A Value-Added Methodology for Defining Virtual Communities for Enterprises Jan Isakovic
Alja Sulcic
Artesia Iztokova 16 1215 Medvode +386 41 724715
Artesia Iztokova 16 1215 Medvode +386 41 236247
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[email protected] communication technologies (especially the Internet), we are seeing more and more people connecting together online and forming virtual communities that help them fulfill their needs (be it sharing their musical taste with a person from the other side of the globe or finding a good place to eat in the neighborhood). This environment is globally empowering consumers/users on a global scale never seen before and is now challenging the traditional perception and role of enterprises. Companies that want to survive in the fast changing world of virtual communities must learn to understand their users and embrace the now almost ubiquitous online social technologies. For many companies the best approach is to start interacting with their users online through virtual communities. For the purpose of this paper, we define communities as any group of people using the same social platform to achieve a common goal.
ABSTRACT The business potential of virtual communities is gradually being accepted by the enterprises, which are moving from singlepurpose collaboration or online learning tools to complete virtual community platforms. The challenge facing the enterprises now is how to define their communities and how to deduce software platform specifications from the community specification. In the paper we present our approach to community building that starts with a community model based on two key parameters: Purpose and People, which can help us identify the Added Value for both the company and the community members and is concretized by defining Community Parameters. The results of the community model can then be applied in the community definition process, which results in software specifications for the community platform. The goal of this approach is to minimize the time spent on building the community platform, enable a concise user adoption strategy and faster user adoption.
When defining a virtual community for users (either inside or outside the company), the enterprise must answer many questions. Besides obvious ones (community purpose, community target members, main community platform functions, strategies for attracting members) there are many smaller ones, which have a powerful impact on the user experience. For example, how much data to store in profiles or is there a need for friend tracking. Special emphasis must be placed on added value (both for the community members and for the enterprise) and usage metrics which will allow us to track the community adoption and success and enable us to fine-tune the community strategy if needed.
Categories and Subject Descriptors J.4 [Social and behavioral sciences]: Sociology
General Terms Design, Economics, Measurement Your general terms must be any of the following 16 designated terms: Algorithms, Management, Measurement, Documentation, Performance, Design, Economics, Reliability, Experimentation, Security, Human Factors, Standardization, Languages, Theory, Legal Aspects, Verification.
In this paper we present our approach to the conceptual stage of community building for enterprises. We propose a community model which fully describes the community and allows shaping the community and its social networking tools to fit the purpose of the company and to add value to both the users of the community and the company, and a process for defining the community which results in a set of community platform software specifications. The results of the presented approach also provide the tools that can be used in other stages of community building and maintenance.
Keywords Virtual communities, value-added building communities, enterprise virtual communities.
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1. INTRODUCTION People are social beings that are used to live and function within communities. With the introduction of modern information Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MindTrek’08, October 7-9, 2008, Tampere, Finland. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-197-2/08/10…$5.00.
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It is important for a company to be able to estimate the number of users in each of the user participation types for its own community. In other words, we must be able to know how many users would be willing to consume content in our community (passive participants) and how many would be willing to create content for passive participants to consume (active participants).
2. COMMUNITY MODEL
The active participants of a community should be identified in more detail. Users that will be participating in a company’s community are often members of several active participation user groups and have different levels of involvement within the participation groups themselves. That is why we propose using the active participation graph with four axis to plot what we call the prototype user of our desired community. The position on each axis is defined as the average of users’ online participation behavior. Standard deviation could also be measured to identify the presence of stronger subgroups within the targeted user base.
Figure 1. Community model.
Figure 3. Active participation graph of a sample community.
The bases for our model of the community are two community parameters: Purpose and People. Purpose defines the purpose of the community, both for the organization and for the community members, and specifies what user and company need the community fulfills. EXAMPLE: Imagine PetPro, a company specializing in cat food and other products for cat lovers. They already sell high quality cat food, but want to expand into health pet products and wish to use the crowdsourcing model to discover possible product niches. The purpose of the cat owners is to make their cats healthier. The People parameter defines the current or future community members. What kind of users are they when it comes to participating in virtual communities? What technologies are they comfortable with? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff [1] of Forrester Research define six basic groups of online consumers in their Social Technographics Profile: Inactives (do not participate in online communities), Spectators (passive participants - content consumers), Joiners (participate in social networks), Collectors (organize, tag, and share information), Critics (write reviews of content, rate content), and Creators (create content). Li and Bernoff [1] organize these groups of online consumers into the Social Technographics ladder with six steps (the lowest being the Inactives step and the highest the Creators step), in which the user involvement in online communities increases on each step of the ladder. We prefer to see the groups defined by Li and Bernoff grouped into three basic types of user participation: no participation (Inactives), passive participation (Spectators), and active participation (Joiners, Collectors, Critics, Creators) as seen in Figure 2.
EXAMPLE: As Figure 3 shows, the cat community members are eager creators. Research finds out many cat blogs on the web, where proud owners share pictures of their cats. The mass of sites where users can rate pictures of cats also tell us that there is a strong critic component to the community. Because there are no large cat owner forums or blog aggregators, we conclude that the users are weak joiners and collectors. To validate these findings additional surveys can be conducted among users. So the People community parameter is a description of the rate of user activity and the type of user activity that we can expect to have in our community. Based on community purpose and user profile, it is possible to accurately define the community added value - both for the users and for the company. Once the added value is defined, we can also decide the best user metrics that can be used in later stages to measure the adoption success of the community.
Figure 2. User participation types.
EXAMPLE: PetPro decides to set up a website with a blog written by experts (veterinarians) that will cover most common cat health issues without focusing on PetPro’s existing products. Visitors of the site can suggest health issues to be dealt with in the next post and vote on suggestions made by other visitors. In this case, the added value for community members is expert advice on cat health, whereas the company can accurately gauge the scale of
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The basic process for community building starts with a perceived need - either at the company or the user side (the need of PetPro to find new product niches). The need is solidified in a purpose for the community (to make cats healthier), which, joined with the user profiles (active participation profile, willingness to use different technologies), defines the added value (expert cat health advice, direct connection to cat health problems) which provides benefits to the company and users and fulfills the initial need.
cat health issues based on the number of votes a specific health issue gets and on the number of page views for each of the expert posts. The community parameters are then used to specify the community details in more concrete terms. For this purpose we decided to use most of the design principles for communities defined by Amy Jo Kim: Places (gathering places for community members), Profiles (level of profile management offered to users), Roles (definition of user roles and strategy to welcome and empower new members), Leadership (definition of community leadership - how will the leaders be chosen), Etiquette (rules of conduct and plan for emergence of community etiquette), Events (purpose, schedule, and scope of events), Rituals (existing and plans for new rituals), Sub-groups (possible subgroup definition) and Rules (rules of conduct) [2]. As we will see in the process, these community metrics help us define platform software specifications and can also be used as a monitoring tool for the community in its later stages.
After the main community parameters have been defined, we define the community parameters: Purpose, Places, Profiles, Roles, Leadership, Etiquette, Events, Rituals and Sub-groups. These parameters serve as a good foundation for the community platform software specification, which allows us to select the best software platform for the community or identify the required custom modules that should be developed to support community specifics. Following the launch of our new community, we can use the results of the community model that is used in the conceptual stage to monitor the progress of our community and to adjust our community strategy when needed. In the later stages the community model should be improved by empirical data and feedback from the community members, which can also result in new software specifications.
EXAMPLE: As the cat owners are likely to have blogs and share cat pictures, user profiles are set up which allow users to link to their blog and showcase pictures of their pets. To promote user activity and establish leadership, “karma” is introduced, which increases when users perform specific actions (suggest questions, vote on questions, get their question answered, post pictures). Users with the highest karma receive discount coupons for PetPro products. As the cat owners are not prone to joining social networks, no further social functions will be implemented at the start; the company does, however, include a votable suggestion box to detect possible future wishes for platform expansion.
Communities are living organisms that change with time and for this reason we often return to the beginning of the community definition process even after we already have a live community.
4. CONCLUSION We believe that the combination of a community model and process allows companies a way to deterministically describe the community, define the software specification and implementation project and measure success; it, in effect, moves community building from alchemy to science.
5. REFERENCES [1] Li, C., and Bernoff, J. 2008 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business Press. [2] Couros, A. 2003. Communities of Practice: A Literature Review. Available on: http://www.tcd.ie/CAPSL/academic_practice/pdfdocs/Couro s_2003.pdf [10. 5. 2008].
3. COMMUNITY DEFINITION PROCESS Figure 4. Community definition process.
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