Goals and perceived success of online enterprise communities

Abstract

Online communities are successful only if they achieve their goals, but there has been little direct study of goals. We analyze novel data characterizing the goals of enterprise online communities, assessing the importance of goals for leaders, how goals influence member perceptions of community value, and how goals relate to success measures proposed in the literature. We find that most communities have multiple goals and common goals are learning, reuse of resources, collaboration, networking, influencing change, and innovation. Leaders and members agree that all of these goals are important, but their perceptions of success on goals do not align with each other, or with commonly used behavioral success measures. We conclude that simple behavioral measures and leader perceptions are not good success metrics, and propose alternatives based on specific goals members and leaders judge most important.

They Said What?

“…We collected these data for the 142 communities in our dataset. As in prior work [22], these behavioral data did not improve the prediction power. We also explored various other attributes of the communitiessuch as geographic dispersion of members, type and goals of the community (collected via survey)-and none of these had any significant impact on the models.…”

“…The use of words in these two categories implies fairly good social and professional skills, with members being firm when expressing themselves, and agreeable toward others. Some of the major goals of workplace online communities are to collaborate with and to learn from peers [22], which would benefit from such healthy interactions.…”

“…Prior work has shown that it is difficult for community leaders to know, on an on-going basis, whether members are satisfied [22]. First, many activities are suggested as potential success factors in prior work, such as setting a clear mission [31], controlling the composition of community membership [20], welcoming new members [19], and encouraging social bonds between members [32].…”

Reciprocity and Donation

“…One is a paper linking people's personal value with topical interests. Specifically, the research found that those holding stronger universalism values are more interested in reading environmental articles, and those with stronger achievement values are more interested in work-related articles [25]. This result suggests that different content attracts different types of individuals.…”

“…There are two possible mechanisms for this. One mechanism, suggested by the Hsieh et al paper on topical interests, is that people who more frequently use Wikipedia for functional purposes, self-select to visit higher utility pages more frequently [25]. They may generally be more indebted to Wikipedia and thusly feel more motivated to contribute.…”