Establishing Online Communities - Only Trial & Error?

Abstract

More and more firms make use of virtual communities to interact with customers, particularly in the light of open innovation. Although companies invest enormous effort in developing virtual communities just a minority of these succeed. That means that firms were either unable to recruit the critical mass of users or to motivate users to publish and discuss generated content on the platform. Looking at the literature there are several models explaining the systematic development of virtual communities. Nevertheless, there is a lack in terms of the establishment of communities. Thus, we aim at taking a closer look at a few success stories in this field. We conducted several qualitative expert interviews with platform developers of these examples. The results show that the interviewed experts use a generic approach, which is based on practical experiences. Using these insights platform developers can design a more systematic approach to establish communities.