Hello everyone
My first article was Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective by Vladimir Zwass, throughout the article he examines co-creation inside out. He first starts why current marketing environment is not like as it used to be. He points out that distinction between customers and producers are no longer clear. He divides co-creation into two, sponsored and autonomous co-creation. He defines and separates every aspects of co-creation and classifies them. One of the interesting phenomenon he explained was social capital. Social capital is basically the trust level within the virtual communities and how tightly connected the community is. He believes that higher level of social capital also increases co-creation activities. Most of the things explained in the article is things we already know but what makes this article important that it creates an in debt framework for co-creation. The taxonomy he created helps to analyze the co-creation projects, and provides you the outline.
Second article was Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on eWOM versus Observational Learning by Yubo Chen, Qi Wang, and Jinhong Xie. The article explains the result of the experiment that tests effects of WOM and Observational Learning (OL). I’m just gonna move directly to their results. They wanted to figure out whether OL and WOM individually have effects on sales, whether change in WOM affects OL or other way around, also for each interaction method they wanted to find out negative or positive of them have greater effect on the sales. They used Amazon.com’s data for their experiment. They found out that negative WOM has greater effect on sales than positive. However they also see that negative OL usually does not affect customer decision, at least not as much as positive OL. Their explanation for this was that, according to Cascade theory if there is no much information available we make our own decisions, but if all the people are buying one product, we feel inclined to buy that product as well. However if one product is not popular, sometimes it may not be the reason that the product is bad but it appeals to a niche market or its an advance product. They also see that OL and WOM contribute to each other, if you have both tools on your e-commerce site they will work better than having just one of them available.
My third article was “Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy” by Barbara Giamanco and Kent Gredoire. The review tries to persuade why social media is important for businesses. They advice the managers not to be scared from social media but find ways to use it for their own benefit. One of the very catchy story they used was, people ask a robber why he robs banks, and he replies “its where the money is”. They say since most of the customers spend most of their time in sites like twitter and Facebook it is wise for companies to be there too. They also advice managers to encourage their employees to use social media not only marketers or sales people but everyone.
I am posting this table mainly because I believe it might come handy for if your trying to examine a company and you need a framework its good summary to provide decent outline.
| Taxonomic Framework of Factors in Co-Creation | ||
| Performers | The world | Anyone regardless of location and knowledge can contribute |
| Prequalified Individuals | To be able to contribute, the contributor should meet the criteria. | |
| Community Members | In some closely bonded communities contributions will be higher | |
| Skilled Contributors | In OSS projects, contributors should be skilled in software program writing | |
| Motivation | Extrinsic | External rewards, and rewards provided by others |
| Intrinsic | Inner motivations of individuals, such as satisfying self-affiliation needs. | |
| Governance | Individual Autonomy | Uncoordinated correlation |
| Collective Norms | Collective expectations of the communities regarding their behavior to each other or to co-creation | |
| Software Code | In OSS, the rules to write the program also shape the creation and the re-use of the software. | |
| Facilitators | Found useful in opinion aggregators | |
| Adhocracy | Can be seen some successful OSS projects | |
| Bureaucracy | early Wikipedia evolved from this kind of governance | |
| Market mechanism | Information markets, (stock market exchange rules) | |
| Hybrid Forms | Includes mixed governance models, such as Wikipedia | |
| Task Characteristics | Structural complexity | The degree of complexity of structure of co-creation projects. High in OSS, really low in blogging. |
| Intellective Demands | What the project want from the contributors? Knowledge, skills, experience, creativity or diversity. | |
| Effort Intensity | How much time should the contributors (individuals) spent for the project being successful? | |
| Time Frame | How long it takes to successfully complete a project? For Wikipedia case infinitely many | |
| Principal Mode of Product Aggregation | Searchable Corpus | Affective search engine to aggregate and classify the content, example; Technorati |
| Hyperlinking | Generally combined with other methods, a native web method to aggregate. | |
| Progressive Refinement | Wikipedia, software coding | |
| Statistical Rankings and Ratings | Can be used to summarize or convey sentiment | |
| Competitions and Voting | Putting content in competition and by users vote deciding which project to invest | |
| Information Markets | Select an idea or options from all possible options or ideas. | |
| Bottom-up Taxonomy(folksonomy) | Classify and provide access like Flickr | |
| Moderators, auditors, and facilitators | For example Slashdot, they help selecting the business models | |
| Economic Beneficiary | The World | Everyone is benefited from the project, such as Wikipedia |
| The Community | Benefits usually with the sponsoring company | |
| The Sponsoring Firm | Sponsoring co-creation firm | |
| The Aggregator | Such as Apple App World with the contributors | |
| The Contributors | InnoCentive, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk | |
My examples were MMORPG game called Tibia and Apple app World.
this table was my comparison of these two companies.
| Comparison criteria of co-creation | Apple App World | Tibia –MMORPG (CIP) |
| Autonomous or Sponsored? | Sponsored | Both, some value creation activities for the VC not supported by the company |
| Performers | Skilled Contributors | The World |
| Motivation | Mostly extrinsic | Mostly intrinsic |
| Governance | Software Code | Hybrid Forms both Collective Norms, Software Code and Bureaucracy |
| Structural complexity | Relatively high | Low, and in some cases high –such highly complex contests |
| Intellective Demands | creativity and diversity | Knowledge, skills, experience, creativity, and diversity –depending on the project |
| Effort Intensity | High | Vide ranged –depending on the contest or contribution |
| Time Frame | Varies from application to application | Varies from contest to contest but usually less than 1 month |
| Economic Beneficiary | Both sponsor and contributor | only CIP |
Sources
Zwass, V. 2010. Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 15(1) 11-48.
Chen, Y., Wang, Q., and Xie, J. 2011. Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on eWOM versus Observational Learning. Journal of Marketing Research 48(2) 238-254.
Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy, Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93.
