Virtual communities play an important part in enabling people with common interests to interact with each other. Current research mostly focuses on the aspects of social interaction, usability and success factors for virtual communities. However, few studies have analysed how management teams affect virtual communities. Therefore, our research focuses on the role of management teams for the suc...

customers extend robust trust to a business when they believe the business puts their interests first. good experience of banking services and recommendations of other customers can increase trust. loyalty and word of mouth (wom) is accepted as key factors successes of marketing. this paper seeks to discover the affecting factors on positive word of mouth and loyalty based on trust enhancement ...

Owner-managers of small businesses invariably cite word of mouth recommendations as the principal way in which they attract new customers. Marketing theory is under-developed in this field with little empirical evidence about the recommending behaviour of small business customers and referral groups. The case study of an independent health club reported here illustrates how these processes can ...

With the multiplication of communication medium, the increasing multi-partner global organizations, the remote working tendencies, dynamic teams, pervasive or ubiquitous computing Virtual Communities (VCs) are playing an increasing role in social organizations currently and will probably change profoundly the way people interact in the future. In this paper, we present our position on the key c...

Learning Communities is one approach in individuals to improve their skills and knowledge. Web based learning communities provide additional capabilities such as global distribution of participants and asynchronous participation. The learning process in such communities is flexible and distributed, but still uni-directional: knowledge, advices and support is transferred from professors to stude...

When knowledge management (KM) began to emerge in the 1990s it was seen as an innovative solution to the problems of managing knowledge in a competitive and increasingly internationalised business environment. However, in practice it was often little more than information management re-badged (Wilson, 2002). More recently, there has been recognition of the importance of more subtle, softer type...

This study establishes the importance of considering both posters (interactive members) and lurkers (non-interactive for a clearer understanding online brand communities. Based on organizational support theory social identity theory, this proposes model that illustrates impacts perceived in brands’ communities upon members’ community trust, leading to their positive behaviors toward (i.e., purc...

Virtual communities are complex systems interweaving technical and human aspects. We propose here to identify usual functions provided by virtual communities and define a typology based on the common objects or goals shared by their users. The papers included in this special issue show some examples of research works lead in some of these categories of communities.