Case study on incentive mechanism and its effectiveness of campus network in virtual community-case of Myclub2.com

Abstract

The effectiveness of incentive mechanism in virtual community determines whether this virtual community can achieve its primary goals when it's first established. Meantime it's also a key factor to determine whether the community will exist over a long period of time as long as its profit is more than the cost. As a special virtual community, the campus virtual community provides students a platform for communication, meanwhile it implements some educational purposes. Therefore, the settings of incentive mechanism directly determine the educational effect when the virtual community introduced in. In this paper, by the way of case study, the author introduces a campus virtual community named Myclub2.com which was established by himself, labors its design goals and value degree settings of network behavior, analyzes user's initial motivation and induced motivation, also elaborates the setting mode and the function system of incentive mechanism. By summarizing Myclub2.com's operational situation over the past 10 years in the aspects of module settings, interface layout, identity and value orientation settings and function system, also analyzing the effectiveness of user's behavior guidance, it is shown that users are highly interested in those functions promoting communication. Moreover, by marking the post as Top or Essence is an adjustment of visual display which can guide the network behavior effectively. It is concluded that the internal value system based on visual control and incentive function plays an effective guiding role for user's network behavior. In addition, the ranking settings of getting promoted in the virtual community are also appealing to many users.