Building Successful Online Communities

Abstract

How insights from the social sciences, including social psychology and economics, can improve the design of online communities. Online communities are among the most popular destinations on the Internet, but not all online communities are equally successful. For every flourishing Facebook, there is a moribund Friendster—not to mention the scores of smaller social networking sites that never attracted enough members to be viable. This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities. The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims. They explain, for example, how to encourage information contributions based on the theory of public goods, and how to build members' commitment based on theories of interpersonal bond formation. For each design claim, they offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.

Tweeting to Feel Connected: A Model for Social Connectedness in Online Social Networks

“…Building on the concept of evidence-driven social design, we aim to translate the findings resulting from the test of our theoretical model into concrete design implications (Kraut & Resnick, 2011a;Riedl, 2011). The goal of this is to help designers incorporate these social science research findings into informed design choices for online communities and online social networks.…”

“…To enhance social connectedness, designers of HCI should integrate system features that motivate users to use the system more. A wide variety of system features can be employed such as low threshold interfaces for easily making small contributions, identifying user contributions by name, leader boards, and conveying to users that they are unique and others in the group cannot make the contributions they are making (Preece & Shneiderman, 2009;Kraut & Resnick, 2011b). Twitter encourages usage frequency, for example, through their "Trends" feature that shows major trends in current Twitter content and thus invites the user to explore contributions made by other Twitter users who are not in the ego's immediate network.…”

Solver engagement in knowledge sharing in crowdsourcing communities: Exploring the link to creativity

“…The potential transformative nature of crowdsourcing communities as a channel of organisational innovation for companies has urged both researchers as well as practitioners to understand how crowdsourcing communities can be nurtured to generate novel ideas and solutions (Poetz and Schreier, 2012;Afuah and Tucci, 2012;Kraut et al, 2012). Crowdsourcing relies on a selfidentification process among participants willing and able of contributing to a task (Howe, 2008).…”

Enhancing engagement behavior using Shikake

“…Although the topics in focus differ, HCI and marketing share a fundamental philosophy, as both aim to clarify the mechanism of users' spontaneous behavior. Kraut and Resnick (2012) have introduced theories and evidence regarding building successful online communities and define online communities as any virtual space where people come together with others to converse, exchange information or other resources, learn, play, or just be with each other. These theories and evidence facilitate choices with respect to establishing a community, the integration of newcomers, encouraging commitment, regulating behavior when there are conflicts, motivating people to contribute, and the coordination of those contributions to maximize benefits for the community.…”

“…To explain user participation and commitment, Kraut and Resnick (2012) refer to evidence obtained through research on intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and ''design framing.'' The intrinsic motivators include factors such as self-confidence, efficacy, fun, and lust, and extrinsic motivators are defined as rewards such as money, points, coins, mileage, etc.…”