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E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what does this involve? Research on face-to-face communities identifies the concept of "sense of community:" a characteristic of successful communities distinguished by members' helping behaviors and members' emotional attachment to the community and other members. Does a sense of virtual community exist in online settings, and what does it consist of? Answering these questions is key, if we are to provide guidance to businesses attempting to create virtual communities.The paper explores the concept of sense of virtual community in a newsgroup we call Multiple Sports Newsgroup (MSN). We first demonstrate that MSN does indeed have a sense of virtual community, but that the dimensions of the sense of community in MSN differ somewhat from those reported for physical communities. The nature of these differences is plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-to-face communication. We next describe the behavioral processes that contribute to the sense of virtual community at MSN-exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those found in non-virtual communities, but they are related to the challenges of electronic communication. Lastly, we consider the question of how sense of community may come about and discuss the implications for electronic business.

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Sense of virtual community is an important feature of virtual communities. This study develops a sense of virtual community (SOVC) measure, building off the strengths of a widely used measure of sense of community (SOC) for face-to-face communities. Although there is overlap between the senses of community for face-to-face and virtual communities, there are significant differences. The new SOVC measure is compared to the SOC measure on 265 members of seven online groups, explaining at least 7% more of the variance from exchanging support and member identification. This study represents an important step in developing a valid measure of SOCV.

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