Introduction to the Special Issue: Business Value Creation Enabled by Social Technology

Abstract

Viewing social commerce as settings that offer users an electronic commerce platform to specifically support participation and co-creation activities, we present five rigorously conducted empirical research studies that quantitatively measure business value contributions generated from consumer co-creation activities. The studies are based on business data from five different social commerce settings: a social gaming site, an e-book recommendation system, a social news site, a social network fan page, and a social buying platform. The specific co-creation activities examined consist of, respectively, user collaboration in playing online games, user-driven book recommendations, implicit relationship building in social network communities, online discussions in a consumer brand community, and consumer coordination in social shopping.

Keywords:

• business value
• co-creation
• consumer participation
• empirical research
• social commerce