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The Department of Information Science of the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf is currently conducting a research project on Informational World Cities – the prototypical cities of the knowledge society, which have been growing in the twenty-first century. In total, 31 potential Informational World Cities were identified and a set of criteria was developed to evaluate the degree of informativeness of a city through coherent criteria. The purpose of this paper is to investigate London.

The investigation was based on the Grounded Theory, ethnographic field research, interviews, bibliometrics, patentometrics, official statistics and the analysis of web content. During the stay in London, eight semi-standardised interviews according to SERVQUAL were conducted.

The characteristics of an Informational World City are well-marked in most cases, especially London’s knowledge infrastructure. Furthermore London places value on smart innovations and tries to adapt public transport to the growing population. This includes, next to an enhancement of the train capacities, information and communication technology, since the digital infrastructure keeps gaining importance. The ethnic/cultural diversity as well as the international connectivity and the creative infrastructure are also distinguishing marks of London. Nevertheless, especially the digital and smart infrastructure require enhancement. London’s government is ambitioned, though, to make progress and pursues plans which are of benefit to the city’s informativeness.

This paper gives insight into the characteristics of the prototypical city of the upcoming knowledge society.

This paper follows an interdisciplinary approach and combines information science, urban studies and sociology to analyse cities of the knowledge society. Furthermore it is the first time that London is considered an Informational World City in an empirical study.

The purpose of this paper is to identify governmental social media use in cities with enhanced information and communications technology infrastructures (i.e. Informational World Cities) and high Internet penetration rates. Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction and it was investigated if social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens.

This paper is based on an iterative content and Web analysis from November 2012 till January 2013 and offers a comparison of different social media service types and the particular use.

This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities provides an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online. Even as cities in a globalized world become more similar, a variety in the use of social media by governments was detected, which is due to regional and cultural characteristics.

The findings are limited to calculable data, e.g. number of used social media accounts, posts and followers which were available through a content and Web analysis at the time of investigation.

A more detailed content analysis, as well as a more differentiated analysis of users, must be conducted in the future.

This paper is one of the first that presents a global comparison of governmental social media use of cities of the knowledge society and compares different social media platforms.