Global urbanization brings the urge to identify the most intelligent methods to cope with the challenges arising in the modern society. Sustainable and smart cities are the new target for urban development; their representatives are being forced to identify and develop new strategies to increase their city’s performance and ensure that it endures over time. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contributes to this purpose. Brașov is one of the cities in Romania for which the process of modernization started years ago, and it is currently developing as a smart city. This paper focuses on the development of the city in terms of cultural tourism solutions by presenting a case study on the use of virtual reality with a mobile application and its evaluation on cultural heritage sites. The original contribution of the paper is to describe and analyze the quality of the mobile application by using a proposed analysis grid to identify the main elements of this app. The main findings suggest that the application may bring authenticity of experience through the lens of heritage preservation for further user engagement and participation in real-time, while suggestions are made for future enhancement. Implications are discussed for a) destination managers, b) for developers to improve the general quality of the mobile application in terms of design and features and to implement changes in the near future, and c) for visitors who engage in real-time and co-create experiences.

This chapter will present the online environment as the new channel for social interaction, putting into focus the organizational communication and its development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Nowadays, talking about the online environment, Social Media is the main concept, defined by: social networks, Social Bookmarking sites, business blogs, and many other web pages where users can interact and can generate or access content, as well as more static sites, generating unidirectional information. The chapter will also discuss the implication of Social Media characteristics, defining the main terms and includes a case study discussing the OMV Petrom strategy of communication using Social Media channels. So, the online environment can be seen as a second reality in terms of professional activity. Specialists become users, networking, and communicating permanently. The online environment is therefore in favor of any organization that wants to be connected to this technologically and professionalized world.

Places have been promoting their attractions throughout history for almost a century now and place marketing started capturing the attention of economic researchers in the early 1990s. Although the globalized space has become a major interdisciplinary field of study in the past few decades, we still do not have a definite solution for measuring or predicting the changes it brings. The aim of this study is to propose an instrument to help scholars quantify the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 components of the online presence of place brands and their spatial dynamics in a broader global context. By taking the ‘space of flows’ approach to frame globalization, we questioned whether geography is still destiny in the context of online place branding communication. To answer the question, we developed a category grid and applied it in the content analysis of 82 official country websites. We found that geographical position is still important in conditioning the adoption of Web 1.0, and does not make a significant difference in the adoption of Web 2.0. However, the strongest predictors of the adoption of Web 1.0 are not the ones related to geography, but to socio-economic inequality. It is therefore possible for the theorizations of the advantages of the ‘space of flows’ globalization to be suitable only for Web 2.0, Web 1.0 still being under the influence of the ‘space of place’. We discussed the implications of adopting the network society theory in place branding communication in order to nuance the understanding of the transitions from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 in place marketing.

The entrepreneurs need to create a good impression in order to act in the business environment. A bad impression affects the communication and implicitly the collaboration that can turn into unintended results. Thus, they access information on how to make a good impression by using several sources: specialty literature, training guides, and courses and online shows promoted by business sites. The main objectives of this chapter are to clarify the notions and the relations between communication and entrepreneurship in the Romanian context and also to present the main results of a research that aimed to identify if the first impression of a person in the Romanian business context is dissimulated or not. The implications for entrepreneurs consist in the degree of promotion of achieving a good first impression and the manipulative or persuasive value of the negotiation techniques applied in the Romanian business environment.