A Techno-Social Approach for Achieving Online Readership Popularity

Understanding what drives readership popularity in online interactive media has important implications to individual practitioners and net-enabled organizations. For instance, it helps generate a success “formula” for designing potentially popular websites in the increasingly competitive online world. So far, research in this area lacks a unified approach in guiding the design of online interactive media as well as in predicting their successful adoption and use, from both technological and social orientations. Drawing upon the media success literature and related social cognition theories, we establish a techno-social model for achieving online readership popularity, accounting for the impacts of technology-dependent and media-embedded characteristics. The proposed model and hypotheses will be tested by a content analysis of 100+ very popular weblogs and survey of 2000+ active weblog readers. This research carries significant value for sustaining communityand firm-based user networks that have been recognized as an important source of social and knowledge capitals.