Conny Janssen Danst leren voortbewegen in virtuele communities.

The cultural sector is experiencing pressure because of the current economical cuts. One of the recommendations made by the `Raad voor Cultuur` is to collaborate with the audience. Social media and especially virtual communities offer opportunities to target the audience and connect them with culture. The growth of members on social networks and the increasing possibilities virtual communities offer are causing brands and organizations to adopt virtual brand communities in their online marketing strategy. Conny Janssen Danst, a dancing community in Rotterdam, also found her way to social media and is now active on Facebook and Twitter. Despite the popularity of virtual brand communities there is still a lack of scientific knowledge, especially from a user perspective, because there is already a large quantity of research available from a market perspective. It is of major importance to attain a deeper insight in the participants of the virtual brand community in order to fully utilize these tools in the cultural sector. The main goal of this research is to further develop the theory about virtual brand communities by means of understanding the motives of members to participate in virtual brand communities of Conny Janssen Danst and complement existing studies about underlying motives of social media applications. Additionally this research investigates to what extend these underlying motives of the participants match the use of social media of Conny Janssen Danst. The research question in this research is: ‘Which way does Conny Janssen Danst use social media as a part of the firm strategy and to what extend does this match the motives of the members to participate in the virtual communities of Conny Janssen Danst?’ The research question consists out of two parts and the first part is answered by means of a conversation with the head of publicity of Conny Janssen Danst and an quantitative analysis of the content of the messages written within the community of Conny Janssen Danst on Twitter and Facebook. The second part will be answered according to two different methods. Exploratory interviews will be conducted in order to find out what the motives of the participants of the virtual communities are. Then the discovered motives from the interview are combined with the earlier motivational studies and are explored within the social media applications under a larger population of community participants using a questionnaire. The results from the first part of the research show that Conny Janssen Danst use the virtual community to reach a broad target market in order to generate brand awareness, interacting with the audience and to build up a relationship with the audience. According to the results of the questionnaire it could be concluded that on Facebook as well as on Twitter most of the members participate from the motivation of altruism with respect to the brand. This implicates that the members of both the communities participate because they are already familiar with Conny Janssen Danst and have a certain appreciation for the organization. Other motives that have a high score are information and entertainment. The participation within the community exist mainly out of passive participation which means that the participants only read messages but do not produce and publish anything themselves. From this research can be concluded that the goal Conny Janssen Danst has does not entirely correspond with the motives of the members of the community. The community appears to be a good tool to enhance the relationship with the audience and not to reach new audience. The relationship can be deepened within the existing network when Conny Janssen Danst is able to motivate that audience to actively participate and interact which enables the organization to acquire valuable information from the audience.