Success Of Online Communities Research Articles

Leveraging community support and platform affordances on a path to more active participation: A study of online fan fiction communities

The success of online communities is driven by continuous active community participation, but motivating silent members (lurkers) to participate might push them faster than they are prepared for and demand extra labor from active members. This article explores user participation in online fan fiction communities through empirical interviews of once-silent but now-active members, demonstrating how such platforms afford lurking as a legitimate mode of participation and provide affordances for users to participate at their own pace. We propose a theory of incidental mentorship, where active users become role models within a supportive community and motivate lurkers to participate without doing additional work.

Understanding Differentiation of User Roles and Gamification in a Professional Online Community: A Case Study

Online communities can flourish only when users participate by contributing meaningful content. A clear understanding of the gamification concept and user roles are crucial in creating a successful online community. This case study examined user roles and gamification in Now Community® —a popular online community for ServiceNow professionals. Ten user roles and five gamifications components were identified. While simply gamifying an online community does not guarantee increased user participation and engagement, learning how user roles and gamification work in a successful and popular professional online community can be beneficial. Results of this study should provide valuable insights and help other professionals and practitioners who wish to gamify their online communities.

Cohesion, collaboration and the struggle of creating online learning communities: Development and validation of an online collective efficacy scale

A number of strategies have emerged over the last decades to guide the development of online learning communities where members share, augment and co-create information but few tools to measure their success. This paper suggests that some online communities’ success can be understood through the lens of online collective efficacy. Albert Bandura introduced the idea of collective efficacy as an emergent variable where members have agency in community success. Collective efficacy sees group success as dependent on relationships between members of the group on two levels: the degree to which individuals feel that they able to contribute to the existing group, and the degree to which individuals perceive a fit between their own abilities, desires and goals and those of the other members of the group. The present paper describes the development and validation of a 35-item Likert-scale measure of online collective efficacy to capture this phenomenon. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis corroborated the fit of the data (n = 634) to the proposed theoretical structure of the scale (comprising 6 factors), and the convergence validity analysis yielded significant moderate correlations between the proposed scale and other instruments measuring related constructs. The developed measure has both descriptive value helping researchers/instructors understand the effectiveness of their strategies in managing online learning communities; and prescriptive value, helping offer guidance in how to move towards a more successful online community.

How Potential New Members Approach an Online Community

Online communities, socio-technical systems where people interact with others, depend on new members coming to the community. While the majority of research in online communities relation to the recruitment of new members has focused on new members’ socialization and retention, little work has focused on how potential new members who are not yet a member of the community make the decision on whether they are willing to join in the online community. To understand this initial decision process, we investigated how potential new members build mental models of the online community from their first experience within the community, and how this process impacts the decision to continue participating in the community. We interviewed 31 potential new members of the online communities, Quora and Reddit, to better understand how they evaluate a new community. We found that the process of understanding a community involves orienting toward multiple different aspects of the community, including the content available on the community, the people who are already part of the community, and the technology interface and mechanisms that control the community. Participants who focused on consuming and enjoying content were much more likely to express an interest in future participation in these communities than participants who just evaluated the community, looking at the people in the community or the technology of the community. This extends previous considerations for recruiting new members in online communities. We conclude by discussing how our findings can have broad implications in developing successful online communities and suggesting future research efforts that could help understand potential new members.

Coding and Classifying Knowledge Exchange on Social Media: a Comparative Analysis of the #Twitterstorians and AskHistorians Communities

As social media become a staple for knowledge discovery and sharing, questions arise about how self-organizing communities manage learning outside the domain of organized, authority-led institutions. Yet examination of such communities is challenged by the quantity of posts and variety of media now used for learning. This paper addresses the challenges of identifying (1) what information, communication, and discursive practices support successful online communities, (2) whether such practices are similar on Twitter and Reddit, and (3) whether machine learning classifiers can be successfully used to analyze larger datasets of learning exchanges. This paper builds on earlier work that used manual coding of learning and exchange in Reddit ‘Ask’ communities to derive a coding schema we refer to as ‘learning in the wild’. This schema of eight categories: explanation with disagreement, agreement, or neutral presentation; socializing with negative, or positive intent; information seeking; providing resources; and comments about forum rules and norms. To compare across media, results from coding Reddit’s AskHistorians are compared to results from coding a sample of #Twitterstorians tweets (n = 594). High agreement between coders affirmed the applicability of the coding schema to this different medium. LIWC lexicon-based text analysis was used to build machine learning classifiers and apply these to code a larger dataset of tweets (n = 69,101). This research shows that the ‘learning in the wild’ coding schema holds across at least two different platforms, and is partially scalable to study larger online learning communities.

Living in the Present

Successful online communities accumulate large amounts of long-term content. However there has been little quantitative, theoretically-motivated exploration of how communities organize such content, nor which community members take responsibility for active organization. We examine one aspect of long-term content organization through link behavior, also exploring role differences between enterprise community leaders and members in the context of life-cycle community models. We first classify how content is linked within posts, identifying usage patterns that organize information within and outside communities. We next present an exploratory quantitative analysis of 2,010 communities including 428,476 posts and 1,246,570 links. We show paradoxically that although mature communities accumulate substantial content, organizing that content using links decreases over time. Further analyses suggest that this arises from a recency bias, with communities being focused on current content. Our results also challenge descriptive lifecycle community models, which propose that regular community members adopt greater responsibility over time. We explore explanations for our findings and implications including new tools that encourage responsibility for active organization, as well as methods for members to revisit critical content.

Posting-related attributes driving differential engagement behaviors in online travel communities

Users’ engagement behaviors such as likings, sharing and social interactions in online communities are critically important to the viability and the ultimate success of these communities. However, empirical research investigating which posting-related attributes driving these participation behaviors still lags. The purpose of this study is to understand what and how posting-related attributes drive the engagement behaviors. Using travelogue data from a large traveling knowledge-sharing community, we used econometric models to investigate and compare the antecedents leading to three different kinds of engagement behavior that users exhibit in online communities (i.e., consuming, contributing, and creating). The results reveal that five attributes are associated with these engagement behaviors. These attributes demonstrate the differential effectiveness on the engagement behaviors with different intensities. Our empirical findings provide both theoretical and practical implications for online community operators to build a vibrant and successful online community.

Brand Communication Success in Online Consumption Communities: An Experimental Analysis of the Effects of Communication Style and Brand Pictorial Representation

ABSTRACTOnline communities are often focused on consumption‐related consumer interests and offer marketers the opportunity to actively engage and cooperate with consumers, foster customer relationships, and easily spread information about new products and services. In spite of this enormous potential, it is surprising that to date, little is known about how such communities can be designed to positively influence consumers’ evaluation of a brand and further marketing‐related outcome variables. Previous studies have shown that the success of online communities might depend on the communication style that is used to interact with the members as well as on the pictorial representation of the brand within an online community. To gain insights into these and further relationships, the authors conducted an online experiment in an online brand community on a social networking site and analyzed the effects of the communication style and the pictorial representation of the brand on the members’ attitudes toward the brand, their satisfaction with the community, brand recommendation, and brand purchase. The study was conducted over three months, and the participants were surveyed three times during this period. Hence, the present study further analyzed whether the proposed effects will change over time due to the member's participation in the community. The results show that communication style and brand pictorial representation in an online consumption community influence members’ evaluation of the brand as well as of the community and brand purchase.

Conceptual Model of Successful Educational online Community of Practice for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The community of practice is an internet application that nourishes knowledge management and innovation. Implementing the community of practice in education can enhance the learning process and make it an enjoyable, exiting and lifelong experience. In this paper, the researchers intend to create a conceptual model for the successful implementation of community of practice in Education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through evaluate the literature review about the educational community of practice. Then, a prototype is developed followed by a survey to collect feed-backs about the experiment. Using the Chi-Square statistical method of qualitative analysis associated with the Design Science Methodology of research, the research is fulfilled. The results illustrated the conceptual model of the effective implementation of the community of practice in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that define the seven factors to be considered which are network density, culture perceptions, distributed production, knowledge complexity and richness, government enforcement, IT specialist role, and senior members role.

Elevating Engagement and Community in Online Courses

Community, while inherent in assumptions about online education, rarely materializes as an integral component of the experience. Misconceptions and misguided motivations can derail participation and engagement in the online setting. Creating a successful online community is dependent on knowing what works in the face-to-face environment and implementing effective parallels online. We will discuss best practices for building community in online information literacy courses and leveraging motivators to keep students and instructors engaged. While this paper focuses on online information literacy courses, many of these strategies can be applied to online workshops, embedded librarianship, and other instructional initiatives.

Bipartite Editing Prediction in Wikipedia

Link prediction problems aim to project future interactions among members in a social network that have not communicated with each other in the past. Classical approaches for link prediction usually use local information, which considers the similarity of two nodes, or structural information such as the immediate neighborhood. However, when using a bipartite graph to represent activity, there is no straightforward similarity measurement between two linking nodes. However, when a bipartite graph shows two nodes of different types, they will not have any common neighbors, so the local model will need to be adjusted if the users' goal is to predict bipartite relations. In addition to local information regarding similarity, when dealing with link predictions in a social network, it is natural to employ community information to improve the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we address the link prediction problem in the bipartite editing graph used in Wikipedia and also examine the structure of community in this edit graph. As Wikipedia is one of the successful member-maintained online communities, extracting the community information and solving its bipartite link prediction problem will shed light on the process of content creation. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, the problem of using community information in bipartite for predicting the link occurrence has not been clearly addressed. Hence we have designed and integrated two bipartite-specific approaches to predict the link occurrence: First, the supervised learning approach, which is built around the adjusted features of a local model and, second, the community-awareness approach, which utilizes community information. Experiments conducted on the Wikipedia collection show that in terms of F1-measure, our approaches generates an 11% improvement over the general methods based on the K-Nearest Neighbor. In addition to this, we also investigate the structure of communities in the editing network and suggest a different approach to examining the communities involved in Wikipedia.

Agent-Based Modeling to Inform Online Community Design: Impact of Topical Breadth, Message Volume, and Discussion Moderation on Member Commitment and Contribution

The design of complex social systems, such as online communities, requires the consideration of many parameters, a practice at odds with social science research that focuses on the effects of a small set of variables. In this article, we show how synthesizing insights from multiple, narrowly focused social science theories in an agent-based model helps us understand factors that lead to the success of online communities. The agent-based model combines insights from theories related to collective effort, information overload, social identity, and interpersonal attraction to predict motivations for online community participation. We conducted virtual experiments to develop hypotheses around three design decisions about how to orchestrate an online community—topical breadth, message volume, and discussion moderation—and the trade-offs involved in making these decisions. The simulation experiments suggest that broad topics and high message volume can lead to higher member commitment. Personalized moderation outperforms other types of moderation in increasing members' commitment and contribution, especially in topically broad communities and those with high message volume. In comparison, community-level moderation increases commitment but not contribution, and only in topically narrow communities. These simulation results suggest a critical trade-off between informational and relational benefits. This research illustrates that there are many interactions among the design decisions that are important to consider; the particulars of the community's goals often determine the effectiveness of some decisions. It also demonstrates the value of agent-based modeling in synthesizing simple social science theories to describe and prescribe behaviors in a complex system, generating novel insights that inform the design of online communities.

Effectiveness of shared leadership in Wikipedia.

The objective of the paper is to understand leadership in an online community, specifically, Wikipedia. Wikipedia successfully aggregates millions of volunteers' efforts to create the largest encyclopedia in human history. Without formal employment contracts and monetary incentives, one significant question for Wikipedia is how it organizes individual members with differing goals, experience, and commitment to achieve a collective outcome. Rather than focusing on the role of the small set of people occupying a core leadership position, we propose a shared leadership model to explain the leadership in Wikipedia. Members mutually influence one another by exercising leadership behaviors, including rewarding, regulating, directing, and socializing one another. We conducted a two-phase study to investigate how distinct types of leadership behaviors (transactional, aversive, directive, and person-focused), the legitimacy of the people who deliver the leadership, and the experience of the people who receive the leadership influence the effectiveness of shared leadership in Wikipedia. Our results highlight the importance of shared leadership in Wikipedia and identify trade-offs in the effectiveness of different types of leadership behaviors. Aversive and directive leadership increased contribution to the focal task, whereas transactional and person-focused leadership increased general motivation. We also found important differences in how newcomers and experienced members responded to leadership behaviors from peers. These findings extend shared leadership theories, contribute new insight into the important underlying mechanisms in Wikipedia, and have implications for practitioners who wish to design more effective and successful online communities.

Bridging indistinct relationships and online loyalty: evidence from online interest-based communities

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.

Community Management That Works: How to Build and Sustain a Thriving Online Health Community

Health care professionals, patients, caregivers, family, friends, and other supporters are increasingly joining online health communities to share information and find support. But social Web (Web 2.0) technology alone does not create a successful online community. Building and sustaining a successful community requires an enabler and strategic community management. Community management is more than moderation. The developmental life cycle of a community has four stages: inception, establishment, maturity, and mitosis. Each stage presents distinct characteristics and management needs. This paper describes the community management strategies, resources, and expertise needed to build and maintain a thriving online health community; introduces some of the challenges; and provides a guide for health organizations considering this undertaking. The paper draws on insights from an ongoing study and observation of online communities as well as experience managing and consulting a variety of online health communities. Discussion includes effective community building practices relevant to each stage, such as outreach and relationship building, data collection, content creation, and other proven techniques that ensure the survival and steady growth of an online health community.

Are Stereotypes Relative to Gender Usage Applicable to Virtual Worlds?

Common stereotypes of virtual game or community users are often portrayed as young and socially inept male addicts. Recent studies, however, defy many of the common prejudices about game or community users. As an extension of recent research, this study looks at gender differences in Virtual Worlds and finds that female users are actually a driving force behind the recent success of online communities. The study results indicate that female users more actively participate in social life, information seeking, and building activities in Virtual Worlds than their male counterparts. Similarly, female users have greater appreciation for the value of Virtual Worlds, although both male and female users recognize Virtual Worlds as a highly useful entertainment tool.

How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: Behaving appropriately

In this final part of his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses how to avoid bad behavior and foster a real sense of community.

How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: Getting Started With An Online Community

In Part 3 of 4 in his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses how to get started in building an online community by having a clear purpose and having all your ducks in a row at launch.

How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: How Is A Community Different From A Network?

In Part 2 of 4 in his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses what distinguishes a community from a network.

How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: What makes a community a community?

In this first in a series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock defines what makes a community and discusses the importance of online communities for learning and development.