The hidden architects of the internet: Rebecca Newton and the making of online community management

Online communities are used across several fields of human activities, as environments for large-scale collaboration. Most successful ones employ professionals, sometimes called “community managers” or “moderators”, for tasks including onboarding new participants, mediating conflict, and policing unwanted behaviour. Network scientists routinely model interaction across participants in online communities as social networks. We interpret the activity of community managers as (social) network design: they take action oriented at shaping the network of interactions in a way conducive to their community’s goals. It follows that, if such action is successful, we should be able to detect its signature in the network itself.Growing networks where links are allocated by a preferential attachment mechanism are known to converge to networks displaying a power law degree distribution. Growth and preferential attachment are both reasonable first-approximation assumptions to describe interaction networks in online communities. Our main hypothesis is that managed online communities are characterised by in-degree distributions that deviate from the power law form; such deviation constitutes the signature of successful community management. Our secondary hypothesis is that said deviation happens in a predictable way, once community management practices are accounted for. If true, these hypotheses would give us a simple test for the effectiveness of community management practices.We investigate the issue using (1) empirical data on three small online communities and (2) a computer model that simulates a widely used community management activity called onboarding. We find that onboarding produces in-degree distributions that systematically deviate from power law behaviour for low-values of the in-degree; we then explore the implications and possible applications of the finding.

Research that focuses on participation in the field of journalism remains undertheorized and overused to explain whatever type of relation with the audience. This tension leads to a shortage of a solid theoretical construct to explain the processes of sharing online content in journalism. This article frames the audience studies in a new paradigm, which is linked to the key concept of sharing. It argues for an unresolved issue between the users’ abundant social activities with media content and the lack of explicit strategies by the media to take advantage of how and why people share news on the internet. This article deals with a theoretical framework for journalism built on the convergence of audience studies, the research on participation and the management of online communities. All these approaches converge in the activity of sharing content, which remains undervalued within the academic and scientific field of journalism studies. This article recovers the paradigm of a media landscape made by information flows –instead of information stocks. Therefore, the act of sharing –by the audience– becomes strategic for the media. What it means in the field of research in journalism for the coming years is the main issue of this theoretical article. As part of the final results, the article summarises some research lines that are useful to develop a new framework around audiences and sharing content. We hope this work contributes to the theoretical awareness within a distinct segment of journalism studies influenced by the audience’s online activities with media content.

Online communities provide technical support for organisations on a range of products and services. These communities are managed by dedicated online community managers who nurture and help the community grow. While visual analytics are increasingly used to support a range of data-intensive management processes, similar techniques have not been adopted into the community management field. Although relevant tools exist, the majority is developed in the lab, without conducting a domain analysis or eliciting user requirements, or is designed to support more general analytic tasks. In this chapter, the authors describe a case study in which we design, develop, and evaluate a visual analytics application with the help of Symantec’s online community management team. The authors suggest that the approach and the resulting application, called Petri, is an important step to promoting online community management as a strategic and data-driven process.

Online communities may increase customer brand loyalty, deliver customer feedback, and lead to cost savings. Yet they also suffer from weak contributions that limit their survival chances. This study explores whether two types of explicit incentives—monetary and normative pleas—encourage members of an online community to contribute actively. Community managers often administer explicit incentives to increase members' participation, but economic and psychological theories indicate that their effects depend on members' previous levels of voluntary contributions. An experimental study among members of a large, public question-and-answer community confirms varying effects: Online community managers can use monetary incentives to increase active and passive community members' participation in the short term, but these rewards' hidden costs likely emerge in the long run because participation motivation among formerly active members decreases after the incentives expire. Explicit normative pleas should be administered only to increase active members' short-term intentions to post messages. These results can help community managers decide whether to use explicit incentives to increase member participation and which kinds of explicit incentives to offer to various community members.

<p>This paper presents the current problem of investigation of the effect of implementation of improved methods of the life cycle stages organisation to online community management. The online community life cycle is the sum of the stages of organisation and development of online community. The current approaches of scientific researches of social processes within the WWW are analysed. The types of life cycles are distinguished and implemented in the online community management. The algorithm of life cycle stages of the online community is designed. The total quality of the life cycle stages execution and quality of the life cycle stages execution of Lviv Polytechnic online community from 2013 till 2016. Currently, the appropriate study and development of community management hardware and software provoke the most interest because online communities are a widespread and popular phenomenon, and the existing management software for them is imperfect and not complex.</p>

Open Design Communities: A bibliometric analysis of community-based management

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the diverse strands that underpin the still emerging concept of co‐creation. The paper aims to suggest that there are alternative views rooted in psychotherapy, critical theory, software development and design that can help provide a richer understanding of the meaning of co‐creation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a general review of the field based on the literature and the different strands that comprise it.FindingsCo‐creation is often seen from a managerial perspective. In this general review of the concept, the authors demonstrate that co‐creation can also be seen from the perspective of consumers and other stakeholders. This also shifts the idea of co‐creation away from a strongly rational approach to one that is more spontaneous and playful.Practical implicationsThe review focuses primarily on consumers and how they can be encouraged to collaborate with one another to meet their needs for socialisation and meaning making and how organizations can influence and use the insights of co‐creation.Originality/valueOver the past decade there has been a rapidly growing interest in co‐creation, but much of the research focuses on the creation and management of online communities. By recognising the antecedents of managerial co‐creation and its diverse heritage, it is possible to see the concept as a development of other practices. By drawing on these practices, it is possible to look at co‐creation in a new light.

Online communities suffer serious newcomer attrition. This paper explores whether and how early activity diversity - the degree to which a newcomer engages in a wide range of a site's activities in the first session - is associated with their longevity. We introduce a metric (DSCORE) to characterize early activity diversity in online sites and run our analyses on an online community ‘MovieLens’. We find that DSCORE is significant both by itself and in conjunction with a measure of quantity of activity in predicting longevity. This finding is robust to different measures of longevity (aggregate number of sessions and attritions after sessions 1, 5, and 10). The immediate implication is an effective classifier for identifying users with higher (or lower) expected longevity from the first-session activity. We also find DSCORE is more useful than a traditional measure of measuring diversity such as the Gini-Simpson index. We conclude by discussing how early activity diversity may be more broadly effective in supporting design and management of online communities.

Administrators of online communities face the crucial issue of understanding and developing their user communities. Will new users become committed members? What types of roles are particular individuals most likely to take on? We report on a study that investigates these questions. We administered a survey (based on standard psychological instruments) to nearly 4000 new users of the MovieLens film recommendation community from October 2009 to March 2010 and logged their usage history on MovieLens. We found that general volunteer motivations, pro-social behavioral history, and community-specific motivations predicted both the amount of use and specific types of activities users engaged in after joining the community. These findings have implications for the design and management of online communities.

Purpose– The objective of this paper is to explore empirically the relationship between quantity and quality of user contributed information in online social computing systems, and how these two performance outcomes are associated with user factors.Design/methodology/approach– Drawing from prior research, the paper presents a conceptual model hypothesizing a tradeoff between quality and quantity of user contributed information. In addition quality and quantity are associated with a set of motivational, cognitive, and social factors. The model was tested using data obtained through a web-based survey of 345 users of the Flickr online photo sharing community.Findings– The empirical results support the hypothesized inverse relationship between quantity and quality of user contributed information, moderated by user's tenure in the community. The findings also suggest that a user's quantity of contribution is positively associated with the intrinsic motivation of commitment to the community, whereas quality of contribution is positively associated with the extrinsic motivation of self-development. While users’ social embeddedness is associated with quality and quantity of contribution, virtualness of social ties is only associated with quality of contribution.Practical implications– The findings of this study can inform the design and management of online communities, and promote sustained contributions from individual users.Originality/value– This study extends our knowledge of the quality and quantity of user contributed online information by demonstrating the inverse relationship between these two performance outcomes, and that they could be motivated by different user factors.

Accounts of the social experience within livestreaming channels vary widely, from the frenetic "crowdroar" offered in some channels to the close-knit, "participatory communities" within others. What kinds of livestreaming communities enable the types of meaningful conversation and connection that support relationship development, and how? In this paper, we explore how personal relationships develop within Twitch, a popular livestreaming service. Interviews with 21 pairs who met initially within Twitch channels illustrate how interactions originating in Twitch's text-based, pseudonymous chat environment can evolve into close relationships, marked by substantial trust and support. Consistent with Walther's hyperpersonal model, these environments facilitate self-disclosure and conversation by reducing physical cues and emphasizing common ground, while frequent, low-stakes interaction allow relationships to deepen over time. Our findings also highlight boundaries of the hyperpersonal model. As group size increases, participants leverage affordances for elevated visibility to spark interactions; as relationships deepen, they incorporate complementary media channels to increase intimacy. Often, relationships become so deep through purely computer-mediated channels that face-to-face meetings become yet another step in a continuum of relationship development. Findings from a survey of 1,367 members of Twitch communities demonstrate how the suitability of these spaces as venues for relational interaction decreases as communities increase in size. Together, these findings illustrate vividly how hyperpersonal interaction functions in the context of real online communities. We consider implications for the design and management of online communities, including their potential for supporting "strong bridges," relationships which combine the benefits of strong ties and network bridges.

Purpose – Bridging indistinct relationships and online loyalty has become an important strategy for online interest-based communities' operators and firms. The objective of this study is to draw on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to advance our understanding of the influences on the development of relationship quality and the consequent impact on members' loyalty to online communities. Design/methodology/approach – To test the hypotheses the authors identified and selected four interest-based online communities in Taiwan. The online survey yielded 331 completed questionnaires from members of interest-based online communities and the authors analysed the results using the structural equation modelling approach. Findings – The findings show that argument quality and source credibility positively affect members' perceived relationship quality, which has a positive and significant effect on behavioural loyalty, and personal relevance and user expertise positively moderate the relationship between argument quality and relationship quality and negatively moderate the relationship between source credibility and relationship quality. Research limitations/implications – While this study has produced meaningful insights for investigating the informational processing influences on relationship quality and subsequent behavioural loyalty through the ELM perspective, the samples may not allow researchers to draw more general conclusions across different types of community contexts. The data were collected only from interest-based communities. Examining this model across different types of online communities, such as transaction-, relationship-, or fantasy-based ones, would help establish the generalisability of these results beyond the current context. Practical implications – The present study can help managers of online communities recognise the differential effects of these information processes across a user population and customise optimal strategies that best fit the unique characteristics of their community members. For making argument quality more convincing, Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation could serve as an appropriate mechanism. Moreover it is crucial to provide various indicators of source credibility for information content. Originality/value – The paper addresses a gap in the research by using ELM to better understand the influences on the development of relationship quality and the impact on members' loyalty. Understanding these dynamics is critical since it: enriches the relationship marketing and information management literature by addressing the role of information content in the management and success of online communities; helps online community managers customise optimal strategies for their members, thereby fostering members' loyalty and their platform's competitive advantage; and illuminates two influential processes that can achieve the desired attitude change in the context of online communities.

Business managers are recognising the potential of firm-initiated online communities to monitor user preferences, enhance brand awareness, advertise new products, and react to feedback. We explore the social organisation of such virtual communities via in-depth interviews with German online community managers about their daily work and their self-presentation. Norbert Elias’s insights into long-term changes in self-constraint and self-expression in occidental societies serve as heuristic framework. We argue that online community managers’ behaviour is typical of the trend towards informalisation, which can also be observed in for-profit relations.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates individual-level antecedents and relational outcomes of social media engagement. Social media engagement approached in this study is a three-dimensional construct composed of affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions. Surveying more than 48 Facebook pages, spanning nine product categories and 448 consumers, the results show that product involvement, attitude towards the community and online interaction propensity all impact social media engagement. The study also reveals that high social media engagement increases brand relationships significantly, particularly affecting brand trust, commitment and loyalty. Additionally, community engagement appears as a precursor of brand engagement. These findings provide insight into antecedents and outcomes of engagement for academic research and bring value to online brand and community management.

While extensive studies on various networks properties have been carried out, little has been done on large-scale online community networks. An online community network essentially is a group-centered online platform, that is much different from traditional social network. Based on the log data of a university online community, we investigate the statistical characteristics of the evolving network during the different observation period, and find that the degree distribution of the network follows a composite power laws form. In addition, the online community network shows the small world effect, well-interconnected modules, and the hallmark of “scale-free”. Further research indicates that the online community network is high robust to random removals, but fail to intentional attacks, especially to attacks based on the betweenness, that shows some nodes with high betweenness play a key role in maintaining the online community network communication capabilities. Our analysis aims to provide a platform for drawing a host of practical implications for information diffusion and promoting valuable communication, as well as for the management and design of online communities.