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The research objective of the paper is twofold. First, it scrutinises the current state of the art concerning adopting the most popular social media by European port managing bodies (PMBs). Second, it investigates the use of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies of European PMBs.

The paper carries out online field research on the use of social media by the top-25 European ports. Then, it provides an in-depth case study of the use of Twitter by the Port of Rotterdam for CSR communication. Finally, a content analysis of the tweets published in the 2017–2019 timeframe is performed.

Empirical results demonstrate the extensive use of social media by European PMBs to reach a wider array of stakeholders. Uneven approaches emerge considering port sizes and cultural clusters. The content analysis shows that one-third of tweets published by the Twitter account of the Port of Rotterdam address CSR issues, especially green initiatives, advocating the use of social media to communicate CSR.

The study focuses on the European domain. A broader sample of ports worldwide should be examined to further investigate the drivers affecting PMBs' strategic adoption and use of social media, mainly to communicate CSR.

The paper provides port managers with insights to strengthen CSR communication. Given the increasing pressure of the public opinion on environmental and social issues, the ability of European PMBs to communicate their CSR commitment through social media represents a key driver when searching for consensus of stakeholders and “licence to operate”.

The paper adds to the existing maritime logistics literature by introducing a promising field of research.

Drawing on a unique case of a Web 3.0 recruitment campaign, the purpose of this paper is to explore how a Web 3.0 social media recruitment communication strategy influence, add value to and challenge conventional recruitment communication management.

The study draws on a reflexive dialogical research approach, which means that it is methodologically designed as a critical dialogue between on the one hand an empirical case and on the other hand theories on social media and strategic communication.

The study points toward a fundamental new approach to recruitment communication. The application of a Web 3.0 strategy entails what we term an open source recruitment strategy and a redirection of employee focus from work life to private life. These insights point toward ontologically challenging the basic assumptions of employees, work life and the employing organization.

The paper presents a single-case study, which prepares the ground for larger, longitudinal studies. Such studies may apply a more long-term focus on the implications of applying Web 3.0 recruitment strategies and how they may be integrated into – or how they challenge – overall corporate communication strategies.

A turn toward Web 3.0 in recruitment communication affects the degree of interactional complexity and the level of managerial control. Furthermore, the authors argue that the utilization of a Web 3.0 strategy in recruitment communication put forth precarious dilemmas and challenges of controllability, controversy, ownership and power relations, demanding organizations to cautiously entering the social media 3.0 employment market.

This study indicates how the value and potentials of social media as facilitating participatory processes and community conversations can be strategically used in and fundamentally alter recruitment communication, and hence offers new insights into a paradigmatically new way of understanding what strategic social media recruitment is, can and do.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public sector organisations produced thousands of social media messages weekly answering citizens questions and informing the public on safety related matters. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the pandemic shaped social media listening in Finland's public sector organisations and how these organisations aligned their listening and strategic communication to address emerging questions, news (real and fake) and rumours during the pandemic.

Building on a theoretical background from strategic communication, organisational listening, digital marketing and public sector communication, qualitative interview data included communicators (N = 14) from all central Finnish public sector organisations in charge of COVID-19 communication. Findings were themed and analysed qualitatively to understand the level of alignment of strategic communication on social media.

The findings revealed that the pandemic had strained public sector organisations' communication capabilities, forcing them to align their processes and resources reactively to enable useful content and limit false/misleading content. The results confirmed that organisational listening remained somewhat unaligned. A dual role of public sector communication as speakers but increasingly as listeners was highlighted.

The study’s findings point to organisational listening on social media being a central requisite for public sector organisations overcoming a crisis.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important issue for service brands in fast fashion retailing, as consumers' negative impressions about retailers' CSR activities influence brand experience. Consumers' impressions of CSR efforts arise based on agendas communicated through many channels from different sources. The paper unravels the ‘wrinkles’, i.e. possible mismatches in CSR communication around service brands by studying differences between the three main sources of fast fashion brand-related CSR agendas: Autonomous company communication, news media and social media postings by consumers.

The authors use structural topic modeling (STM) to analyze a corpus of texts focusing on the CSR efforts of three major fast fashion service brands over three years. The texts included 89 items of company communication (CSR reports and press releases), 5,351 news media articles about the brands' CSR efforts and 57,377 consumer generated tweets about the brands.

The STM analysis extracted 26 different CRS-related topics from the texts. Results showed differences in how much the three sources emphasized topics. The brands' own communication puts emphasis on environmental responsibility. News media tended to report on economic issues, treatment of employees and specific CSR-related events. Twitter showed more activity in discussing incident-based and emotionally charged topics.

The results feed into the ongoing discussion about how companies' CSR communication relates to communication in the press and among consumers. The authors highlight themes in the individual topics that are emphasized by the three sources, and discuss how CSR themes emerge in the overall transformative agenda.

The paper highlights how fast fashion service brands can identify and understand different CSR agendas arising around their brand. Insight into such agendas can be used to tailor the brands' communication strategies.

The paper contributes to the understanding of the factors behind fashion service brands' CSR reputation, highlighting how the three main sources of CSR reputation (company reports, news and social media) emphasize different types of agendas.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of social media and corporate communication as a key success factor of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Arab world. This is a conceptual study and has shed light on the notable existing literature on these issues and particularly of Arab context. The social media has emerged as an opportunity for marketing communication, and it is the easiest cheapest way of advertising products and services. Social media provides a platform wherein a company or firm can target a diverse audience and can create an effective communication strategy. The sustainability agenda has emerged as a key as well as a sensitive issue for the global as well as local organizations. The inclusion of corporate social responsibility and incorporation of sustainability initiatives have changed the corporate landscape and merged as key determinants of business success. The social media for many firms has emerged as a major outlet of internal and external corporate communication for sustainability. The uniqueness of social media is that it not only conveys a message, rather it also provides an opportunity for direct feedback from users. This study will be helpful for practitioners, policymakers and researchers in understanding the link between social media, corporate communication and sustainable performance of the SME sector. The paper adds to the literature on the role of social media and corporate communication as a key success factor of SMEs operating in Arab world.

The paper will highlight significant and relevant findings generated from previous scholarly and commercial research on the subject. Thereafter, the discussion will focus on the unique relationship between the social media and the Arab world in social, political, religious or cultural and economic spheres. Thereafter, the paper will progress to the central theme of the discussion, reviewing social media’s impact on the Arabian market in such areas as offering a marketing platform for the new age, being an avenue and forum for increased sales, and as a public relations front line (a benchmark of direct client communication). Ultimately, the paper will provide a succinct conclusion to the discussion.

The paper affirmed that the social media is influencing/impacting the SMEs in the Arab region in numerous ways. Findings generated from recent empirical studies, strengthened by a resounding theoretical and scholarly literature, helped identify four of the main impacts of social media on SMEs in the Arab world. These four significant impacts, as discussed in the paper, include offering a marketing platform for the Information Age, offering an avenue and forum for increased sales, giving an innovative edge to SMEs in a bid to reduce expenditures/cost and increase profitability and creating a benchmark of direct client communication in modern PR. These fours ways constitute the most significant impact of social media, as demonstrated by SMEs in the Arab world, and in many ways they are congruent with the social media impact beyond the Middle East.

This paper is very limited in Arab countries, and researchers could not use this study with female.

Information technology and gender are linked with the usage of social media.

The core focus of the present paper was to provide a brief literature-based review of how the social media affects SME in the Arab world (largely in nations within the Middle East region). Not only is the social media enabling positive “societal and cultural change” in the Arab world.

The chapter addresses the question of how crisis and emergency communicators in the justice (police) and health sector in Norway reflect on their use – or lack of use – of social media during the terror crisis on 22 July 2011. We examine how these communicators in the years following the crisis have developed their use of social media to optimise their and the public’s awareness of similar crises. Our semi-structured interviews with key emergency managers and responders display how the terrorist-induced crisis in 2011 was a wake-up call for communicators in the police and the health sector. They reflect on the significance, strengths and weaknesses of social media in the management of crises such as this one.

Using and understanding social media in the context of networked publics enhances crisis communication. This chapter describes models and ideas for integrating social media into the communication strategies of rescue organisations. The authors develop their recommendations for the use of social media by these organisations from both a summary and comparison of communication processes during the 2013 Central European floods in Austria, and from the perspective of an organisation actively using social media in the chosen model region of Alkoven. The chapter presents basic recommendations, recommendations inspired by content strategy and recommendations based on web and social media literacy in order to support the further development of crisis communication in the digital age.

The 2013 Central European floods were not only one of the most severe natural disasters in Austria in the last decades, but also constituted a landmark in crisis communication. For the first time, social media and online newspapers were important news channels, creating a need for new crisis communication strategies. Based on 20 semi-structured interviews and an analysis of online data, we reconstruct in this chapter the online communication of different stakeholders such as the authorities, rescue organisations and journalists during this emergency situation. The study shows that the use of social media was a weak point in official crisis communication. Through detailed analyses of information flows and the requirements of different stakeholders, the study reveals new challenges and possibilities for crisis communication in the digital age.

This paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.

The authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.

The authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.

Comparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.

This study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how media synchronicity facilitates the emergence of social exchange (i.e. trust and reciprocity) in organizations’ information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated interactions. A model of media synchronicity in organizational social exchange (MSiOSE) is proposed.

The paper has a design and review approach. The theoretical analysis is based on social exchange theory (SET) and media synchronicity theory (MST).

The authors propose that, in general, social exchange benefits from both asynchronous and synchronous communication processes. However, media synchronicity has different boundary conditions (i.e. pros and cons) in relation to the emergence of social exchange, determined in accordance with the mutually interacting patterns of trust and reciprocity predicted by SET. The authors provide testable theoretical propositions to support the analysis.

Social exchange is a critical business factor for organizations due to its well-known positive outcomes, such as the strengthening of social ties. The need for successful social exchange in remote work conditions is particularly emphasized. However, with regard to the communication and behavioral patterns that lead to social exchange via ICT, the theoretical understanding is limited. The study reveals previously unmapped heuristics between social exchange and physical media capabilities. Thus, the study's propositions can be used to study and analyze social exchange in the ever-changing media landscape. As a practical contribution, the study helps organizations to improve their communication strategies and use of ICT.