Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities

ABSTRACT

People come to online communities seeking information, encouragement, and conversation. When a community responds, participants benefit and become more committed. Yet interactions often fail. In a longitudinal sample of 6,172 messages from 8 Usenet newsgroups, 27% of posts received no response. The information context, posters' prior engagement in the community, and the content of their posts all influenced the likelihood that they received a reply, and, as a result, their willingness to continue active participation. Posters were less likely to get a reply if they were newcomers. Posting ontopic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language and other features of the messages, increased replies. Results suggest ways that developers might increase the ability of online communities to support successful individual-group interactions.

REFERENCES

• 1: George Edward Pelham Box , Gwilym M. Jenkins, Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1994
• 2: Brian S. Butler, Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures, Information Systems Research, v.12 n.4, p.346-362, December 2001 [doi>10.1287/isre.12.4.346.9703]
• 3: Butler, B.S., M.A. Smith, and T.C. Turner. Connectivity vs. Coherence: Boundary Tensions in Online Technical Discussion Communities. in Academy of Management Conference. 2004. New Orleans, LA.
• 4: Carvalho, V.R. and W.W. Cohen. Learning to Extract Signature and Reply Lines from Email. Paper presented at the Conference on Email and AntiSpam. 2004. Mountain View, CA.
• 5: Vitor R. Carvalho , William W. Cohen, On the collective classification of email "speech acts", Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1076034.1076094]
• 6: Cohen, W.W., Minorthird: Methods for Identifying Names and Ontological Relations in Text using Heuristics for Inducing Regularities from Data. 2004.
• 7: Galegher, J., L. Sproull, and S. Kiesler, Legitimacy, authority, and community in electronic support groups. Written Communication, 1998. 15(4): p. 493--530.
• 8: Gouldner, A.W., The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 1960. 25(2): p. 161--178.
• 9: Herring, S., Interactional Coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1999. 4(4).
• 10: Quentin Jones , Gilad Ravid , Sheizaf Rafaeli, Information Overload and the Message Dynamics of Online Interaction Spaces: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Exploration, Information Systems Research, v.15 n.2, p.194-210, June 2004 [doi>10.1287/isre.1040.0023]
• 11: Joyce, E. and R.E. Kraut, Loyalty: Predicting continued participation in newsgroups. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Under review).
• 12: Karau, S.J. and K.D. Williams, Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 1993. 65(4): p. 681--706.
• 13: Katz, M.L. and C. Shapiro, Systems competition and network effects. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1994. 8(2): p. 93--115.
• 14: Amy Jo Kim, Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 15: Cliff Lampe , Erik Johnston, Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community, Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, November 06-09, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/1099203.1099206]
• 16: Levine, J.M. and R.L. Moreland, Group socialization: Theory and research, in European review of social psychology, W.S.M. Hewstone, Editor. 1994, John Wiley & Sons: New York. p. 283--308.
• 17: Linde, C., The quantitative study of communicative success: Politeness and accidents in aviation discourse. Language in Society, 1988. 17: p. 375--399.
• 18: Mader, T.E. and D.C. Mader, Understanding one another. 2nd ed. 1993, Madison, Wisconsin: Brown and Benchmark Publishers.
• 19: Markus, L., Towards a "critical mass" theory of interactive media: Universal access, interdependence, and diffusion. Communication Research, 1987. 14: p. 491--511.
• 20: McQuillen, J.S., The Influence of Technology on the Initiation of Interpersonal Relationships. Education, 2003. 123(3): p. 616--624.
• 21: David R. Millen , John F. Patterson, Stimulating social engagement in a community network, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587121]
• 22: Moreland, R.L. and J.M. Levine, Socialization in small groups: Temporal changes in individual-group relations, in Advances in experimental social psychology, L. Berkowitz, Editor. 1982, Academic Press: New York. p. 137--192.
• 23: Oliver, P.E. and G. Marwell, The paradox of group size in collective action: A theory of the critical mass. II. American Sociological Review, 1988. 53(1): p. 1--8.
• 24: Pennebaker, J.W., M.E. Francis, and R.J. Booth, Linguistic inquiry and word count. 2001, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Publishers.
• 25: Pennebaker, J.W., M.R. Mehl, and K.G. Niederhoffer, Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 2003. 54: p. 547--577.
• 26: Porter, M.F., An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program, 1980. 14(3): p. 130--137.
• 27: Jenny Preece, Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2000
• 28: Ridings, C. and D. Gefen, Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2004. 10(1).
• 29: Sacks, H., G. Jefferson, and E. Schegloff, A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 1974. 50(4): p. 696--735.
• 30: Sassenberg, K., Common bond and common identity groups on the Internet: Attachment and normative behavior in on-topic and off-topic chats. Group Dynamics: Theory and Practice, 2002. 6(1): p. 27--37.
• 31: Smith, M.A., Measures and Maps of Usenet, in From Usenet to Cowebs: Interacting with Social Information, S.C. Leug and D. Fisher, Editors. 2003, Springer Verlag: Amsterdam, Holland. p. 47--78.
• 32: Smith, M.A., Netscan: A Social Accounting Search Engine (http://netscan.research.microsoft.com). 2004, Community Technologies Group, Microsoft Corporation.
• 33: Whittaker, S., Terveen, L., Hill W., and Cherny, L., The Dynamics of Mass Interaction, in From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information, C. Leug and D. Fisher, Editors. 2003, Springer Verlag: Amsterdam, Holland. p. 79--91.
• 34: Zajonc, R.B., Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 1968. 9(2): p. 1--27.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces

Keywords:
commitment, community success, contribution, language, online communities, responsiveness, text analysis