Authors
Ryan Compton, Jilin Chen, Eben Haber, Hernan Badenes, Steve Whittaker
Publication date
2017/5/3
Journal
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Volume
11
Issue
1
Pages
500-503
Description
Online enterprise communities often have clear informational goals, for example, for experts to answer novices’ factual questions. However, emotional support is also critical for developing online social relationships. But what is the optimal balance between informational and emotional communication for such communities? To address this, we develop and validate a model to assess the relative prevalence of emotional versus factual communication. We next test hypotheses about how this prevalence relates to community member satisfaction in enterprise communities. Overall, factual, not emotional, posts predict perceived member satisfaction. This relationship also depends on community subtype. Although prior work argues that Communities of Practice (CoPs) rely on frequent emotional communication, instead we found CoPs showed less satisfaction when members focused on emotional concerns. We discuss implications for both community tool design and the practices of community leaders.
Total citations
Scholar articles
R Compton, J Chen, E Haber, H Badenes, S Whittaker - Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on …, 2017