Identifying a company's noncustomer online communities: a proto-typology

This paper describes an exploratory, qualitative study of a process for extracting, identifying and exploiting an enterprise's implicit (less visible) Web communities using link analysis. By identifying the implicit communities' relationships to a specific enterprise, the information can be organized into stakeholder groups and used for 'listening' to the external environments. A proto-typology was derived using analysis of 445 hypertext links and their associated textual annotations (comments) to the Web site of MicroStrategy, a business intelligence vendor. The proto-typology can be used not only to identify independent but implicit community of users who virtually interact and relate with an enterprise, but also understand how the enterprise supports their interests and value creation activities.