Abstract
Business managers are recognising the potential of firm-initiated online communities to monitor user preferences, enhance brand awareness, advertise new products, and react to feedback. We explore the social organisation of such virtual communities via in-depth interviews with German online community managers about their daily work and their self-presentation. Norbert Elias's insights into long-term changes in self-constraint and self-expression in occidental societies serve as heuristic framework. We argue that online community managers' behaviour is typical of the trend towards informalisation, which can also be observed in for-profit relations.
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CITATION STYLE
van Iterson, A., & Richter, J. (2017). “Friends and followers”: The social organisation of firms’ online communities. In The Social Organisation of Marketing: A Figurational Approach to People, Organisations, and Markets (pp. 171–192). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51571-7_7
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