Net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities
Net gain: expanding markets through virtual communities
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
Rise of the Network Society
The Cybercultures Reader
The Wealth of Nations
The Economic Leverage of the Virtual Community
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
A consumer support architecture for enhancing customer relationships
WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications
An architecture for consumer support systems
SEPADS'09 Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS International Conference on Software engineering, parallel and distributed systems
A construction method for the ontology of customer information in consumer support systems
E-ACTIVITIES'09/ISP'09 Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS International Conference on E-Activities and information security and privacy
An ontology-based architecture for consumer support systems
WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications
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Building Internet communities has been hailed as one of the major strategic innovations of the New Economy, both as a stand-alone model or as a supplement to sustain competitive advantage for normal business models. Community based business models aim to profit from the value that is created when Internet communities solve problems of collective action, by controlling access, aggregating data, or realizing side-payments.The current literature on community based business models relies on methodological individualism to explain why members join and leave Internet communities. However, such an approach cannot sufficiently describe and explain communities because they are by definition more than an aggregation of its members.We, on the other hand, offer a metaphorical approach to conceptualize communities. Metaphors have a double function for communities: to explain the community to its members and thereby legitimize and reproduce it, and to describe the belief of community members to outsiders in order to operationalize it.With the metaphorical approach we develop a framework to build profitable Internet communities. If an internet community can be legitimized and reproduced community-value is created. However, that does not yet mean that it can be translated into profit, as many I Internet entrepreneurs had to realize. To translate the community-value into profit, the communal entrepreneur must position it in its competitive environment.