• The Journal of Economics, Marketing and Management
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2023

Purpose: This study identified the effects of the three types of consumer interactions on the utilitarian and hedonic values experienced by community members, their degree of participation, and brand loyalty. In addition, the mediating effect of virtual interactivity between the interactions that occur within the online brand community and the value experienced by community members was also identified. Research design, data and methodology: An online survey was distributed, and the data gathered was analyzed using structural equations modeling. Results: Test results showed that product-information interaction has a positive effect on utilitarian value and interpersonal interaction has a positive effect on hedonic value. Human-computer interaction was found to have a negative effect on hedonic value and no significant effect on utilitarian value. Furthermore, it was revealed that among the three types of interactions, virtual interactivity had a mediating effect only in the relationship between human-computer interaction and hedonic value. Moreover, utilitarian values experienced by community members affected their level of participation which ultimately enhances brand loyalty. Hedonic value did not affect their level of participation within the online brand community. Conclusions: When marketers establish online brand community strategies, they must place elements that can directly help the use of brands and products.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.231-238
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• 2014

Recently, many people can experience the virtual space by smartphone, and they use many games. In particular, this change has great implications in the collaborative and communicative planning paradigm, which is residents' participation and agreement becoming important in community making and urban design. This study analyze the case of the five virtual space games about community making and urban design, and examine the related regal system. Game users can construct roads, houses, buildings and facilities in the virtual city. Then, they create profit, and promote the growth of virtual city. In these games, construction elements are classified residential, commercial, industrial, parks, green spaces, public building, and roads. But these elements does not identified clearly, and they mixed. By analyzing of related regal system, these games focus on the individual buildings, spaces, and facilities rather than considering the terms of urban planning. To complement the virtual space game with the aspects of urban planning, these games can encourage the participation capability and enhance the communication skills of citizens.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.71-90
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• 2003

Virtual communities have been suggested to play important roles such as attracting customers, building customer loyalty, and leading to commercial transactions. Little research in marketing has focused on virtual communities in spite of its importance indicated by many practitioners and conceptual studies. More specifically, little research has empirically examined factors of customer participation and its consequences. This research investigate if customers' participation motives in virtual communities affect their sense of community and if sense of community affects customers' loyalty towards and purchase intentions from the website offering the community service. One hundred ninety six questionnaires were collected from individuals who have participated in and have been involved in online activities in various virtual communities. Major results of this research can be summarized as follows. First, participation motives employed significantly affected customers' sense of community and more specifically, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness had a large influence on the customers' sense of community. Second, customers' sense of community positively affected their loyalty toward the community and more specifically, membership and emotional connection had a large influence on loyalty. Third, customers' sense of community did not affect directly their purchase intentions. Fourth, customers' loyalty toward virtual communities had a significant, positive, although marginal, influence on their purchase intentions.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.117-144
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• 2008

Lots of virtual communities and online businesses presently derive their primary sources of revenues through advertising, but nevertheless are plagued with marginal profitability though they might possess a significant user base. In the light of the need for an efficacious business model, there have been recent insights of an online community in particular reaping profits through an innovative and lucrative revenue generation method that earns by selling digital items. There have been some obvious evidences (e.g., Cyworld, SecondLife, Habo Hotel, etc.) that online communities can be profitable through their unique business model of selling digital items. However, there is lack of understanding about the motivation of purchasing digital items. This study tries to identify the main motivators of digital item purchases based on social/individual identity theory and self-presentation theory. "Digital items", otherwise known as "virtual assets", may include online avatars, accessories for the avatars, decorative ornaments like furniture, digital wallpapers, skins, background music and virtual weapons used for Internet games. These digital items are employed by users for representation and articulation in the online space, especially to create and enhance their online profiles in web pages and games. Prices for digital items typically range from a few cents to a few dollars each. Based on the theoretical framework like social identity theory and self-presentation theory, we developed the research model and proposed seven hypotheses. An analysis of 225 members of Cyworld found that digital item purchase intention in virtual world is affected by both members' need for self-presentation and need for affiliation. We also found that the need for self-presentation is significantly increased by innovativeness of members, community group norm, and community involvement. We concluded that the need for self-presentation could be a key variable for profitable business model in online community service industry. However, neither individual self-efficacy nor the need for affiliation significantly influenced the need for self-presentation which triggers purchase intention of digital items. In term of the theoretical and practical contribution, this study can be a pioneering empirical research that investigates the purchase intention of digital items based on social identity theory and self-presentation theory in the online context. Also, the findings of our study are valuable and practical for practitioners in the market who wish to adopt or improve the business model of selling digital items in an online community. From the findings, it can be seen that innovativeness of users, community group norm, and community involvement are three significant factors that influence need for self-presentation of users which ultimately leads to their intentions to buy digital items. These findings put forth that virtual community providers and online businesses selling digital items should prioritize their efforts and focus on these three factors if they want to increase the sales of these digital items and generate greater revenues. This study provides important implications for academic researchers and practitioners to understand why the community members pay money for their digital items in virtual world and how the practitioners can increase the sales of digital items in an online community. A couple of limitations of the study and future research directions are also discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.415-424
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• 2005

The rapid growth of blog has caused information overload where bloggers in the virtual community space are no longer able to effectively choose the blogs they are exposed to. Recommender systems have been widely advocated as a way of coping with the problem of information overload in e-business environment. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most successful recommendation method to date and used in many of the recommender systems. Therefore, we propose a CF-based recommender system for bloggers in the virtual community space. Our proposed methodology consists of three main phases: In the first phase, we apply the "Interest Value" to a recommender system. The Interest Value is a quantity value about user preference in virtual community, and can measure the opinion of users accurately. Next phase, we generate the neighborhood group based on the Interest Value. In the final phase, we use the Community Likeness Score (CLS) to generate the top-n recommendation list. The methodology is explained step by step with an illustrative example and is verified with real data of a blog service provider.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.41-72
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• 2019

Purpose Virtual communities (VCs) are becoming ever more important in these days, sometimes more than offline communities. Notably, they have become significant sources of knowledge sharing. Therefore, in order to foster a VC, it is very important to understand why people share their knowledge in the VC. Under this background, this paper aims at proposing the behavioral model best explains knowledge sharing activities in VCs. Design/methodology/approach We basically design our behavioral model for knowledge sharing in VCs based on theory of reasoned action (TRA). However, to understand knowledge sharing in VCs better, we specify knowledge sharing by dividing it into knowledge contribution and knowledge use. Also, instead of 'subjective norm', we adopt 'sense of virtual community (SOVC)' as a main social factor, which has been found to be important in the literature. We also include the antecedents such as 'quality of the shared knowledge', 'trust in community members', 'passion of the community leader', 'reciprocity', and 'self efficacy', which affect VC users' attitude towards knowledge sharing and SOVC. To test the hypotheses in our proposed model, we collected 253 valid surveys from the VC users. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS 23 is employed to assess the relationships proposed as the hypotheses. Findings Major findings are as follows. SOVC positively affects both intention to contribute knowledge and intention to use knowledge. And, trust in community members positively affects the attitude towards knowledge use and SOVC. The attitude towards knowledge use is also affected by the quality of the shared knowledge. Reciprocity is found to strongly positively affect the attitude towards knowledge contribution. However, passion of the community leader and self efficacy are found to have insignificant effect on SOVC and the attitude towards knowledge contribution respectively. Our study sheds a light on how to foster VCs from the perspective of knowledge management.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.02a
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• pp.937-944
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• 2006

Although people's anxiety about the environmental problem has been getting higher, they are not provided good quality of knowledge about the environment. Based on this situation, Ecoblog can be a new type of online community to educate the public in ecological knowledge. Especially, Ecoblog can be utilized as a method of "preventive education", and it will contribute to reduce great amounts of environmental budget to restore contaminated environment to previous condition. Ecoblog also utilizes the concept of blog which user can create and append their site with chosen themes. A weblog or a blog is a non-commercial webpage regularly updated through the use of a blogging software which allows the user to "publish" kinds of amalgamations of text and graphics to the page as posts. The technology offered in Ecoblog is utilizing the concept of 4D place and game metaphor in order to provide users the sense of participation, interaction and immersion among them and the growing community. Thus, it requires applying the CAAD technology by implementing semantically well-defined building data model as a core database to create a 4D virtual community. This research focuses on defining a 4d spatial framework suitable for developing an online ecological community. Through our study, the state-of-the-art of online community has been studied at the first step. Second, the scenario of using EcoBlog described with content, visualization and navigation are defined based on the critical features derived at the first step. Finally, a 4d spatial framework composed of semantic building data model, content and rule database is constructed to propose factors that are necessary to establish an ecological virtual community. In conclusion, our framework could enhance the comprehension and interaction between users and virtual buildings in the ecological community by integrating the concept of game design, 4D CAD and semantic data model. Such framework can be applied to any online community for an educational purpose.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.135-158
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• 2016

Purpose Virtual communities change the way people communicate and share information. The purpose of this paper is to find how internet social capital and individual motivations influence the information sharing in virtual communities. This study considers the social capital theory, individual motivations, information sharing, and community promotion to construct a theoretical model. Design/methodology/approach Social capital focuses on three dimensions that include 6 factors: social interaction ties, centrality, shared language, shared vision, trust and reciprocity. Individual motivations include 2 factors: reputation and enjoy helping. To confirm the research model and the hypotheses, 426 effective questionnaires were used for the final analysis. Findings The result of data analysis demonstrates that social interaction ties, centrality, shared language, trust, and reciprocity were significant in affecting information sharing behaviors. However, reputation, enjoy helping, and shared vision does not appear to have a significant influence on information sharing behaviors. The information sharing was positively related to community promotion.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.30
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• pp.7-33
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• 2005

This study examined the type of needs involved in the activities of a virtual community and the impart of gender on online participants' needs and 'perceived control behavior'. In addition, the study tried to figure out how people behave on certain factors. The survey was conducted to 230 local students who have experienced online community activities. The study results showed there were three factors related to a virtual community, 'relational need', 'entertainment need', 'instrumental need'. There was, however, no significant effect between gender and the type of needs, and between gender and 'perceived behavior control'. The results also showed that 'entertainment need' is the most important factor to predict a virtual community participation. This might not Imply the improvement of information technologies helps us return to the communities in which Individuals have a close and affectionate relationship each other.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.11-20
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors determining users' acceptance of individualized virtual community. While there has been considerable research on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that has predicted whether individuals will accept and voluntarily use information systems, limitations of the TAM include the omission of an important characteristics of individual construct in the context of individualized community. Based on literature relating to the theory of reasoned action (TRA), the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the TAM, this study extends the applicability of the TAM in a individualized community context, by adding characteristics of individual-based construct ("subjective norm", "self-efficacy", "self-presentation" and "sharing information to exchange various information") to the model. Analysis was conducted on using the structural equation modeling approach. The result supports the extended TAM in predicting users' intentions to using personalized community. Several implications for IT/IS acceptance research and individualized community service management practices are discussed.