Development of a Framework to Measure the Financial Performance of the Virtual Community of the Berlin Stock Exchange

The usage of social software and virtual community platforms in particular promises to offer opportunities for customer integration approaches into a company´s value creation activities. Therefore, ideas and innovations generated by members of a virtual community can be analyzed and used in order to enhance the quality of firm´s products and services. However, evaluating economic consequences associated with the set-up, operation, and maintenance of virtual communities on a quantitative basis has widely been neglected in social network research. Thus, the objective of this paper is therefore to develop a measurement framework for the financial performance, including revenues and expenditures of a virtual community platform reflecting specific economic conditions relevant in a certain situation. The measurement framework is then applied to a real life example of the Berlin Stock Exchange, in Germany.