This paper highlights some confusion in the marketing literature concerning virtual communities of consumers which are initiated by companies in their web sites. Some researches in Marketing tend, indeed, to design any community within the official Website of the brand as a B2C virtual brand community. However, the paper notes that the passion to the brand, which is an essential characteristic ...

Nowadays, the growth of virtual environments such as virtual organizations, social networks, and ubiquitous computing, has led to the adoption of trust concept. One of the methods of making trust in such environments is to use a long-term relationship with a trusted partner. The main problem of this kind of trust, which is based on personal experiences, is its limited domain. Moreover, both par...

Virtual communities of patients provide health-related information and mutual support for their members. This paper presents a member centric knowledge creation process within virtual communities of patients. Our objective is to capture the importance of quality assurance of medical information available within virtual communities of patients. Furthermore, the role of the members as the main pl...

Over the past few years, viewing social groupings as “communities of practice” has become increasingly popular in the knowledge-management literature as communities of practice have been identified as settings for effective knowledge sharing. It is tempting to use the the concept to describe and to analyze “knowledge communities” as well. In this paper, we argue that the transfer of a concept t...

A virtual community is a group of people whose shared needs and/or interests are largely communicated within, and mediated by Webenabled interactions, e.g., within a Website. While some virtual communities (e.g., Motley Fool) have flourished, many sites designed for online collaboration have failed to succeed as virtual communities, places for people to hang out and collaborate online. In order...

INTRODUCTION A great deal of the literature on virtual communities evolves around classifying the phenomenon1 while much empirically constructive work on the topic has not been conducted yet. Therefore, the research discussed in this paper proposes to explore the actual field of the virtual community (VC). By means of a comparative ethnographic research, virtual communities are to be defined in...

In the mid 1990s, Virtual Communities (VCs) were described as a very promising internet-based business model. After the shake-out of the so-called New Economy only a few commercially-oriented Virtual Communities have survived. Many assertions and principles regarding important components and distinct strategies of Virtual Communities have not been empirically substantiated. This paper proposes ...

Virtual communities of patients provide health-related information and mutual support for members. This paper presents an analysis of the demand of virtual communities of patients for novel electronic services. Results include the success factors of virtual communities of patients, the demand for electronic services for new and experienced community members and the demand for electronic service...

During the last decade, the advance of Internet has enabled the emergence of previously nonexistent type of human social structures virtual 'online' communities. As compared to the traditional communities, online communities are distinguished by the drastic reduction of the requirement for the physical proximity and geographical clustering of their members. The primary cause of this shift away ...