Cohesion-based Virtual Community Characteristics Impact Studies, Community Performance

In recent years, virtual community, as one kind of Internet form, has a profound effect on people's life as well as the whole socity, and in the near future, the quantity, the quality and the influence of virtual community will get a fast and continued promotion. Hence, virtual community draws the scholars' attention more and more.The success operation and good performance of virtual communities are determined by their owners' understanding about the characteristics of the members and the communities. High cohesive members are essential to the development of virtual communities, on the one hand, those members can contribute many contents for the communities, making high performance; on the other hand, community operators can realize their marketing intentions through those member, such as enhancing brand reputation, teaching product knowledge, learning cunstomers' feedback, and so on.This study focuses on the relation between virtual community's characteristics and performance and on that whether cohesion plays an intermediary role in the relation. Based on former literatures, we devide virtual community characteristics into three major parts, the participation of community members, the quality of the information system, and community's management strategy, making cohesion as the intermediary variable, examining those characteristics' effects on community's performance. The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) Community members' participational frequency and level are both extremely important to community cohesion, as well as community's final performance.(2) The quality of community's information is essential to community cohesion and performance, while the quality of community's system influence parts of community cohesion and performance, however, the quality of community's service does not affect community cohesion and performance.(3) We devide community's management strategy into two dimension based on the statistical results, and find out that both dimensions are critical to community cohesion, as well as community's final performance.