Social influence process in the acceptance of a virtual community service

This study investigates the effect of subjective norms, tendency to social comparison, and social identity on behavioral intention to use an Avatar service. Use of a virtual community service can be regarded as social behavior or a behavior affected by social factors. This study relies on the link between subjective norms and behavioral intention in the theory of reasoned action, social identity theory, and social comparison literature. The proposed model was tested using survey data with the results lending support for the proposed model. The implications from this study are expected to contribute to the literature by shedding light on the social influence process in two ways. First, this study unveils how social factors including subjective norms, social identity, and tendency to social comparison affect behavioral intention to use a specific service from virtual communities. Second, this study will aid managers and academics to further understand the social nature of customer behavior with regard to using virtual community services and thus provide insight for the development of technology driven e-commerce. Jaeki Song is Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences at the Rawls College of Business Administration at Texas Tech University. His research interests include electronic commerce, web design, information systems strategy, and technology adoption. His work has appeared in Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Information & Management, and International Journal of Information Management. He also has published book chapters on Global Information Technologies and Electronic Commerce. Yong Jin Kim is Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Management at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He holds a Ph.D. in MIS from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has 10 year industry experience. His research interests are in knowledge management, technological innovation, IS success, e-business, and information technology valuation. He has published papers in outlets such as MIS Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, International Journal of Information Management, JITTA, and Knowledge and Process Management. He also has published book chapters on IS Success and e-learning.     

Social Media Use for News and Individuals' Social Capital,Civic Engagement and Political Participation

Recently, scholars tested how digital media use for informational purposes similarly contributes to foster democratic processes and the creation of social capital. Nevertheless, in the context of today's socially‐networked‐society and the rise of social media applications (i.e., Facebook) new perspectives need to be considered. Based on U.S. national data, results show that after controlling for demographic variables, traditional media use offline and online, political constructs (knowledge and efficacy), and frequency and size of political discussion networks, seeking information via social network sites is a positive and significant predictor of people's social capital and civic and political participatory behaviors, online and offline.     

Becoming Friends in Online Brand Communities: Evidence From China

With the aid of information technology, consumers have increasingly engaged in social interaction in online brand communities. How can these strangers make friends online? Drawing on embeddedness theory and media richness theory, we examine the antecedents and intermediate mechanisms of online friendship. We theorize that online brand community interactivity aided by instant messaging technology is the main driving force of online friendship, whereas social presence and a sense of yuan (a Chinese concept describing predetermined relations) mediate online friendship development. Online friendship in turn enhances consumer online brand community commitment. We test our conceptual model with a sample of consumers from Chinese online sporting goods forums. The results support our hypotheses and inform online brand community research and practice.     

Exploring the Impact of Social Networking on Communication in Organizations

ABSTRACT

Social networking technology has the potential to transform how organizations communicate, cooperate, and connect with key stakeholders. Our research explores how social networking technologies are deployed within organizations and how the use of these technologies is related to effectiveness in organizational communication and promotion. We also identify the facilitating factors and constraints around the use of social networking tools for communication. To examine these questions, we conducted interviews with 131 senior level executives across a broad range of organizations and employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis. The executives were asked to rate numerically and then discuss in narrative form a series of questions about IT strategy and issues affecting social networking in their organization. We find important differences both in the types of tools used as well as how they are used and discuss the implications of our findings for companies seeking to more effectively harness social networking technologies.     

How online self-customization creates identification: Antecedents and consequences of consumer-customized product identification and the role of product involvement

Online self-customization (OSC) enables customers to design a product tailored to their preferences and needs via the online platform. This study mainly argues that a successful OSC experience goes beyond simply increasing a consumer’s preference fit; it provides an opportunity to develop a meaningful relationship with customers by allowing them to embed their sense of self into the customized products and thus identify themselves with the products. Consumer-customized product identification (C-C identification) was proposed as central to our understanding of why and under what conditions OSC processes enable consumers articulate their identities. This study is theoretically based on internal motivations from social identity theory and identification literature to develop a model. The model was tested using a scenario-based survey with respondents collected from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Structural equation modeling analyses showed that value congruence and distinctiveness of the customized products positively influenced C-C identification, which in turn positively influenced attitudinal responses. The results further showed that the relative impact of two antecedents on C-C identification varies with a consumer’s product involvement. A similar pattern of results was obtained in two product categories. Theoretical and managerial implications for OSC marketers are also discussed.     

Strategies for the Diffusion of Innovations on Social Networks

We investigate the spread of innovations on a social network. The network consists of agents that are exposed to the introduction of a new product. Consumers decide whether or not to buy the product based on their own preferences and the decisions of their neighbors in the social network. We use and extend concepts from the literature on epidemics and herd behavior to study this problem. The central question of this paper is whether firms can learn about the network structure and consumer characteristics when only limited information is available, and use this information to evolve a successful directed-advertising strategy. In order to do so, we extend existing models to allow for heterogeneous agents and both positive and negative externalities. The firm can learn a directed-advertising strategy that takes into account both the topology of the social consumer network and the characteristics of the consumer. Such directed-advertising strategies outperform random advertising.     

Gaming Social Capital: Exploring Civic Value in Multiplayer Video Games

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming‐related community construct that is shown to be a positive antecedent in predicting both face‐to‐face social capital and civic participation.     

Beyond Leaders and Followers: Understanding Participation Dynamics in Event-Based Social Networks

ABSTRACT

Understanding user behaviors and social relations in social media has been an important topic in Human-Computer Interaction research. In this paper, we look at an emerging form of social media, Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs), which support a special type of hybrid community where people are connected online to organize themselves for offline gatherings. EBSN users are labeled as either organizers or members on existing platforms, and their behavioral and relationship patterns in offline events have not been described systematically. To understand participation dynamics in EBSNs, we present an interview study with 12 Meetup users and categorize a variety of social roles beyond organizers and members. We identify that different types of organizers, classical leaders and delegated leaders, have different relationship patterns with various types of members, including active contributors, active followers, newcomers and occasional visitors. By comparing these roles with purely offline or online communities, we discuss how participation dynamics in EBSNs reflect the intertwined impacts of hybrid community and implications of our findings for technology designs.     

Social Media as Information Source: Recency of Updates and Credibility of Information

Social media are increasingly being used as an information source, including information related to risks and crises. The current study examines how pieces of information available in social media impact perceptions of source credibility. Specifically, participants in the study were asked to view 1 of 3 mock Twitter.com pages that varied the recency with which tweets were posted and then to report on their perceived source credibility of the page owner. Data indicate that recency of tweets impacts source credibility; however, this relationship is mediated by cognitive elaboration. These data suggest many implications for theory and application, both in computer‐mediated communication and crisis communication. These implications are discussed, along with limitations of the current study and directions for future research.     

Social Network Clustering and Visualization using Hierarchical Edge Bundles

The hierarchical edge bundle (HEB) method generates useful visualizations of dense graphs, such as social networks, but requires a predefined clustering hierarchy, and does not easily benefit from existing straight‐line visualization improvements. This paper proposes a new clustering approach that extracts the community structure of a network and organizes it into a hierarchy that is flatter than existing community‐based clustering approaches and maps better to HEB visualization. Our method not only discovers communities and generates clusters with better modularization qualities, but also creates a balanced hierarchy that allows HEB visualization of unstructured social networks without predefined hierarchies. Results on several data sets demonstrate that this approach clarifies real‐world communication, collaboration and competition network structure and reveals information missed in previous visualizations. We further implemented our techniques into a social network visualization application on facebook.com and let users explore the visualization and community clustering of their own social networks.     

Mutual development in mass collaboration: Identifying interaction patterns in customer-initiated software product development

In this paper we investigate computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and innovation in a large-scale distributed setting. Get Satisfaction (GS), a social media platform for involving customers in product development activities, is our case study. In order to identify how end users contribute to product development, we researched the interactions between end users, champions, and professional developers in this online community as they jointly constructed a shared artifact (a web application). We collected publicly available platform interaction data over a six-month period (N = 229 users). The methods we employed are social network analysis (SNA) and interaction analysis (IA), which we combined in a mixed-methods design. At the network level, we identified key actors according to centrality measures. At the interaction level, we zoomed in on specific interactions. We propose a model of mass collaboration in terms of four interaction patterns: 1) gatekeeping, control of excessive information sharing, 2) bridge building, spreading information across groups in the network, 3) general development, allowing professional developers to create new software functionality and update existing software, and 4) user-user collaboration, facilitating non-centrally organized development activities, ranging from feature requests to local development. We discuss our findings and compare them with related research.     

Professional confidence in the roles as ambulance and medical incident commander

The aim was to investigate professional confidence in the roles of ambulance and medical incident commander (AIC and MIC), and how it influences achievement of performance indicators at an incident site. A web survey based on theoretical constructs (e.g., social identity, efficacy, accountability) and questions about prehospital emergency care connected to the roles were used (n = 426 Swedish ambulance nurses and emergency medical technicians). The results showed that social identity, independence and occupation were moderators for professional confidence. Organizational support, relational trust and independence were moderators for achieving performance indicators. Strengthening group identification and independence as MIC and independence and support for women as AIC together with a stronger organizational support can increase professional confidence and improve performance.     

Incidental Exposure,Selective Exposure,and Political Information Sharing: Integrating Online Exposure Patterns and Expression on Social Media

Political information sharing in social media offers citizens opportunities to engage with news and express their political views, but how do different patterns of online political information exposure, including both incidental and selective exposure, affect sharing? Using two‐wave panel survey data collected in the United States, we examine the relationship between incidental and selective exposure and their consequent links to political information sharing, across different levels of strength of political party affiliation. Our results demonstrate that incidental exposure to counter‐attitudinal information drives stronger partisans to more actively seek out like‐minded political content, which subsequently encourages political information sharing on social media. The results highlight the need to consider both types of political information exposure when modeling citizens' political behavior online.     

Getting used with groupware: a first class experience

This article reports on an empirical investigation of long-term use of a groupware system in a spatially and massively distributed network of educators. It is a case study based investigation aimed at understanding the impacts of collaboration technology in supporting social interaction. The paradigm of social constructivism and the perspective of structuration are proposed as frameworks for understanding the impacts of technology on mediating social interaction. Utilizing these perspectives in an empirical investigation, the case study findings demonstrate how collaboration technology can serve as a change agent in transforming the culture and structure of social interaction. This is enacted in two ways: through the various meanings which people construct when interacting with technology and in benefiting from the structural properties of a system through its technical affordances.     

A robust ant colony optimization-based algorithm for community mining in large scale oriented social graphs

Community detection plays a key role in such important fields as biology, sociology and computer science. For example, detecting the communities in protein–protein interactions networks helps in understanding their functionalities. Most existing approaches were devoted to community mining in undirected social networks (either weighted or not). In fact, despite their ubiquity, few proposals were interested in community detection in oriented social networks. For example, in a friendship network, the influence between individuals could be asymmetric; in a networked environment, the flow of information could be unidirectional. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called ACODIG, for community detection in oriented social networks. ACODIG uses an objective function based on measures of density and purity and incorporates the information about edge orientations in the social graph. ACODIG uses ant colony for its optimization. Simulation results on real-world as well as power law artificial benchmark networks reveal a good robustness of ACODIG and an efficiency in computing the real structure of the network.     

基于项目合作的社会关系网络中核心社团发现

近几年,基于社会关系网络的研究得到了社会各界的广泛关注。在社会关系网络中往往存在不同类型角色,其影响力与行为表现也不同。根据国家自然科学基金(以下简称“基金”)历史的20年申请信息中的申请人与参与人构成的项目合作关系,将其映射到社会关系网络中,挖掘其中有影响力的申请人,由此导出关系网络中的核心社团发现。为了更好地展示、处理这种大型社会网络,提出一种基于贪心策略的核心社团发现算法。与现有算法进行比较,结果显示该算法略优于目前的几种算法。     

基于活动的社交网络中的群组推荐算法设计

在基于活动的社交网络（EBSN）中,群组中聚集了具有相似兴趣的用户,并为用户组织并举办线下活动,在社区的发展中起到了至关重要的作用,因而理解用户加入群组的原因和群组形成的过程在社交网络的研究中是一个重要的议题.本文通过基于活动的社交网络中的一些相关内容信息,比如社交网络中的标签信息和地理位置信息,来辅助推荐系统更好地为用户预测对于群组的偏好.本文提出了SEGELER （pair-wiSE Geo-social Event-based LatEnt factoR）模型,并使用这些社交网络中的信息,来为用户的兴趣进行预测.通过在真实的EBSN数据集上进行实验与验证,本文的模型不仅可以有效提升对于用户偏好的预测,也可以缓解冷启动问题.     

Knowledge as a Social Medium

The increasing popularity and access to computer networks such as the Internet has introduced a new form of interaction among individuals, and brought about the social dimension to intelligent systems that are embedded into group and community settings. Knowledge is now seen as an asset not only of an individual but also of groups; research fields such as organisational memory, knowledge management and community ware are beginning to emerge. This paper surveys recent approaches, discusses whether social knowledge is a tangible notion, and examines the role of social knowledge in the context of group and community oriented systems with new challenges it offers. Keiichi Nakata, Ph.D.: He is a research scientist at the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at GMD. He is currently a member of the “Social Web” research programme at GMD, with a particular interest in the investigation of social development of knowledge that belongs to communities, and its application to support social interactions. Prior to the current appointment, he has held lectureships at the University of Wales and Oxford Brookes University in UK. His academic background is BEng and MEng degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Tokyo and PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh.     

Social network use and personality

Studies have shown a connection between the individual personality of the user and the way he or she behaves on line. Today many millions of people around the world are connected by being members of various Internet social networks. Ross et al. (2009) studied the connection between the personality of the individual users and their behavior on a social network. They based their study on the self-reports of users of Facebook, one of the most popular social networks, and measured five personality factors using the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992) questionnaire. They found that while there was a connection between the personalities of surfers and their behavior on Facebook, it was not strong. This study is based on that of Ross et al. (2009), but in our study the self-reports of subjects, were replaced by more objective criteria, measurements of the user-information upload on Facebook. A strong connection was found between personality and Facebook behavior. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Digital circles of support: Meeting the information needs of older people

The UK Government strategy for aging in the 21st Century challenges conceptions of older people as passive recipients of care and promotes their engagement as active citizens. The strategy includes a commitment to test services which embody these principles with a range of innovative pilot projects. This paper summarises research on older people’s information needs and use which informed the design for one of these projects, Leeds Link-Age Plus. The research explored the complex circumstances around which older people access and use social and community information – a topic that has received limited attention in the literature. The paper is novel in considering how the use of informal networks for securing information, advice and advocacy can be supported by technology literate mediators, who may be older people, located within local community or voluntary organisations. Emphasising the mediator in design facilitates social contacts, directly addresses issues of trust and can reduce the chance of causing distress dealing with complex information. A model is suggested for using emerging technology to introduce new ways in which information for older adults can be improved by digital ‘circles of support’ – a form of social network where mediators collaborate to create and share self-authored content.