The Role of an Online Community in Relation to Other Communication Channels in a Business Development Case
Name
SSRN-id1375681.pdf
Size
308.56 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Takahashi, Masamichi
Herman, George
Ito, Atsushi
Nemoto, Keiichi
Yates, JoAnne
Date Issued
April 9, 2009
Publisher
Cambridge, MA; Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series/Report no.
MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper;4731-09
CCI Working Paper;2009-002
Abstract
We investigated how sales representatives (Salespeople) and members of a service business development department (the Service Dept.) communicated within an informal online community, particularly in relation to their use of other informal and formal communication channels. We found that while the Service Dept. developed formal communication channels in order to fulfill the information needs of Sales, some types of information were apparently more effectively provided by the online community. The result suggests that an online community may play an important role both in making visible information needs, and in providing information that can’t be better provided by the formal organization.
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