Motivation And Incentive Design On User-Generated Content In Social Media

With the sweeping progress of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the evolution of Internet, social media has been the focus and aroused great attention from both academia and industry. Social media is a technology enabled social software, platform, or system which aims to attract mass user's participation. User-Generated Content (UGC) is an emerging mode for the creating and organizing of web information resources, and it attempts to incubate an internet mediated social participation, communication, and collaboration environment. User is not only the consumer of web information resources, but also the producer and communicator. Therefore, UGC is one of the most important motives for the flourishing and sustainable development of social media. However, how to attract user's participation and yield more high quality contents are interesting topics which need more exploration. This dissertation starts from the motivation perspective and extends to the incentive related issues, including the incentive mechanism and incentive design.This dissertation first introduces the research background and significance, and clarifies the research objective. Furthermore, a detailed literature review is conducted, and then we state the research approach, methods and road map of the study. The second chapter explores the trajectory, theoretical bases and applications of UGC. We elaborately examine the conceptualization of UGC, and propose some framework and model for analysis, which endeavor to positioning and detecting potential research topics from four perspectives, i.e. resource view, behavioral view, technology view and application view. We also classify the typology of UGC applications based on the literature review and real cases. Moreover, the dissertation focus on four sections, namely the characteristic and mechanism of UGC, motivation of UGC, incentive strategy of UGC, and UGC incentive design.The third chapter first explains the foundation and mathematical form of Information Production Process (IPP), and then explores the feasibility of applying the IPP as a framework to guide the research of UGC. We take an empirical study to reveal the characters and mechanisms of UGC quantitatively by collecting and analyzing data from 8 UGC sites based on different rules. In addition, YouTube is used to conduct a case study to yield some implications for the characteristics of UGC qualitatively.The fourth chapter first refines the related theories from multiple disciplines and classifies the influence factors of UGC. A theoretical model is proposed and analyzed, and then we build a research model and put forward some hypotheses for empirical study. Tudou website is used to collect the subjective data from users and analytical survey is employed to validate the hypotheses and yield some implications for social media companies.The fifth chapter first builds a user classification framework based on user mass contribution, and then borrows the two-factor theory as the theoretical basis to propose a UGC influence factor list by grounded theory and open coding approach. The empirical study adopts the'user classification & influence factor'dimension to conduct survey and interview on three groups of user's judgments and attitudes towards the hygiene and motivation factors. Finally an elaborate discussion is put forward based on the findings.The sixth chapter first introduces the design-science research paradigm from Information Systems (IS) discipline, and emphasizes the concept of IT artifacts which can be viewed as the core object for the UGC incentive design. Then we explore the basic IT artifacts in our study, i.e. entity artifact, theory artifact, and service artifact, and build the framework of UGC incentive design from user and content perspective. Two research topics are put forward and examined in this dissertation. The first study aims to construct a motivational affordances model for user experience design of social media based on the theories of affordance and perceived affordance, and put forward 10 design principles to enhance the UGC incentive design. The second study attempts to solve the content evaluation issue in UGC via a problem-driven approach. We build a conceptual framework for UGC evaluation and state the application of our model in real cases. The findings of this dissertation will contribute to the theoretical construction of UGC motivation and incentive issues in social media, and yield some implications, suggestions, and guildlines for the service provider, content provider, designer, and cyber regulation department in their real work. The dissertation has several major innovations as below. First, we propose the UGC analytical framework and component model for the future related studies. Second, we examine the UGC incentive strategies from an integrated perspective on user classification and two-factor theory. Third, we incorporate the concept of affordance and perceived affordance in UGC incentive design and propose the motivational affordances model for social media interaction design in a creative way. However, our study also has some limitations. First, we need to examine the moderating effects of demographic factors in UGC motivation study and explore more on the lurker's incentive strategies in the fifth chapter. Second, although we propose the motivational affordances model for social media interaction design and evaluation framework for UGC content, we lack the empirical evaluation stage in our design research part, which may need further work in the future. Third, several empirical studies in this dissertation adopt the video-sharing websites as the research object. Although the video sharing UGC is a very typical style, the generalization of our findings may still need to be examined in some other types of UGC in future work.