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.