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The UK has experienced a number of flood events in recent years, and the intensity and frequency of such events are forecast to further increase in future due to changing climatic conditions. Accordingly, enhancing the resilience of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) – which form an important segment in a society – to flood risk, has emerged as an important issue. However, SMEs often tend to underestimate the risk of flooding which tends to have a low priority in their business agenda. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an investigation of adaptation to the risk of flooding considering community‐level measures, individual‐level property protection, and business continuity and resilience measures.

A total of four short case studies were conducted among SMEs to identify their response to flood risk, and what measures have been undertaken to manage the risk of flooding.

It was observed that SMEs have implemented different property‐level protection measures and generic business continuity/risk management measures, based on their requirements, to achieve a desired level of protection.

SMEs are likely to positively respond to property‐level adaptation following a post‐flood situation. It is important that information such as costs/benefits of such measures and different options available are made accessible to SMEs affected by a flood event.

Implementation of property‐level adaptation measures will contribute towards the long term adaptation of the existing building stock to changing climatic conditions.

The paper contributes towards policy making on flood risk adaptation and SME decision making, and informs policy makers and practitioners.

Amidst the current economic climate, which places many constraints on expensive flood defence schemes, the policy makers tend to favour schemes that are sympathetic to the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and which promote empowering local communities based on their individual local contexts. Research has shown that although several initiatives are in place to create behavioural change among SMEs in undertaking adaptation approaches against flooding, they often tend to delay their responses by means of a “wait and see” attitude. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper argues that unless there are conscious efforts in the policy-making community to undertake explicit measures to engage with SMEs in a collaborative way, the uptake of adaptation measures will not be achieved as intended. With the use of the “honest broker” approach the paper provides a conceptual way forward of how a sense of collaboration can be instigated in an engagement process between the policy makers and SMEs, so that the scientific knowledge is translated in an appropriately rational way, which best meets the expectations of the SMEs.

The paper proposes a conceptual model for engaging SMEs that will potentially increase the uptake of flood adaptation measures by SMEs. This could be a useful model with which to kick start a collaborative engagement process that could escalate to wider participation in other areas to improve impact of policy initiatives.

The paper lays the conceptual foundation for a new theoretical base in the area, which will encourage more empirical investigations that will potentially enhance the practicality of some of the existing policies.

The study aims to report on a research project that analyzed social websites for booklovers. These sites represent a service that is promising for public libraries in their efforts to find new ways in promoting reading and literature. At the same time the growth of such sites is another example of how technological developments challenge librarianship. Many of these sites are established and run independently from the library field.

This paper reports from a research comparing two such websites – the Norwegian Bokelskere.no and the Hungarian Moly.hu. A questionnaire was published on the two websites in mid September 2010. It was accessible for approximately 20 days. A total of 777 users filled in and returned the questionnaire.

As the typical user of Moly/Bokelskere is a young, ethnic Hungarian or Norwegian, well educated, female from the bigger cities the complexity and pluralism of society is not reflected in the websites in the same way as it is in physical libraries. They are not heavy library users, and they have a relatively low trust concerning libraries in comparison with other sources of information. The sites are mainly used as information sources and not as places where one can meet with others. Although the social dimension of reading appears, it is related mainly to the family or friends and not to strangers.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the study gives a comprehensive overview on social sites for booklovers. The relatively high number of respondents from the two analyzed websites provides an extensive, but not comprehensive, sample. Self‐recruitment of respondents might cause biases compared with a randomly drawn sample.

The study on which the paper is based is a part of the PLACE project, which aims at exploring the role of public libraries as meeting places. The study generates knowledge on the potential and role of virtual meeting places that is relevant for public libraries in their efforts to adapt to a new reality.

The study generates knowledge that can be of importance for developing libraries and library policies in relation to digital meeting places.

There are few studies analyzing literary websites for booklovers and the study contributes in developing a new research field in library and information science.

The purpose of this paper is to take the results of two studies to hypothesize about practice and recommend research/debate on business leaders’ use and perceptions of social media. Data were considered under the umbrella of current senior management practice, with the purpose to make suggestions for better practice, but primarily to theorize about the probable evolution of social media value and credibility for executives.

The first study presents results from a qualitative content analysis of Fortune and Inc. 500 CEOs’ use of Twitter in terms of: activity and engagement; tweet subject matter; frequency of opinions expressed; and level of formality. The second considers the credibility of social media against traditional media and personal information sources within one quantitative survey.

Senior executives using social media (Twitter) tend to engage in one-sided conversations in a two-way medium. Further, most CEOs appear to be using more formal language than general Twitter users. These factors, combined with the low credibility and value of social media by senior managers, may indicate the best future hope for social media credibility with executives will be neutral.

In examining a combination of current literature and the data from these separate studies, the authors posit a number of underlying challenges in realizing the potential of the evolving social media environment that may deserve specific research.

Discussion touches on implications for future adoption of social media tools by business leaders, as well as one-way vs two-way communication tendencies. This paper proposes a starting-point for theory development regarding this significant emerging area of communication.

This paper aims to investigate the perceptions of Omani citizens toward the use of social media by the government for participatory and interactive relationships. More precisely, the descriptive nature of the study resides in its ability to explain how social media users regard the current status and levels of presence, transparency, engagement, responsiveness and trust about the current use of social media by the Omani Government.

A quantitative approach was used to collect data. This was done via a self-administered questionnaire from a return sample of 1,769 citizens drawn from different places in Oman. These citizens were considered as well-informed and regular active users of social media. The reviewed literature provided a basis for the construct of the questionnaire.

The overall results indicated modest levels of agreement in all of the investigated factors. The neutral findings suggest that there is a level of uncertainty among the respondents regarding how the government is determining the potential of social media for participatory and interactive relationships. Findings in this study advocate the outcomes of the recent Arab Social Media Report, plus the few relevant studies included in the literature, which nearly stated that although there is a growing use of social media among citizens, governments are failing to take full advantage of social media. Governments are also failing to engage citizens to design and deliver more efficient and collaborative services, per this study’s findings.

The findings call for the importance of strategically framing the use of participatory social media by the government. In a broader sense, the findings of this study are beneficial to all contexts that share similar political and socio-economic philosophy, especially the Arab states and most of the developing countries. The findings provide insights for governments in need of developing social media strategies to promote more collaborative and interactive governance.

The study aids in understanding the views of citizens who are the current major players in a highly technology-driven environment. This environment is found to be transforming the relationship between citizens and governments. The study adds knowledge to the currently scarce body of literature dealing with issues pertaining to citizen–government relationships in social media in the Arab states, and similar contexts in developing countries. Its findings may provide valuable insights for policy makers to leverage collaborative relationships between governments and citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity as reflected in audience engagement with their Facebook posts during the 2015 Israeli election campaign.

Using Israel’s 2015 election campaign as the case study, the authors analyzed all messages posted (n=501) on 33 politicians’ official Facebook pages during the week leading to Election Day.

The results demonstrate that audiences do engage more with posts of the more facially attractive politicians. These posts generated more shares, more comments and more participants in their discussions – but not more likes – relative to posts of less attractive politicians. These effects became even stronger when the posts were accompanied by one or more visual image, and remained significant even after controlling for other engagement predictors, such as a politician’s gender, seniority or the timing of a post’s publication.

The findings emphasize the importance of attractive looks for politicians. The findings highlight that attractive politicians’ posts attract more attention, allowing them to better spread their ideas. Thus, politicians should aim to post aesthetic images and visuals to promote better engagement with their ideas on social media.

The study expands our understanding of online presentations of politicians, focusing on the effect of politicians’ facial attractiveness on their online popularity. Recent studies have demonstrated that physically attractive politicians enjoy more and better media attention on television news, but not in non-visual media such as radio and newspapers. This effect has not been examined in the social media environment, a central arena for today’s political debates and one that involves many visual messages.