Branding Mykonos on Facebook: A digital sociolinguistic analysis

Aiming at contributing to the sociolinguistic theorization of branding, this paper delves into the ways whereby Mykonos is branded on Facebook. “Place branding”, namely the process of “establishing a stable link between... [ view full abstract ]

Aiming at contributing to the sociolinguistic theorization of branding, this paper delves into the ways whereby Mykonos is branded on Facebook. “Place branding”, namely the process of “establishing a stable link between a place and certain positive experiences” (Hanna & Rowley 2008: 63), is investigated in the context of photos and posts found in the Facebook group “Mykonos @MykonosHolidays”, which were gathered from 1/1/2016-1/1/2017. These digital multimodal texts are analyzed from a discursive semiotic (van Leeuwen & Kress 2011) perspective and the comments found below are dealt with through an interactive analytical (Benson 2015) lens focusing on responsiveness (R moves) and interpersonal interaction (I moves). More specifically, a typology of the basic discursive features of both photos and posts is provided along with a micro-analysis of linguistic and semiotic uptake acts and stance markers, including the tagging of other people, the posting of other videos or images, the use of the different categories of the ‘like’ button, the use of emoticons, punctuation markers, capitalization and acronyms. The core argument put forward is that in that particular Facebook group branding is a marketizing (Kelly-Holmes 2016) bottom-up interactive word of click (drawing of “word of mouth”) act prompted by photos and videos indexing elitism, luxury and privilege. On the other hand, there are trolling comments that contest these ideologies in a sarcastic way. As such, this Facebook group creates a controversial version of Mykonian reality to which people from all over the world respond, making the whole branding process into a grassroots one instead of a top down one. As a result, people seem to construct a love-hate relationship to each other and to the Mykonos brand itself, which, however, is a successful branding technique contributing to the island’s high revenues from tourism.