KonzeptioNerd

On the lack of hard data regarding online communities

I’m reading up on online-communities these days.

Tim Keding’s Virtuelle Communities: Erfolgsfaktoren für das Internet-Geschäftsmodell virtueller Gemeinschaften is very obviously a graduation paper. Once you accept this (and the author’s insistence on unidiomatic German), you’ll find Virtuelle Commuities to be a handy little introduction to the topic that can be gathered in one or two sittings.

Keding clips smartly from the mainstays of community-studies (Rheingold, Hagel/Armstrong, Kim) plus, for my taste, too much of Bernd Wirtz’s textbooks and encyclopedias and Gregor Panten’s 2005 research. This provides a good overview, but Keding sadly sticks with paraphrasing others’ points, forgetting to formulate a point of his own. His conclusions, the “summary” as well as the “results” may follow from Paten’s data, but they don’t appear to derive from what came before in Keding’s reasoning.

So much for form. Keding creates a different problem for himself, I think, when he focuses too much on business models and commercial yields, but doesn’t quite have the data to support such reasoning.

Die zu Beginn erwähnten hohen Summer für Übernahmen lassen ein hohes Ertrags-Potential der virtuellen Commuities vermuten. (p10)

Keding takes the exorbitant sums that had been paid in recent community-acquisitions by large corporations and interprets them as indications of as exorbitant commercial yields. The lack of reliable figures and projections is an issue that bothers not only this author. Keding admits this problem further down (p50).

But are online communities really the cash-cows Hagel and Armstrong made them out to be in 1997? I tend to doubt the stability of the virtual mall approach. Keding himself (based on Granovetter) points to content as binding factor within online communities. The question, then, appears to be whether to go along with Hagel/Armstrong and force shopping-occasions from commuities of shared interest or whether to simply benefit from the potentially product- or brand-directed content community members create.

Tim Keding
Virtuelle Communities: Erfolgsfaktoren für das Internet-Geschäftsmodell virtueller Gemeinschaften
VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007
68 pages
ISBN: 978-3-8364-0303-0
Amazon-Link: Virtuelle Communities

BTW Before I checked out Keding’s ecommerce-website, I was more inclined to simply blog about the book’s benefits and interesting observations and leave the weaknesses alone.

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