Encouraging commitment to online communities
The internet has revolutionized the way people work life and interacts, this is due to the important part in plays in human interaction as, through the internet, people are able to keep in touch with each other regardless of the geographical location. The increase of the number of internet users has overtime given tech-related companies the opportunity to form online communities and companies, popularly known as social media, which have become the most popular locations on the internet. The success of any Internet communities is pegged on the portal that the community operates on, the portal should ideally allow the internet user to make changes to the home page by dragging and dropping widgets on the home page, allowing them to see, only what they want at that particular time and can always get access to the page later so as to make more changes to it (Burtler, 2008). Community developers face various challenges as they try to maintain community commitment on the portals they have developed. To discuss this challenges, this discourse will analyze Yelp a web 2.0 web portal, in relation to creation of community commitment among the users.
Commitment is an important building block that ensures the success of any internet community. Commitment is important as it forms the basis of regulation on how people interact in the community, people can easily respond to regulation set and are able to effectively enforce norms of appropriate behavior in the community. Commitment makes people more committed to the community as they is motivated to exert more effort, even behind the scene, to ensure more contributions are made to the community so as to ensure that the community activities continue to run as required. Commitment also ensures that community users are not enticed by external communities and available alternatives in the market. As a business review site, Yelp main business is to post peoples’ reviews on companies and their products; Yelp has a social media platform and advertising division. To ensure commitment to the site, Yelp has come up with regulation that governs the content on their site. Yelp does not allow the use of threats, harassment, lewdness and hate speech. Yelp encourages its users to post reviews that are unbiased to avoid cases of conflict of interest. Users are not allowed to post reviews on the companies they are working for and the businesses belonging to their relatives. Businesses are also not allowed to ask customers to write reviews. Yelp users are encouraged to make relevant contributions to the forums, the users are discouraged to post reviews based on political ideologies, employer practices, business practices and any other extraordinary activities that do not address the core of customer experiences. Yelp users are also subjected to privacy rules as they are not allowed to post pictures of individuals without their consent, they are not allowed to post the names of individual names in full unless they are referring to brand names (Marshable, 2014).
In line with these regulations, Yelp web 2.0 developers have been faced with challenges of regulating the kind of comments and reviews posted on their page. It is because they have not been able to come up with a system that can filter reviews that go contrary to the company’s policies and regulations and any attempts to do so always leads to legal battles. It was alleged that Yelp edits user’s reviews based on the advertising campaigns it ran on its website. Yelp’s Chief operations Officer, however, refuted this claims by stating that their sales representatives do not the ability to change or alter users’ comments. This challenge that has been difficult to tackle as the web developers is not able to remotely control the activities of web 2.0 users. The fact that these sites are hyperlinked to others makes them hard to manage as information passes fast through the links on to other sites, for instance Yelp has a link to other sites like Flickr as the company allows signages from the Flickr stream (Marshable, 2014).
References
Marshable Inc. ( 2014) 11 Things You Didn't Know About Yelp. New York: http://mashable.com/2012/09/03/10-yelp-facts/
Paul B. (2008). Web 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges. City: University of Pittsburg Press.
http://www.slideshare.net/bbutler/web-20-challenges-opportunities-presentation.
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