Investigating the Impact of Offline Events on Group Development in an Online Sports Community

The literature on online communities suggests those communities that grow successfully have members who create and share common bonds and common identities. Our goal in this research-in-progress paper is to better understand the impact that shared experiences have on user activities in online communities. We use PLS in a preliminary analysis of the relationships between page views at the online community BigUfans.com and real-life events that affect the online community‟s members. The preliminary results suggest that our model accounts for 60.4% of the variance in page views on the site and 27.2% of the contributions (e.g. message board posts) to the site.