Developing an Online Business Community: A Travel Industry Case Study

Abstract

Many businesses are now using online communities to interact with their customers and to realise the many benefits such communities offer. However, there remains little understanding of how such communities should be developed and maintained. A case study of Lonely Planet examines the way in which the travel publisher has established a vibrant online community with more than 250,000 members. Analysis shows that the company has integrated the elements of a socially constructed community with those of a business one. Lonely Planet has increased the value proposition for their customers while nurturing a sense of social belonging. An examination of a successful business-sponsored online community contributes to more understanding of how such communities can be developed.

Measuring the success of business-intelligence systems in South Africa: An empirical investigation applying the DeLone and McLean Model

“…Furthermore, the DeLone and McLean (2003) model framework has been used extensively in various empirical works on IS success. Empirical work has drawn on the updated DeLone and McLean (2003) model to examine the success of a student information system using student users (Rai, Lang & Welker 2002), tourism websites (Stockdale & Borovicka 2006;Wang & Liao 2008), knowledge-management systems (Wu & Wang 2006), e-government systems (Hussein, Abdul Karim & Selamat 2007), online learning systems (Lin 2007) and e-commerce systems (Wang & Liao 2008). Prior studies confirm the model's usefulness in assessing different IS applications.…”

A Design Theory for Digital Platforms Supporting Online Communities: A Multiple Case Study

“…Although the extant body of knowledge on online communities is useful for explaining and predicting online community behavior and dynamics (Butler et al, 2015), we have little understanding of how organizations can effectively design DPsOC (Stockdale and Borovicka, 2006;Gawer, 2009). The availability of a large amount of data on community members' behavior has allowed researchers to build and test behavioral or economic theories of online communities.…”

Designing an ‘Electronic Village’ of Local Interest on Tourism: The eKoNES Framework

“…Rather, online practice is manifested as manipulations of virtual prototypes to codify and stimulate community reactions on creative users' innovative design concepts. The value of this model of community-based collaborative work is clearly indicated in recent studies reporting success stories with respect to the catalytic role of virtual communities of practice in domains such as free and open source software projects (Scacchi, 2005;Scacchi, Feller, Fitzgerald, Hissam, & Lakhani, 2006), new product development (Franke and Piller, 2004;Franke and Shah, 2001;von Hippel and Katz, 2002), the automobile and airspace industries (Wenger, Benninger, Greenhalgh, Ruhl, & Monette, 2002;Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002), service industries such as tourism (Cardoso & Lange, 2007;Stockdale & Borovicka, 2006), insurance (Dignum & van Eeden, 2005), and the public sector (Mitchell & Young, 2002).…”