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Online community influence: A study using the hirsch metric and social network analysis
Abstract
This study looks at small to medium sized online community (OC) and tries to identify ways to measure impact of the contributions of the users of the OC. OC's are dependent on contributions of their users to maintain the health of the OC. Measuring the health of an OC by identifying those users that have most influence and thus create more activity and finally more people the visit the OC is an important activity to the stakeholders in the OC. In order to measure these high end users we are extending previous research to include a two part measure. First, using the Hirsch metrics to measure the productivity and impact of user contributions and second, using social network analysis to see those users that have high centrality measures in the network of posters and readers of the OC. This study looks at one University sports fan site to measure the influence of their users and found some correlation between the Hirsch measures and the centrality measures. © (2013) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved.
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The design of online communities that promotes user participation is critical to the community’s success in fostering new ideas and innovations, building knowledge competencies, and strengthening customer relations. Social presence has been considered as a major design principle and important concept in explaining the relationship between online community artifacts and online user behavior. While most prior IS research adopts a unidimensional conceptualization of social presence and focuses on its effects on user attitude and/or behavior, this research employs a multidimensional conceptualization and demonstrates its suitability for understanding the effects of online community artifacts on social presence. More specifically, this research examines the effects of three categories of design artifacts (artifacts supporting self-presentation, deep profiling, and virtual co-presence) on three social presence dimensions (awareness, affective social presence and cognitive social presence). To validate the research model, a survey was conducted with four online communities. Different social presence dimensions were found to carry different weights in forming the overall sense of social presence and the effects of perceived usage of various online community artifacts varied for different social presence dimensions.
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