Why People Hang Out Online in Virtual Communities - Information Exchange, Support and Socializing

In this exploratory study, Ridings and Gefen (2004) investigate the reasons why people participate in virtual communities (here: bulletin boards). The term “virtual community” is definded as “groups of people with common interests and practices that communicate regularly and for some duration in an organized way over the Internet through a common location or mechanism.” A community member is anyone who participates in a community by either posting or reading messages regardless of frequency.

Antecedents of Successful Virtual Communities

In this review paper, Anita L. Blanchard [1] ties together several studies on one of the most interesting issues in virtual community research: What makes a virtual community successful?

How firms might leverage online communities to create value for themselves

Porter & Donthu (2008) conducted an empirical study (using structural equation modeling techniques) aimed at providing quantitative evidence that explains how the efforts of a community sponsor might create value. In contrast to previous research that put the focus on the benefits that customers could derive from being a member of a sponsored community this study wants to reveal the benefits for the sponsor.

Six functional building blocks of social media platforms

In their paper "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media" Kietzmann et al. (2011) present a (honeycomb) framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks. The blocks are intended to provide a better understanding of the audience of a particular social media platform and their engagement needs:

Mixed lessons from using social psychology to foster activity in an online community

In this article Kraut et al. describe their attempt to apply some basic social psychology to the participants of a movie rating platform in order to enhance the activity level on the platform. The four experiments were performed with active members of the community MovieLens. The various conditions of the experminents were realized by emails.

CE Porter's typology of virtual communities revisited

Ten years ago, Constance Elise Porter was aiming of developing a typology/classification system that would be useful to researchers from various disciplinary perspectives such that the classification system might be used as a foundation for theory construction.

Can Blogs Be Virtual Communities?

To answer this question, Anita Blanchard examined a very active blog, the Julie/Julia Project which followed the blog author, Julie Powell, as she cooked her way through Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. During its one year existence, the Julie/Julia Project had regular updates on most weekdays and also on many weekends. It was a very popular blog with hundreds and then thousands of daily hits. There were frequent comments by readers. Julie would sometimes respond to the comments; other commenters would also respond to each others' comments.

Personality and Culture Influence Self-presentation and Self-disclosure on SNSs

Baiyun Chen and Justin Marcus conducted a non-experimental study to investigate how university students (N = 463) use Facebook, and examined the roles that personality and culture play in disclosure of information in online SNS-based environments. The research seeked to extend existing theory on self-disclosure to the online arena in higher educational institutions and contribute to the knowledge base and understanding about the use of a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook, by college students.