Knowledge sharing in virtual communities: an e-business perspective

Thanks to availability of the Internet, virtual communities are proliferating at an unprecedented rate. In-depth understanding of virtual community dynamics can help us to address critical organizational and information systems issues such as communities-of-practice, virtual collaboration, and knowledge management. In this article, we develop a virtual community activity framework, integrating community knowledge sharing activity into business activities in the form of an e-business model. We examine how the level of community knowledge sharing activity leads to virtual community outcomes and whether such community outcomes are related to loyalty toward the virtual community service provider. Based on a field survey of 77 virtual communities currently operating in Freechal.com, one of Korea's largest Internet community service providers, we found that the level of community knowledge sharing activity is related to virtual community outcomes and such outcomes are significantly associated with loyalty to the virtual community service provider. These results imply that the level of community knowledge sharing activity may be a proper proxy for the state of health of a virtual community. Implications of the findings and future virtual community research directions are discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.