Search

We analyze whether an informal second channel for communication can improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer in an electronic network of practice. We explore this question by analyzing the effect of chat rooms in the well-known Q&A forum Stack Overflow. We identify the causal effect using a difference-in-differences approach, which exploits a feed functionality that non-selectively pushed all questions from the Q&A into the relevant chat rooms. We report two main findings: First, chat rooms reduced the time until a question in the main Q&A received a satisfactory answer. Second, chat rooms disproportionately benefited new users who asked low-quality questions. Our study has clear managerial implications: A second channel for communication can complement the main channel in online communities to enhance both efficiency and inclusion.

In this paper we describe how a name-based face mask rationing system in Taiwan was crucially and very successfully assisted with software applications produced by a collaboration between the public and civic (voluntary) sectors. As such, the paper presents a case in which civic sector contributors have helped a government cope with the coronavirus outbreak. Originally regarded as the country most likely to be affected by this disease due to its geographic and economic ties with China, Taiwan has performed well compared to most countries. This study, based on online community chat room records and interviews, shows how the civic, private and public sectors have worked together to tackle an immense challenge. Specifically, the paper describes the work by a unique group of people using big data and personal expertise that has assisted in the response to the coronavirus outbreak in Taiwan by conceiving and implementing software systems for public coping with the crisis. The purpose of this account is to document those accomplishments, based on online community messages, open shared interviews, and personal contacts. The lessons learned and the challenges remaining are also discussed.

We study how social support among pregnant women in peer groups relates to their well-being in a large online community. We find that while having more peer groups reduces observable social support in terms of information exchange, it does not undermine perceived social support. Higher perceived social support from online peer groups is positively associated with both prenatal and postnatal mental health of mothers as well as newborns’ birth weight.

Peloton had redefined many things about the boutique exercise experience, bringing it into members' homes and eliminating per-class fees of roughly $34, instead charging $40 per month. Rather than chatting with a pal beside the gym locker for a few moments before class, customers had Peloton's online community of hundreds of thousands of people who interacted with one another digitally throughout the day. The instructors themselves were part of Peloton's cult following. They were expected to lead and inspire, not just teach a class, and each had a large social media following and minor celebrity status. The company was poised for an IPO in 2019 by identifying a new opportunity in a constantly evolving fitness space, by defining its business broadly, and by capitalizing upon the energy of celebrity and personality that online communities could bring to a brand. But how could a business built on a social community pivot to a position in the public marketplace? Excerpt UVA-M-0977 Oct. 29, 2019 Best Self or Best Company? Peloton Searches for a Voice Cycle with a DJ It wasn't often that a fitness club could justify the hassle and expense of hosting a class with a live DJ. But by spring 2019, it had become a core element of Peloton's cycling studio, with riders relying upon the energy of a DJ's music two-and-a-half times every month, on average. Peloton had redefined many things about the boutique exercise experience, bringing it into members' homes and eliminating the per-charge class fee of roughly $ 34 to instead charge $ 40 per month. Unlike common rhythm-based classes, Peloton used metrics to drive motivation at any given moment. Rather than require customers to get to a particular studio at a specific time to join 30 other acquaintances, they could select from a library of thousands of classes at any time. Yet these customers didn't miss out on socializing with their friends by exercising at home. Rather than chatting with a pal beside the gym locker for a few moments before class, customers had an online community, created by Peloton, of hundreds of thousands of people who interacted with one another digitally throughout the day. Cofounder and CEO John Foley encountered difficulties in creating a business model, raising capital, and designing a product—difficulties shared by many start-ups. But Peloton evolved from a struggling idea in 2012 to a company valued at over $ 4 billion that was poised for an initial public offering (IPO) by spring 2019. It did so by identifying a new opportunity in a constantly evolving fitness space, by defining its business broadly, and by capitalizing upon the energy of celebrity and personality that online communities could bring to a brand. . . .

Online knowledge-sharing communities are important arenas for the development and exchange of knowledge; both firm participation and sponsorship in communities are increasing, as is scholarly interest in understanding how interactions between members shape subsequent participation. We contribute to this literature by examining the relationship between two increasingly relevant, yet underexplored, sets of factors: we examine the effects of with whom an interaction occurs (a user or an employee) on two types of participatory outcomes (future asking versus future replying). Specifically, we examine whether receiving a reply to a question––and from whom the reply is received––affects a new member’s likelihood of asking another question or replying to a question. We examine fifteen years of data from Statalist, the online community that formed around the Stata statistical software package. Our findings show that receiving a reply from another user is positively associated with future questioning, but negatively associated with future replying. However, receiving a reply from a firm employee is positively associated with future replying. To help address endogeneity concerns, we conducted qualitative interviews with Stata employees, used fixed-effects models, implemented an instrumental variable-based approach, utilized a two-stage Heckman selection model, and applied coarsened exact matching; the findings remain consistent. These findings suggest that social interactions play a key, albeit nuanced, role in shaping subsequent participation and the continued health of a community.

Prior research has documented that during mortality-related crises workers face psychic costs and are motivated to make social contributions. In addition, management practices that encourage workers to make social contributions during a crisis create value for firms. However, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 is unprecedented given conditions of social distancing. It raises the question of whether workers who continued to work (albeit from home) during this crisis were constrained in their ability to make social contributions and exhibited disproportionately greater psychic costs compared to workers who could not work from home. We exploit this shock to estimate differences in content contributions to an online community by workers who work from home (WFH) relative to workers who cannot work from home (CWFH). Online content contributions are especially pertinent in our context because social distancing constrained traditional forms of social contributions such as physical volunteering. Using data from a popular question-and-answer platform, we estimate a difference-in-differences specification and report nuanced results: while WFH workers made 19% fewer online contributions on average and contribute less to topics such as ‘family’, they make 148% more contributions on topics related to ‘WFH best practices.’ Using natural language processing tools, we also find that WFH workers exhibited greater psychic costs than CWFH workers. We provide evidence for a plausible mechanism, i.e. time allocation, and show that WFH workers attempted to catch up on social contributions at the end of their workday, suggesting time constraints. Our research contributes to literatures on managing workers during a crisis, WFH and online communities, and have several immediate implications for managing WFH and CWFH workers during the coronavirus crisis.

The development of information and communication technology has brought a lot of progress and helped encourage the emergence of the digital economy - one of which is in the creative industry in the field of graphic design. This development raises an opportunity, namely crowdsourcing system. Crowdsourcing system is the process of getting services, ideas, or content by collecting contributions from a group of people, especially the online community for various activities. According to Howe, this crowdsourcing system results in the democratization of capital or the sort of system we call today the sharing economy of the digital economy. But instead Christian Fuchs (2014) expressed his criticism by saying that the practice of crowdsourcing is only a pretext for producers to exploit to increase profits by using unpaid workers. One of the attractions of the crowdsourcing system is the meritocracy offer which provides opportunities for those who do not have an academic background in graphic design education to be equal and have the same opportunities as academic graphic designers or even professionals. The subject of this study was the self-taught graphic designer community in Salaman village, Magelang, which underwent an online crowdsourcing system. This study aims to gain a critical understanding of the existence of ambiguity in the practice of 'capital democratization' offered in the crowdsourcing system. This research tries to open up new insights about the link between "capital democratization" offered by the crowdsourcing system and the attitude of online graphic designers through Fuchs (2014) approach of digital workers.

Firms have been increasingly relying on online user communities to access external, distant knowledge and expertise. Previous research on online user communities has largely investigated the influence of users’ social capital on their knowledge sharing behavior. In this study, we propose a two-way relationship between social capital and knowledge contribution of users in online user communities. To test our proposition, we collected and analyzed participation data of 1,766 users from the online user community of BMC, a global leader in innovative software solutions. Overall, our study shows evidence of significant bi-directional relationships between social capital (structural, cognitive and relational) and knowledge contribution, while the bi-directional relationships mainly exist among peripheral participants. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study for the online user community literature as well as the broader context of online community.

In an online community, users can interact with fellow community members by voluntarily contributing to existing discussion threads or by starting new threads. In practice, however, the vast majority of a community’s users (90%) remain inactive (lurk), simply observing contributions made by intermittent (9%) and heavy (1%) contributors. Our research examines increases and decreases of types of user engagement in online communities using Hidden Markov Models. These models characterize latent states of user engagement from trace user activity or lack of activity. The resulting framework then differentiates lurkers who can later become "workers'' (i.e., engaged with the community) from those who will not. Differentiating lurkers who can be engaged from those who cannot enables managers to anticipate and proactively direct their resources towards the users who are most likely to become or remain workers (i.e., heavy contributors), thereby promoting community welfare. Analysis of 533,714 posts from an online diabetes community shows that incorporating latent user engagement variables can significantly improve the accuracy of welfare prediction models and guide managerial interventions. Application of our framework to five additional communities of various contexts demonstrates its generalizability.

This paper aims to understand the effects of online communities on the network structure and their marketing implications. To account for the fact that communities are not formed exogenously, we model and estimate how they co-evolve with the friendship network. We control for unobserved heterogeneity and homophily by modeling individuals’ latent positions and similarities. Using data from a worldwide Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) Game, we find that individuals’ friendship formation decision and community membership decision reinforce each other. Moreover, model simulation reveals that, under some circumstances, online communities may promote not only within-community ties but also cross-community ties. Here, one important moderating factor is the community stickiness, which is captured by the positive effects of an individual’s number of friends in a community on her probability of staying in that community (instead of switching to a different community). As shown by our simulated diffusion exercises, only a moderately sticky community system promotes cross-community ties and consequently improves information reach. This insight helps social platforms manage online communities more effectively to improve the marketing value of social networks.

User-generated content (UGC) platforms have increasingly adopted digital badges as a key mechanism to incentivize user engagement. Drawing from the extant literature, the authors theorize that digital badges can have an enduring effect on UGC consumption and creation beyond immediate effects because of the impact of digital badges on users’ underlying engagement states with the platform. To understand the dynamic effect of digital badges on user engagement, the authors propose a hidden Markov model and estimate the model using a unique panel data set from a large UGC platform. Four distinctive engagement states of users emerge from the estimation results. The immediate impact of digital badges is generally negative and homogeneous in discouraging both content consumption and generation. However, in the longer term, digital badges encourage content generation but suppress content consumption. This double-edged effect is most pronounced when users are in the middle-range engagement states. Finally, the authors demonstrate the managerial value of the proposed model in helping UGC platforms design digital badge algorithms to achieve their key marketing goals.

This essay identifies shared commonalities underlying the organizational structures of successful online collaborative creation. Online collaborative cation involves individual Internet users and communities that work together to generate and produce works online by contributing to, creating, and reusing and modifying each other’s works. Successful online collaborations have produced a variety of socially-valuable works, including viral Internet urban legends, open software, and knowledge repositories. These collaborative works not only serve important roles in the growth and development of public knowledge, but they also contribute to cultural growth and creativity. The commonalities that successful online collaboration share are: (1) fair and equal access to the Internet; (2) modularity and granularity of each individual’s contributions; (3) pseudonymity of contributors; (4) online community norms and policing; and (5) lack of exclusive ownership of online creations. This essay explains how each of these contributed to the successes of various online collaborative creative projects. As we begin to live more of our lives online, we tend to form more connections online and join online communities based on similar politics, professions, or interests. Many of these online communities have the ability to collaborate and create valuable works of authorship. Understanding the organizational structures that foster online collaboration allows us to recreate structures that encourage online collaboration. More importantly, it helps guide us in examining or reexamining our legal systems in order to optimize rules and regulations that promote rather than impede online collaborative creation.

This case examines Facebook's corporate governance by reviewing information in the company's proxy statement. Students become familiar with the nature and type of information in proxy statements. They also learn how to examine various facets of executive compensation and corporate governance such as the use of stock options and restricted stock to compensate executives, dual class share structures, board composition and characteristics, controlled companies, and classified boards. Excerpt UVA-C-2411 Rev. Aug. 23, 2018 Facebook, Inc.: A Look at Corporate Governance Sarah Jones returned to her desk after the half-hour meeting with her manager, Joe Thomas. She was excited about her first assignment as an analyst at Salomon Partners, an investment research company that sold reports to a variety of clients. Thomas had asked her to write a report on the governance structure at Facebook, Inc. He had recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that technology companies were increasingly using multiple classes of shares when going public. He anticipated having to field questions about what that meant for his clients who had invested in, or were thinking about investing in, Facebook, as he knew the company had an interesting governance structure. Thomas wondered what he could learn from Facebook. He asked Jones to investigate, and he suggested she start by reading Facebook's annual proxy statement. Company Description Facebook was a large US social media and social networking company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. According to its website, Facebook's mission was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” In addition to the social networking site Facebook.com, the company's products included Instagram, an online community for sharing visual stories using photos, videos, and messages; Messenger and WhatsApp, both messaging applications; and Oculus, a virtual reality platform. The company's revenues, which totaled $ 40.7billion in 2017, came primarily from advertising. The company had more than 25,000 employees at the end of 2017. (Facebook's consolidated balance sheets and consolidated statements of income are presented in Exhibits 1 and 2.) . . .

Social media is the most used medium in this digitized world to connect to the community by just a click. The users on the network can be real or fake and determining them is a challenge. User’s reaction to a topic makes it a trend and if some company, individual, organization try to analyze the users for their benefits then the whole concept of social connection and contribution is gone. So determining the real user and fake users is very important. On first level of scanning the user account may look like being legitimate but it may be not. For effective decision making in key marketing strategies for a particular location, the demographics and the numbers should be perfect for better results. Hence, many-fold improves the spatial dissemination that is being done by filtering the fake users in the online community.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) is showing its age. Enacted in 1998, the DMCA succeeded in its initial goal of bringing clarity to wildly inconsistent judicial standards for online copyright infringement. But as time has passed, the Act has been overtaken—not by developments in technology, but by developments in copyright’s case law. Those cases are no longer as divergent as they were in the last millennium. Instead, over time the judicial standards and the statutory standards have converged, to the point where the differences between them are few. The statute whose ascendance was once central to the governance of copyright online is therefore now diminished in importance. At first glance, this development seems unproblematic. After all, uniformity was the DMCA’s goal, and convergence gets us closer to it. But a deeper look reveals that convergence has significantly changed the cost/benefit calculus for those whom the Act governs. The benefits of complying with the Act’s regulatory requirements have decreased, because convergence means that one can ignore the statute and rely solely on the case law. And the costs of complying have increased, because convergence has paradoxically given rise to a new, troubling phenomenon: the mixing and matching of statutory and judicial standards in unpredictable and counterproductive ways, which create new, unintended forms of copyright liability and immunity. In short, convergence has led to conflation, which means that the best course for today’s online community is to steer clear of the DMCA altogether.

The language around social media contributes to perceptions of who is posting content and why. The concept of user generated content (UGC) places an emphasis on authorship and has been defined as online content that is publicly available and created by end-users in a creative effort (Dennhardt, 2013). UGC is a powerful tool for businesses because it taps into one of the most valued marketing tools: verbal consumer-to-consumer communication, which is also known as “word of mouth” (WOM) marketing. However, the tactics used by companies to integrate UGC with their own content and goals has resulted in a blurred line between sponsored content paid by advertisers and UGC independently posted by regular users. Recent attempts to regulate this distinction have struggled to determine how, exactly, audiences can be effectively alerted to paid content on social media platforms, especially Instagram. This study uses the persuasion knowledge model (PKM) as a theoretical framework to examine if and when audiences’ responses and coping mechanisms are triggered in Instagram. It argues that digital media literacy is especially challenged in UGC platforms, and draws on political economy to suggest that the relationships between producers and consumers has been blurred in favor of the producers. Online users who have a well-known or niche brand can make money from his or her brand and online community because companies use “regular people” to push products to reach a specific audience; one that a regular user has the ability to build and maintain. This is why businesses have targeted UGC and why the user interaction with this type of content needs to be re-examined. This study examines the relationships between viewer perceptions of commercial sponsorship and post content in the social media platform, Instagram. Specifically, it examines whether or not the trust and credibility generally associated with electronic word-of-mouth are affected by hashtags and other cues on Instagram posts. This project asks, Does the commodification of user-generated content change the way the content is perceived by users? It tests these relationships in an experiment that manipulates hashtags and @name text that accompany an image. The study hypothesizes that users will not be more likely to identify content as sponsored when a #promoted tag is present in the caption than when #ad or #sponsored is used; it also hypothesizes that @company_name tags were more likely to be recognized as sponsored than the hashtag text versions. Changes in advertising recognition, persuasive intent of the message, trust in the message, and credibility of the message were examined in between subjects’ analyses using ANOVAs, correlations, and t-tests. The results revealed several findings. Results showed users recognized the @company_handle as an advertisement more than #ad, #sponsored, and #promoted. The results also showed no significant difference between user’s perception of the hashtags #ad, #sponsored, and #promoted. Also, even when these cues were present, some participants were not aware of their presence and did not recognize any advertising on the post within the survey. It was also found that once identified as an advertisement, the trustworthiness and credibility towards the post was not affected.

Online user communities are increasingly important organizational structures and they can be the sources of competitive advantages and engines of collaborative innovation. Yet, only little is known about the dynamics of tie creation between community members in such communities and of how user innovation develops over time. This paper asks how social networking in online user communities evolve over time and how user innovation spreads through such communities. It also asks how user innovators behave in the communities compared with regular users. The analysis comprises three snapshots of a social network between 165 core community members over a two-year period, including their ties to peripheral community members outside the core. Both dynamic tie formation and adoption of user innovation behavior are analyzed, applying a dynamic stochastic actor-oriented modeling framework for social network analytics. This study finds that specific patterns of dynamic social networking precedes occurrences of user innovation in the community, and that user innovation in turn affects network evolution. These findings align with the theoretically understood but rarely empirically shown conception that social networks and innovation are endogenous to each-other, whereas previous research tends to infer the one while keeping the other constant.

We identify a new phenomenon – “Plebeian bias” – in the crowdsourcing of creative designs. Stardom, an emphasis on established individuals, has long been observed in many offline contexts. Does this phenomenon carry over to online communities? We investigate a large-scale dataset tracking all submissions, community votes on submissions, and revenues from commercialized submissions on a popular crowdsourcing portal, Threadless.com. In contrast to stardom, we find that the portal selects designs from “Plebeians” (i.e. users without an established fan base and track record) over “Stars” (i.e. users with an established fan base and track record). The tendency is revenue and profit sub-optimal. The evidence is consistent with incentives for the portal to demonstrate procedural fairness to the online community.

Human smuggling is an imperfect and inconsistent service due to its illicit nature, which means that problems can arise for all those involved; for smugglers the problem is how to cultivate and communicate their reputation as a bona fide smuggler, and for migrants it is just difficult to know whom to trust. The following study is an exploration of how Arabic-speaking smugglers and migrants interact with each other using the medium of Facebook. Taking a transactional approach as the theoretical framework, this study analyses the concerns raised in this online discourse, the information shared, and the ways in which both sides deal with the challenges they face. The diverse content across the 10 Facebook groups in the sample indicate firstly that smugglers who are concerned about their reputation of trustworthiness use the technological facilities of Facebook to help signal this to prospective clients, such as images, screenshots, and videos. Also posting in these groups, migrants pose many kinds of questions to the online community as a way of informing themselves. Other input from migrants is to give feedback on smugglers, which is positive or negative depending on their experience, as part of a mechanism driven by information sharers. The content of these groups further indicates that the smuggling market, at least online, is competitive and there are cases of specialisation in terms of the services provided.

Human Flesh Search (HFS) has proliferated profusely in China and other countries in recent years. Unlike other value co-creation communities, HFS differs in three important ways to warrant our investigation. We adopted the multiple case approach to investigate 21 HFS cases spanning 2007 to 2014, comprising 204,008 posts from 67,375 posters. Our preliminary analyses depicted consistent patterns across categories. We also established three contagious mechanisms driving HFS behavior (i.e., fueling emotionalism, unquestioning acceptance, and forgetting collectively) and two non-contagious mechanisms (i.e., isolating dissents/squabbles, and updating sluggishly). More essentially, for each of the above mechanisms, we shed insights on the affordances and constraints offered by IT. Critical theoretical contributions include challenging past understanding of “collective efforts” in value co-creation, enriching the discourse on online communities, complementing the “macro level perspective” of HFS with the “micro level perspective”, enhancing knowledge on “crowd behavior” (especially the concept of contagion online) and underscoring the essential roles of IT in providing affordances and constraints. Important practical implications to various stakeholders are also drawn.

Crowdsourcing relies on online platforms to connect a community of users to perform specific tasks. However, without appropriate control, the behavior of the online community might not align with the platform’s designed objective, which can lead to an inferior platform performance. This paper investigates how the feedback information on a crowdsourcing platform and systematic bias of crowdsourcing workers can affect crowdsourcing outcomes. Specifically, using archival data from the online crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, combined with survey data from actual Kaggle contest participants, we examine the role of a systematic bias, namely, the salience bias, in influencing the performance of the crowdsourcing workers and how the number of crowdsourcing workers moderates the impact of the salience bias on the outcomes of contests. Our results suggest that the salience bias influences the performance of contestants, including the winners of the contests. Furthermore, the number of participating contestants may attenuate or amplify the impact of the salience bias on the outcomes of contests, depending on the effort required to complete the tasks. Our results have critical implications for crowdsourcing firms and platform designers. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0775 .

In a globalized digital economy, it is not clear whether it is better to use globally- or domestically-oriented images in marketing communications, or how the optimal strategy would be affected by economic inequality. We explore this using field experiment data from Facebook in India. In these field experiments, consumers were shown ads that encouraged them to join an online community that shared reviews of wedding vendors. These ads randomized the extent to which the images of weddings showed global versus local aspirations. In general, the globalized images performed poorly. However, this is moderated by the degree of inequality in the surrounding region. People living in more unequal regions are more likely to embrace globalized images. We present suggestive evidence that this has to do with consumers trying to distance themselves from an environment of poverty, rather than because inequality is correlated with other regional characteristics that make the globalized image appealing.

A key issue, whenever people work together to solve a complex problem, is how to divide the problem into parts done by different people and combine the parts into a solution for the whole problem. This paper presents a novel way of doing this with groups of contests called contest webs. Based on the analogy of supply chains for physical products, the method provides incentives for people to (a) reuse work done by themselves and others, (b) simultaneously explore multiple ways of combining interchangeable parts, and (c) work on parts of the problem where they can contribute the most. The paper also describes a field test of this method in an online community of over 50,000 people who are developing proposals for what to do about global climate change. The early results suggest that the method can, indeed, work at scale as intended.

Organizations increasingly provide service to their customers via an online product support forum in which service delivery is partially delegated to an active community of users. Through an analytical model, we examine the relationship between askers' impatience, award and cost structure and types of questions attempted by the users towards characterizing how a firm should effectively manage such an innovative business model for service. Our results establish that the rate of firm's participation can steer users responses among the available question types, and that users' rate is unimodal in firm's rate up to a point where a very actively responding firm essentially discourages any participation of the users into its forum. Finally, from the practical perspective of managing customer support, our analysis offers rules of thumb on the extent to which firms should delegate service to a large online community of users, contingent on the incoming demand for service and available staffing level.

Technological advancements have made real time interactions between people frequent, faster and richer in content. The evolution of internet, especially the social media, has brought with it both opportunities and challenges for marketers in abundance. Marketers are constantly seeking ways to understand and serve their customers. Social media offers a richer platform for marketers to reach their customers. It is not just the sellers who share information through social media, but it also offers customers a medium to exchange information. Social media offers “fans” a medium to connect with the brand, the firm, and other customers as well as non-customers. It offers firms an opportunity to listen to and engage with the customer, while also giving them some amount of control on the information being exchanged (Malthouse et. al., 2013).The interactions that take place on the social media communities lead to the establishment of intimate firm-customer relationships. Richard (2013) observed that social media communities have a considerable influence on customer relationships with product, brand, company and other customers. Park & Kim (2014) identified four benefits that customers derive from social networking websites: social benefits, informational benefits, hedonic benefits and economic benefits. Firms must focus on offering long term benefits through social networking websites rather than on short term functional benefits, to develop meaningful and persistent relationships with customers. While functional benefit may not have a significant impact on relationship quality, it holds significant influence on perceived relationship investment (Park & Kim, 2014, p. 466). A brand’s presence on social media can also be an important criterion for the customer in determining the relationship efforts made by the firm. The main objective of this study is to understand and identify the benefits offered by brand communities on social networking websites. Brand communities not only act as a medium to build long term relationships with existing customers but are also instrumental in driving customer acquisition activities. By forming emotional bonds with its members, these communities take the existing firm – customer relationship a level further. There are many studies that observe the contribution of social media communities. While internet penetration is at high levels in developed countries, India still has huge potential to offer. As internet makes deeper inroads, social media too is spreading its wings. While various studies have acknowledged the instrumentality of social media in building and managing relationships and in offering benefits to the customers, the Indian story is still not complete. The purpose of this study thus is to understand the same in the Indian context. This study is thus aimed at understanding how firms are utilizing social networking websites to manage relationships with customers in India and the benefits that this platform offers.

For a wide class of crowdfunding approaches, we argue that the reward structure (for funders) is closer to that of charitable donations to public goods than it is to traditional entrepreneurial finance. Many features of the design of crowdfunding platforms can therefore be understood as attempts to deal with attendant “free-rider” problems in motivating contributions. Reviewing institutional features of today’s crowdfunding, we clarify that there are often limits in the extent to which tangible rewards can be used to motivate contributions. Drawing on analogies with charitable donations, we theorize that intangible sources of motivation — (i) direct psychological rewards, (ii) reciprocity and (iii) social interactions — can play a role in entrepreneurial crowdfunding. In our detailed empirical analysis of a representative project we find abundant evidence consistent with this characterization and we proceed to discuss implications for platform design and entrepreneurial funding and unique and defining characteristics of crowdfunding.

In traditional organizations, stretch goals - difficult and seemingly unattainable goals - have been much debated for their paradoxical effects. Recently, their use as a managerial instrument in IT-mediated crowds has increased. Using online crowdfunding on Kickstarter as an example, we investigate how the use of stretch goals influences project performance. Empirical results show that the use of stretch goals is associated with better project funding performance. Such positive effect is even stronger for projects with higher levels of community engagement. However, stretch goals are less effective in project categories where stretch goals are less novel. Our empirical results also reveal that the use of stretch goals significantly increases a project’s likelihood of delivery delay. These results shed light on the potential dark side of using stretch goals in IT-mediated crowds.

Online reputation trading is a new phenomenon facilitated by the prosperity of e-commerce and social networks. Whether reputations will be reliable when people can purchase rather than build them originally is a natural concern and also a challenge to online marketplaces. In the present study, we examine a reputation market in an infinitely repeated game setting, where agents sell products and trade their online reputations. Agents exert effort to provide products, and their reputations are updated based on consumer feedback. High-type agents have a lower cost of effort than low types. In addition to reputation system, we consider products that are randomly audited, and agents do not receive payment for products that fail the audit. Our analysis depicts a separating equilibrium: high-type agents can be sorted out from low-type agents by their reputations, which contrasts with the results in Tadelis (2002). In a separating equilibrium, reputations become a perfect indicator of agents’ types, effort levels, and product quality. We demonstrate the key role of auditing in separating different types of agents, and reveal the substitution effect between auditing frequency and harshness of reputation systems. We also study the design of the reputation system and the audit mechanism in order to achieve different equilibria in the reputation market. By proposing online reputations as an asset, our paper generates implications for establishing reliable online environments and promoting effective online interactions.

There is an increasing prevalence of Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) websites and a growing reliance of the online community on user-generated content. In this paper, we study users' motivation to win social recognition contests (best answers) and how multitasking and flexible hours influence the performance of contest-motivated users. Heterogeneity of contest motivation is estimated at the user level in a standard contest framework and used to demonstrate that for those who are highly motivated to win contests, multitasking across subjects is associated with lower productivity while flexible hours are associated with higher productivity, as proxied by the rate of winning contests.

Measuring the quality of health content in online health forums has been a challenging task. The majority of the existing measures are based on nonprofessional evaluations of forum users and may not be reliable. We employed machine learning techniques, text mining methods, and Big Data platforms to construct four measures of textual quality to automatically determine the similarity of a given answer to professional answers. We then used these measures to assess the quality of 66,888 answers posted on Yahoo! Answers Health section. All four measures of textual quality revealed a higher quality for asker-selected best answers indicating that askers, to some extent, have a proper judgment to select the best answers. We also studied the presence of order effects in online health forums. Our results suggest that the textual quality of the first answer positively influences the mean textual quality of the subsequent answers and negatively influences the quantity of the subsequent answers.

In this exploratory investigation, we examine changes associated with joining a nominal online group on longer-term behavior of lenders on the leading peer-to-peer microcredit site Kiva.org. Using a random sample of 5,000 Kiva lenders and exploiting a naturalistic field experimental manipulation (the introduction of the “lending teams” feature on Kiva), we analyzed the relationship of group membership with lending behaviors over a two year period. Our results reveal that lending team membership is positively associated with both the number of loans granted and the amount of money loaned whereas non-membership is associated with drop-offs in both behavioral measures. These results suggest that providing customers with the opportunity to join nominal online groups based on their existing affiliations (such as their alma mater, favorite sports team, nationality, etc.) may offer marketers with a relatively inexpensive, low-maintenance, and effective method of strengthening relationships with customers.

With the rapid growth of online social network sites (SNS), it has become imperative for platform owners and online marketers to investigate what drives content production on these platforms. However, previous research has found it difficult to statistically model these factors from observational data due to the inability to explicitly specify and discern the effects of network formation from network influence. In this paper, we adopt and enhance an actor-oriented continuous-time model to jointly estimate the co-evolution of the users' social network structure and their content production behavior using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based simulation approach. Specifically, we offer a method to analyze non-stationary and continuous behavior with network effects, similar to what is observed in social media ecosystems. Leveraging a unique dataset contributed by Facebook, we apply our model to data on university students across six months and uncover novel insights: 1) users tend to connect with others that have similar posting behavior, 2) however, after doing so, users tend to diverge in posting behavior, and 3) friend selections are sensitive to the strength of the posting behavior. Our method provides researchers and practitioners a statistically rigorous approach to analyze network effects in observational data. By suitably applying this method, researchers can generate insights and recommendations for SNS platforms to sustain an active and viable online community.

Many digital platforms, regardless of their business domain, follow the common practice of incorporating social and community features in order to increase their user engagement and expand their online community. Although this practice is advocated by the literature and clearly makes sense, its implications are not well understood. In this research, we aimed to close this literature gap, providing a theoretical framework and empirical evidence regarding the impact of the online community on platform performance. As a testbed, we studied crowdfunding platforms, that is, designated websites aimed at enabling entrepreneurs to raise money over the Internet. We used comprehensive data collected from Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding platform established to date.We theorized that online platforms, such as Kickstarter, consist not of a single community but rather a hierarchy of multiple, partially competing communities. These communities vary considerably with respect to the interests of their members, their platform participation patterns, and their impact on platform performance. Our suggested framework incorporates the notion of fluidity of online communities; that is, online users and digital communities evolve and change over time. As the interests of the online user change, so does the membership of her immediate community. The proposed framework allows us to identify such community changes and, consequently, to better identify pivotal members of online communities and predict their lifetime value as potential backers.Empirically, we validated our theory by studying the participation patterns of over 6.3 million Kickstarter users, who have supported more than 150 thousand crowdfunding campaigns over more than 5 years. We demonstrated the growth of the different community types and estimated their different impacts on crowdfunding performance over time. Interestingly, we found that some communities, despite high participation rates, had negative impacts on crowdfunding campaign success. We discuss managerial and practical implications of our theory and findings.

Internal ideas communities are becoming important instruments for companies, as they are virtual places where employees solve organizational issues, develop new products, services, and business opportunities. The engagement in such communities is voluntary and users are asked to invest their expertise, creativity, and their time to develop ideas. This makes it important to continuously acquire new members and to motivate the community to generate valuable content. However, recent literature does not provide adequate approaches for implementing ideas communities in a structured way. Thus, we conducted a single-case study analysing the implementation of DATEV’s ideas community, which is considered by DATEV as a successfully implemented community. We found that the implementation approach of DATEV has similarities with the diffusion theory by Leonard-Barton. Leonard-Barton’s theory consists of three key principles for implementing innovations in organizations: User Involvement, Sponsors and Champions, Mutual Adaptation of Organization and Technology. Based on the analysis of the DATEV approach by applying the theory by Leonard-Barton, we enrich existing literature about community building and management approaches. Furthermore, we present measures for implementing virtual communities using the example of an internal ideas community.

The convergence between face-to-face and computer mediated learning environments, also known as blended learning, not just require restructuring traditional class contact hours but also rethinking the course design to optimize student engagement (UNESCO, 2010). In this paper, the experiences of one hundred sixty six (166) online learners from six (6) first-time blended learning courses conducted using Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (MOODLE) were examined. Adapting the Blended Learning Student Survey Questionnaire by Garrison and Vaughan (2008) and the Presence in Online Community of Inquiry Tool (Swan, et al., 2008), it was revealed that compared to their non-hybrid courses, there is an increase in the amount and quality of interaction between teachers and other students. This is strengthened by positive perceptions to the three types of online presence in the blended courses as expressed by the students. This resulted as well to significant differences in student achievement for some of the blended courses. It is recommended that additional features such as video lectures and more synchronous online communication be incorporated into the redesign of the courses to further develop online understanding and interaction among the participants. Corresponding professional development for the teachers on these features be conducted. Provision of quality internet connection within the university should also be ensured to improve delivery of the courses.

Operating outside the framework of traditional systems of governance and civic engagement, the digitally-mediated, networked society referred to as the ‘Fifth Estate’ presents the general public with a unique opportunity to reinvigorate the public watchdog role. While previous discussions of the Fifth Estate have emphasized that the communicative power it enables can help to hold government to account, specific strategies have yet to be clearly identified. This paper presents three strategies for activating a digitally-mediated Fifth Estate: 1) building an online community of networked individuals, 2) shaping pre-existing digital platforms to enable members of the public to contribute focused and pointed user-generated content, and 3) developing targeted content to be shared and distributed. These strategies are presented in the context of the successful media reform battle to defeat Canada’s Bill C-30, an attempt by the Canadian government to expand upon its cyber-surveillance capabilities. The Stop Online Spying Coalition is presented as an example of the first strategy; online petitions, digital form letters and the #TellVicEverything Twitter attack are among the examples of the second strategy; and Openmedia.ca’s Stop Online Spying web materials, various online videos and the Vikileaks Twitter attack are examples of the third strategy.

Online social networking sites are considered as one of the most influential facilitator of many recent social movements. In this paper we investigate both the dynamics of friendship interactions and the structure of communication in protest-related community. We find that offline actions play insignificant role for the dynamics of the structure of a relatively stable protest online community.

We evaluate the value to firms of participating in an Internet-enabled network of practice in which IT professionals exchange ideas and help each other resolve problems related to the implementation and use of enterprise software. We show that IT spillovers that take place in these online community networks contribute positively and significantly to firm productivity: by our estimates, a one percent increase in inward IT knowledge spillovers translates to a $0.48 million increase in added value for an average firm in our sample. Further, we highlight the limits of the extent to which firms can benefit from participating in these Internet-enabled networks of practice, by showing that the value of spillovers arises primarily from flows of technical rather than business knowledge related to the enterprise software’s modules.

We report the results of a longitudinal field study, conducted in cooperation with two restaurants, to examine the degree to which participating on a Facebook fan page affects customer behaviors. We assessed customers’ baseline levels of visit frequency and spending. The restaurants then set up Facebook fan pages, maintaining them with regular updates of interesting marketing content. The same customer pools were invited to participate on the restaurants’ respective Facebook fan pages, and five months later, were re-surveyed to reassess their behaviors. Relatively small percentages of invited customers (approximately 2%) became the restaurants’ Facebook fans. Contrary to conventional wisdom, becoming a Facebook fan led to decreased spending per visit, whereas the visit frequency remained unchanged. We also found selective mere measurement effects of survey participation. Customers participating in the first survey visited the restaurant more frequently. The study’s findings raise doubts about the effectiveness of Facebook fan pages in providing direct benefits to firms from the fans in terms of their spending and visit frequency. However, there is some evidence of indirect benefits (e.g. new customer acquisition) that firms can gain from their Facebook fans.

We conducted an experiment with 30,000 users of a virtual nanotechnology facility, nanoHUB.org. We investigate the effect of virtual points and message framing on user participation in a survey. In one treatment, users receive points for completing the survey. In another treatment, users are exposed to a visual observation cue. We vary the social message, either emphasizing the private benefit to the user or the social benefit to the community of participation. Participation rates are increased through virtual points and for users receiving the private benefit messaging. The observation cue doesn’t have an effect.

In the context of behavioral analysis, online security control mechanisms can be classified as an aversive stimulus that is part of the contingencies that control the behavior of Internet users. The prior presentation of an aversive stimulus may decrease the likelihood of an user emitting a response or have other behavioral effects that can affect the user, the online community and/or the services of online social media. Taking the viewpoint of an experimental analysis of behavior as reference, this paper demonstrates empirically how the manipulation of a security control in the behavior contingencies of an online social chat service can considerably affect the behavior pattern of users in a social setting. The results may contribute to understand of the effects of aversive stimuli on the Internet and to assist in studies aiming to develop architectures that preserve the usability and security of online systems. The trend towards using this type of environment is growing considerably and, in general terms, we believe that this study may contribute to the science of behavior analysis and the development of security controls that necessarily involve the understanding of human behavior to perceive, understand and act upon the risks and threats involved in these environments.

Online communities provide a useful environment for web users to communicate and interact with other users by sharing their thoughts, ideas and opinions, and for resolving problems and issues. Companies and organisations now host online communities in order to support their products and services. Given this investment such communities are required to remain healthy and flourish. The behaviour that users exhibit within online communities is associated with their actions and interactions with other community users while the role that a user assumes is the label associated with a given type of behaviour. The domination of one type of behaviour within an online community can impact upon its health, for example, it might be the case within a question-answering community that there is a large portion of expert users and very few users asking questions, thereby reducing the involvement of and the need for experts. Understanding how the role composition - i.e. the distribution of users assuming different roles - of a community affects its health informs community managers with the early indicators of possible reductions or increases in community activity and how the community is expected to change. In this paper we present an approach to analyse communities based on their role compositions. We present a behaviour ontology that captures user behaviour within a given context (i.e. time period and community) and a semantic-rule based methodology to infer the role that a user has within a community based on his/her exhibited behaviour. We describe a method to tune roles for a given community-platform through the use of statistical clustering and discretisation of continuous feature values. We demonstrate the utility of our approach through role composition analyses of the SAP Community Network by: (a) gauging the differences between communities, (b) predicting community activity increase/decrease, and (c) performing regression analysis of the post count within each community. Our findings indicate that communities on the SAP Community Network differ in terms of their average role percentages and experts, while being similar to one another in terms of the dominant role in each community - being a novice user. The findings also indicate that an increase in expert users who ask questions and initiate discussions was associated with increased community activity and that for 23 of the 25 communities analysed we were able to accurately detect a decrease in community activity using the community's role composition.

This paper examines how hepatitis B virus carriers in China change discriminatory regulations and laws by staging a social movement. Participant observation, documentary research as well as in-depth interviews have been utilized to approach the topic from three perspectives: mobilization strategy, media strategy and negotiation with the state. Findings show that a loosely-connected network based on an online community, GDXZ, enables activists to not only dodge the state’s surveillance against people’s collective actions but also mobilize hepatitis B virus carriers across the country to participate in online and offline actions. Good connections with a large number of journalists and proficiency in constructing newsworthy events enable them to get mainstream media coverage and put their appeals into the traditional media agenda. Legal actions, submitting citizen letters directly to the central government as well as lobbying politicians to present motions in political conferences are the three effective ways to communicate with the state for policy changes. HBV carriers’ success in changing laws and regulations has proved that there are institutionalized channels to negotiate with the state during the policy-making process. Dynamics presented by this social movement is of significance because it could be applicable to any social movement in China that aims at changing laws and regulations.

This is the Online Technical Appendix to accompany the paper "The Emergence of Opinion Leaders in a Networked Online Community: A Dyadic Model with Time Dynamics and a Heuristic for Fast Estimation." This paper is available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1562245.

The present work investigates the impact of online self-presentation on the self-concept. Online self-presentation is the goal-directed activity of publishing information on the Internet in order to influence the impressions formed by an online community about oneself. Web-based applications such as personal homepages, blogs, and social network sites facilitate online self- presentation. Prior studies found that the content of one’s online self-presentation is influenced by various internal and external demands. Moreover, research has shown that self-presentation in non-mediated, face-to-face environments, can change one’s self-concept. In this context, the present work addresses the following questions: How does the way one presents oneself online affect one’s self-concept? Under what circumstances is a person’s online self-presentation likely to lead to a self-concept change? What are the potential consequences of an altered self-concept? I develop a theoretical model based on self-identification theory, which suggests that self-presentation impacts the self-concept through a process of inference and spreading memory activation. I propose that the impact of online self-presentation on the self-concept is moderated by system factors (i.e. visibility, identifiability, and restrictiveness), online community factors (i.e. size and importance), and user factors (i.e. self-monitoring and self-concept clarity). In three sequential experiments (total N = 969), I test the proposed relationships by inducing participants to present themselves online as a risk-seeker while manipulating system and online community factors. Subsequently, I measure participants’ risk self-concept using self-report, behavioral, and social perception measures. Results suggest that online self-presentation can change one’s domain-specific self-concept -- an outcome referred to as carryover effect -- if people are led to recall and share specific memories relating to a particular content domain. Moreover, I found that system, online community, and user factors do not significantly influence the carryover effect. Lastly, my findings suggest that the self-concept has domain-specific consequences for one’s behavior as well as for one’s social perception. However, these consequences are greatly influenced by the characteristics of a given sample. Given the nascent stream of research on online self-presentation, the present work makes significant theoretical and practical contributions while opening multiple avenues for future research.

Innovation inside companies is difficult to see. But an emerging online community of inventors who publicly post 3D CAD drawings of their work provide a way to observe - and perhaps amplify - innovation. In this paper we analyze the network structure of Thingiverse, a website oriented toward 3D printing. This form of printing blurs the line between creating information and manufacturing objects: drawings can be sent to devices that build 3D objects out of many materials, including resin, ceramics, and metal. As an exploratory study, we analyzed the structure of Thingiverse links. Our results suggest that analysis of remix network structure may provide ways of tracing innovation processes and detecting the emergence of new ideas, combination of disparate ideas., Workshop on Information in Networks, 2012

Proverbs or better known as Peribahasa, in the Malay Language has been an integral component in learning and understanding the Malay culture. It is also part of the Malay Language curriculum to be imparted to our students during their primary, secondary education and even for their postsecondary education in junior colleges in preparation for the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE), Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Normal, Ordinary, Advanced Level examinations in Singapore. With the advent of today’s information & communication technology, raises the concept of New Media literacy among our youths. One of the commonly New Media tools that the majority youths in the ASEAN region, especially Singapore, have adopting is Twitter (http://twitter.com). Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to tweet about any topics within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. In this paper, the illustration of the twitter technology proposed by the technology librarian with national reference librarian (specialised in language development – Malay) are to explore, deploy and leverage on the capability to create a knowledge awareness and immersive model in propagating Malay Proverbs (Peribahasa) to the new generation within the Twitter sphere. This initiative is introduced to strategically spread them through the digital engagement among the new generation and at the same times expose the surface knowledge of peribahasa among the online community. Most language learners do not need even more passive input in form of texts, lectures or videos. This input is readily available in numerous forms on the Internet. Basically, they need is the opportunity to actively produce peribahasa language and the chance to use them as tool of communication. This addresses for instructional methods and tools promoting ‘active’ learning allowing to express themselves and interact in the target language and cultural. The paper will explores and discusses (i) on the technology - twitter, (ii) digital demo graph and cultural, (iii) the use of language (peribahasa), (vi) the framework and lastly (v) the benefit and return of investment.

As virtual worlds and social media in general become important settings for marketing actions, we need to know what is the weight of social norms within such contexts. To what degree can a researcher expect that the answers obtained within a virtual world ¨C ultimately a social network ¨C reflect real opinions and are not inflated by social desirability? Does the social context of an online community induce higher social desirability? This paper investigates whether social desirability is stronger within virtual world online communities than in the real world, observing same structural relationship among measured constructs but higher social desirability tendency in the virtual world compared to the real life. Since social networks and online communities will be more often used as research and communication platforms, increased attention needs to be paid to the social desirability tendency of the community members.

Several organizations have developed ongoing crowdsourcing communities that repeatedly collect ideas for new products and services from a large, dispersed “crowd” of non-experts (consumers) over time. Despite its promises, little is known about the nature of an individual’s ideation efforts in such an online community. Studying Dell’s IdeaStorm community, serial ideators are found to be more likely than consumers with only one idea to generate an idea the organization find valuable enough to implement, but are unlikely to repeat their early success once their ideas are implemented. As ideators with past success attempt to again come up with ideas that will excite the organization, they instead end up proposing ideas similar to their ideas that were already implemented (i.e., they generate less diverse ideas). The negative effects of past success are somewhat mitigated for ideators with diverse commenting activity on others’ ideas. These findings highlight some of the challenges in maintaining an ongoing supply of quality ideas from the crowd over time.

Online communities play an increasingly important role in developing new innovations. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which community affiliation may change the incentives to commercialize those new innovations. By examining Open Source Software (OSS) as an example of an innovation community, and using both a quasi-experiment and a longitudinal survey, I seek to shed light on this issue. In the quasi-experiment using the launch of the Apple App Store, I find a lower propensity towards commercialization among individuals associated with online community innovation. I then examine the mechanisms for this lower commercialization with a novel longitudinal survey of entrepreneurial activity among OSS community members. Despite the history of OSS as an anti-commercial community, I do not find that anti-commercial attitudes play a role in commercialization decisions. Instead, differences in self-identity between community-based innovators and entrepreneurs have large significant effects on the propensity to commercialize innovations. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for both the literatures on entrepreneurial identity and community innovation.