Reading the academic article “Relationships and online consumer communities” wrote by Julian Farguhar and Jennifer Rowley we find the definition of virtual communities as “any group of people who share a common bond, yet who are not dependent on physical interaction”.
The article also cites the different types of virtual community strategy (Barnatt, 1998) being:
1. Communities around hobbies, professions or other topics of interest. In this case we can find the groups that the consumers can create at Lonely Planet website.
2. Communities in collaboration with other organizations in the same sector that offer the customer a wide range of products and assistance.
3.Communities that “piggyback” in other communities. In this case we can see how Lonely Planet uses the influence of Twitter to communicate with their public.
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Indeed it is interesting. I will use it in the interaction part of the website analysis (part we we analyse all the different interactions that occur on the Lonely Planet website).
ReplyDeleteThank you
In regards to the activities that communities are doing towards companies, I read on the article "WIKINOMICS and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos" that mentions numbers where "active creators are defined as online consumers who at least once a month publish a blog or article online, maintain a Web page or upload videos or audio to sites such as YouTube’ (Li and Bernoff, 2008: 41). This trend resurfaces in a more recent Pew study (Horrigan, 2006), which shows that older users are less likely to contribute than younger users.
ReplyDeleteWhat this simply shows is how companies can take advantage of these trends while cutting costs on Research and Development programs since technology advantages can pull the constant interactivity on the world wide web for multiple purposes.