Carry out a critical evaluation of online communities. It is important Essay

Carry out a critical evaluation of online communities. It is important that you carry this out from a business point of view, rather than from a technical. Disc - Essay Example The work of Rheingold has been instrumental in establishing ways in which others define an online community. He argues that virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Internet when enough people carry on a discussion long enough to form personal relationships. This view remains recognizable in what Preece calls the e-commerce perspective of online communities. The early arguments for regarding virtual communities as a marketing tool took a Spartan view of what constitutes a community. Hagel and Armstrong contend that the community integrates content and communication in a computer mediated space. They put an emphasis on member-generated content; a perspective that may have influenced views that ‘any chat or bulletin board’ is regarded as a community by businesses. The development of an economic perspective to online communities may be frowned upon by some, but there has been a surge of interest from businesses eager to gain advantage from building r elationships with customers. The range of business communities now seen on the Web further complicates the definition of an online community. If it is more than a bulletin board, then the boundaries of the shared space and the nature of the interaction have to be identified. In an example of an embedded business community, Preece examines Rei.com. Rei.com has a link from its homepage to its community page. The Lonely Planet community is more embedded in that it has no separation between community’s space and sales space. Jones [14] argues that information exchange is not a sufficiency for a community. This paper takes the perspective that the virtual space of the website constitutes the shared space of Lonely Planet’s community. These accords with the view that the business community is more than the interchange of information between customers, that information interchange is in itself insufficient to form a community and that the company itself draws no borders but