Virtual Communities and Social Networking in Franchising

Franchising has been a popular approach to growing a business. Its popularity continues to increase, as we witness an emergence of a new business model Netchising or Online-to-Offline, combining the Internet for global demand-and-supply, virtual communities, and social networking processes and the international franchising arrangement for local responsiveness. In this article, we show that building up a good “family” relationship between the franchisor and the franchisee is the real essence of franchising, and proven working knowledge is the foundation of the “family” relationship. Specifically, we discuss the process of how to make big data and business analytics meaningful for virtual communities and social networking in franchising. The process consists of business challenges, data foundation, analytics implementation, insights, execution and measurements, distributed knowledge, and innovation.