Virtual Community Management and Stimulation of Users’ Interaction Research – A case study of BAHAMUT
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Huang, Mu-Chieh
Abstract
By the progressing of information technology, internet communities have become a vital social channel in the today’s modern society. Recently, the managers of online communities realize that by introducing the “WEB 2.0”framework into their online business mode, the concept of “WEB 2.0” might create great value for their communities’ information flows and developments. BAHAMUT Games Information Website is a pioneer in Taiwan’s internet community business. BAHAMUT is the biggest online community and rank no.7 website in web traffic in Taiwan. BAHAMUT continually introduces new services for their users. From the original BBS system to Web interface and from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, BAHAMUT has introduced wiki-based ACG data base, blogs and more. Besides all the achievements, BAHAMUT is still a mystery for academia in Taiwan. There is no thorough study of how BAHAMUT community works and how BAHAMUT propel the users ‘online interactions. In order to understand what kinds of community the BAHAMUT users perceived, how the users communicate and interact with each other and why they contribute to this online community, we have interviewed several users to clarify the case study. By studying this successful experience, it might help us to understand how to manage a virtual community and how to stimulate the users’ interactions within a community. Interviews were conducted ten times. In total 15 BAHAMUT users were interviewed. Finally, we dismantled the community activities into three basic constructs, namely The Management Construct, The Competition Construct, and The Social Behavior Construct. The basic idea is quite intuitive. If managed correctly, the community’s competitive advantages will increase and thus attract more new comers and stimulate the users ‘contributions in the social behavior construct. This Social behaviors and contributions will enhance the community’s attraction and will more over increase community’s competitive advantages repeatedly to become an ever increasing cycle. BAHAMUT online community model is really special. Because of the BBS historical heritage, BAHAMUT is self-governing by the users and their long history also able them to accumulate lots of game knowledge. These again become BAHAMUT’s competitive edges. The founder of BAHAMUT has the passion in ACG (Animations Comics and Games) and leads several innovations to make BAHAMUT really fulfill the users ‘need. A successful Avatar system materializes the reward and thus stimulates the user’s contributions. This kind of rewarding system creates different explicit classes in the community and vitalizes the social activities in the virtual community. These prosperous interactions inevitable create some conflicts between sub-groups and sub-groups, because of the different mindsets and identities between different internet user generations. The conflicts might reduce the seasoned users ‘will to contribute for the community, but the new generations might become the main users in the future. How to balance the two sides would be a crucial question for the future development of BAHAMUT. In the mean time, BAHAMUT might study the cost and benefit of the autonomous virtual community. Would a cost efficient self-governing online community lower the quality of users’ articles? BAHAMUT online community business model will help us to understand how to run a virtual community. Their rewarding and self-governing system is especially worthy for further studying and observation.
Subjects
Virtual Community
BAHAMUT
WEB2.0
Community management
Community Contribution
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-98-R96741038-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):7d57f872cc29e7309d1a5b2c8e27ef02