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This study aims to assess the online presence of three Portuguese low-density territories and analyze the communication strategies employed by public and private entities within each municipality. The alignment between public and private entities within each municipality is also examined as a potential factor that could impact the effectiveness of digital communication strategies.

A qualitative methodology that employed content analysis and interviews to gather data from selected public and private entities in each of the municipalities under study was used.

Despite the widespread availability of digital communication tools, the municipalities under study are yet to fully exploit their potential to promote and publicize their offerings. This could be attributed to several factors such as a lack of knowledge and/or resources and a defective strategic approach to digital communication.

The major obstacle in maximizing the potential of digital communication tools in low-density destinations was not solely a result of restricted access. Rather, it was largely due to insufficient knowledge and resources required for their effective utilization, coupled with a lack of aligned vision among various stakeholders.

The competitive landscape in which tourist actors operate has transformed significantly because of the widespread adoption of digital communication led by social networks. However, studies exploring digital communication in low-density territories are still scarce. This study adds new insights into the main factors that hinder the efficient use of digital communication in these regions.

Technological innovations that resulted in the emergence and widespread adoption of digital communication in recent years have led to a surge of academic and practitioner interest in its implications for the co-creation of value and customer engagement. However, in comparison to the attention given to the study of customer engagement in consumer markets, few studies have examined its key role in business markets. This paper aims to examine the impact of digital communication on value co-creation and customer engagement in inter-organizational relationships in business networks.

Co-creation of value and customer engagement in business networks occurs among interconnected organizations that are partners in intermediate transactions. The paper develops a matrix of inter-organizational engagement among partners in business networks and propositions linking digital communication to value co-creation and inter-organizational engagement.

The relationships among network organizations may be characterized by the extent of relational exchange and inter-organizational bonds among them. Four types of inter-organizational engagement emerge: transactional partners, loyal partners, trusted partners and engaged partners. The partners co-create value to better satisfy customers.

The paper is an initial attempt to develop a conceptual understanding of customer engagement in business markets and formulate propositions that can be further investigated. Networks of partner organizations co-create value, altering their input and output markets, value addition and products, permitting greater flexibility and customization in satisfying the needs of customers.

The ability afforded by digital communication for real-time interactive communication enables individuals from multiple departments and hierarchical positions within multiple organizations dispersed across geographic locations and industries to maintain contact, quickly and easily communicate task information, build trust and commitment in long-term relationships with network partners and provide superior customer value.

The paper represents a unique attempt to understand the nature of customer engagement in business markets. It discusses how digital communication alters market transactions among partner organizations in a network by facilitating changes in their make/buy decisions. It develops a matrix of inter-organizational engagement in business networks and propositions that improve understanding of the customer engagement concept and provide the foundation for strategies to better satisfy customers.

This study aims to examine the current state of mission and vision statements on the company websites of fast-growing Malaysian and Singaporean small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and analyze how these attributes are functionally used to build a distinct digital organizational identity.

The content analysis method was used to examine the similarities and differences among 170 Malaysian and Singaporean-selected SMEs based on Aaker’s five brand personality scales.

The findings demonstrated that there were explicit discrepancies between Malaysian and Singaporean SMEs in the applications of brand personality attributes. The findings also identified an increase in communicating mission and vision statements on the websites of both Malaysian and Singaporean SMEs. This emphasizes the need for Malaysian and Singaporean companies to intensify their efforts to develop a notable digital organizational identity.

This study endeavors to provide novel insights into the digital communication practices of SMEs in building digital organization identity based on brand personality elements. Therefore, this study theoretically advances Aaker’s brand personality framework by incorporating digital organizational identity as a concept of Aaker’s brand personality from the SME perspective. This study contributes to the organizational identity literature by highlighting the need for these SMEs to integrate brand personality dimensions to compete with leading global companies.

The findings indicate that managers of SMEs can develop a unique digital organizational identity by communicating their vision and mission statements on their websites as a strategic asset for sustaining corporate reputation.

To date, little is known about the inevitable adaptation and application of communication that occurs when using digital means to develop a digital organizational identity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to establish how Asian SMEs communicate their unique brand personality through websites to build their digital organizational identity.

This article studies the digitalization of corporate communications and the emergence of communication technology (CommTech). The authors show communicators' expectations regarding digitalization, gauge the current level of digitalization across communication departments and agencies and examine the effectiveness of strategic approaches to manage digitalization.

The authors conceptualize the phenomenon of CommTech and propose a framework for studying CommTech's emergence and consequences by combining (1) recent theorizing on digitalization in corporate communications, (2) the concept of digital maturity from information systems research and (3) a socio-technical approach to analyze the development of work systems. The authors apply this framework in a quantitative study (n = 2,664) among communication practitioners from 46 countries.

While digitalization of both communication activities and the underlying support infrastructure is seen as critically important among communicators, a large fraction of communication departments and agencies are still assessed as digitally immature. Further, data reveal the relevance of different (technology, tasks, structure and people) dimensions of digitalization strategies and the influence of such strategies on the digital maturity of communications.

The framework and empirical instruments developed in this study help practitioners to uncover and evaluate the level of digital maturity of communication departments and agencies. This allows to identify current challenges and future opportunities for improvement.

The authors propose a concise definition for the much-debated concept of CommTech and develop a new theoretical framework for understanding CommTech's emergence and consequences in the profession. This empirical work constitutes the first large-scale study on the digital maturity of communication departments and agencies.

This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of these roles. The concept of corporate voice – the “voice” of the organisation – is problematised to explore tensions in vocality. The aim is to support communication practitioners to navigate multi-vocality in the evolving professional context of digital communication technologies and changes in the workplace.

This qualitative study considers the role of voice in corporate communication practices and offers insights into “digital disruption” and the discursive pressure of employers' priorities on the profession and its practices. Job advertisements for internal communication practitioners were examined during 6-month periods in 2018, 2020 and 2022, which was a significant time of change for the profession with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualitative content analysis of 514 internal communication job advertisements identifies that control and consistency are valorised, and continue to dominate descriptions of internal communication skills and responsibilities. The digital affordances that communication practitioners rely on has not changed significantly and a preference for “broadcasting” is evident.

This study provides insights into how Australian organisations shape and sustain univocal corporate communication practices, and the incompatibility of narrow configurations of voice with emerging organisational challenges such as social connectedness.

This paper refines the Digital Media–Arena (DMA) framework to address the diversity of stakeholders contributing to the production, (re)appropriation and (re)distribution of organisational messages in digital environments. It also presents a case analysis for the purpose of demonstrating the applicability of the revised conceptual framework to a critical situation.

Grounded in key public relations, corporate communication and strategic communication research, this study first extends the DMA framework by introducing six new forms of media-arenas. Next, the study takes a public sector perspective to analyse the revised framework against a critical situation involving the Finnish prime minister in summer 2022.

The application of the revised DMA framework to analyse the critical situation shows the importance of mapping and understanding diverse discourses across multi-arenas and their communication role in a rapidly unfolding scandal surrounding the prime minister of Finland. Findings also reveal the diversity of stakeholder voices forming their own versions of organisational messages and sometimes converging organisational messages within and across DMAs.

The DMA framework can offer practical suggestions to guide communicators to make strategic choices in what, where, how and with whom they can communicate.

The revised DMA framework contributes expanding the field's knowledge of the strategic communicative use of the digital environment in typically highly volatile and multi-vocal situations by offering instrumental understanding of the conflicting challenge between subjugating and liberating organisational messages across the digital spectrum.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how digital communication tools are used for internal communication (IC) in multinational corporations (MNCs). Specifically, the study illustrates the role of digital channels in IC, the benefits they bring and the difficulties involved in using them.

This research features a single-case study focusing on a listed Finnish multinational industrial corporation with a long history. Data for the study come from semi-structured theme interviews and a workshop in which the results were discussed.

Digital IC tools are able to facilitate IC in MNCs, although some challenges may arise in relation to planning their utilization. Related to the role of digital channels in IC, these findings highlight the importance of face-to-face channels in everyday IC and the role of digital channels as more formal communication channels.

This paper focuses on a single organization. Additional research would be required to attain generalizable results.

The effective use of new digital communication tools requires common guidelines across all areas of an MNC. Despite the great potential of new tools, the importance of face-to-face communication should not be ignored.

Most of the research on IC in MNCs was conducted before the digital communications era. Recent advances in information technology have created new challenges and opportunities for IC.

This article explores the relationship between scholarly communication, an established research area receiving renewed interest, and digital libraries, a relatively new area of research. Scholarship is inherently a social process and it is embedded in a structure of relationships with other scholars, with scholarly societies, and with publishers and libraries. These stakeholders agree that the relationship has become unbalanced with the advent of electronic publishing, digital libraries, computer networks and associated changes in pricing, intellectual property policies and contracts, but they do not agree on solutions to redress the balance. Several problems worthy of research lie at the intersection of scholarly communication processes and digital libraries. These include the ability of digital libraries to support the cycle of information seeking, using and creating; the ‘social life’ of documents; and electronic publishing. Other interesting problems exist at the intersection of structures of scholarly communication and digital libraries. These include increased interdependency of scholarly documents, as links are embedded between documents, both within and between digital libraries; the indefinite preservation of digital documents; business models for electronic publishing and digital libraries; and conflicts between the physical and virtual aspects of libraries.

The authors study how communication agencies became important sites for the rise of measurement expertise in the government of consumer conduct following the development of online consumption. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the processes by which digital measurement developed (within the agencies) as a new legitimate form of expertise, able to produce relevant and detailed knowledge about the government of web users.

The authors carried out a field examination in France, predicated on 100 interviews with actors involved in communication consultancy. Drawing on the concepts of governmentality and inter-jurisdictional experimentation, the authors examine how digital measurement expertise acquired legitimacy within agencies. The authors also analyze how contemporary technologies of measurement and surveillance, as operated by in-house digital experts, provide advertising specialists and advertisers with increasingly precise data on consumer conduct and thought.

The constitution and legitimization of digital measurement expertise was characterized by experimentation, culminating in the production of persuasive claims of tangibility concerning communication impact, and in relative agreement on the relevance of digital expertise in operating increasingly powerful technologies of measurement and surveillance.

While the role of experts in promoting and implementing neoliberal governmentality is emphasized in the literature, the study indicates that considerable work is needed to develop and legitimize expertise consequent with neoliberalism. Also, the analysis highlights that the spread of digital measurement expertise and knowledge production in the government of web users constitutes a noteworthy step in the neoliberalization of society. Behind the front of “free” conduct lies an increasingly powerful network of technologies and expertise aimed at rendering consumer conduct knowable and predictable.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN), as a solution for buried water pipe monitoring, face a new set of challenges compared to traditional application for above-ground infrastructure monitoring. One of the main challenges for underground WSN deployment is the limited range (less than 3 m) at which reliable wireless underground communication can be achieved using radio signal propagation through the soil. To overcome this challenge, the purpose of this paper is to investigate a new approach for wireless underground communication using acoustic signal propagation along a buried water pipe.

An acoustic communication system was developed based on the requirements of low cost (tens of pounds at most), low power supply capacity (in the order of 1 W-h) and miniature (centimetre scale) size for a wireless communication node. The developed system was further tested along a buried steel pipe in poorly graded SAND and a buried medium density polyethylene (MDPE) pipe in well graded SAND.

With predicted acoustic attenuation of 1.3 dB/m and 2.1 dB/m along the buried steel and MDPE pipes, respectively, reliable acoustic communication is possible up to 17 m for the buried steel pipe and 11 m for the buried MDPE pipe.

Although an important first step, more research is needed to validate the acoustic communication system along a wider water distribution pipe network.

This paper shows the possibility of achieving reliable wireless underground communication along a buried water pipe (especially non-metallic material ones) using low-frequency acoustic propagation along the pipe wall.