open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/55168

Online Community : A Social Network Perspective : An Empirical Study of Opinion Leader through Network Structure Analysis

日本語

2014-03-18

Graduate School of International Media, Communication, and Tourism Studies, Hokkaido University

The Journal of International Media, Communication, and Tourism Studies

18

157-176

A major challenge in many word-of-mouth marketing campaigns is the cost-effective identification of opinion leaders. Although, opinion leaders exert influence on the other consumers, they also get influenced by other consumers. From this point, we attempt to explain their mutual influence from a social network perspective. In this paper, opinion leaders were elicited from social media of china by measuring their six structural indexes of social network analysis. 703 effective samples were collected to verify the hypotheses. The findings show that: (a) About 15% of the members are opinion leaders. They are holding almost all the communication channels, which more than the channels that other members hold. (b) Opinion leader plays an important role as connecting different relation groups which have not mutual relations (c) Opinion leader is actively accessing original information, they disseminate the information in the preceding period of information dissemination process.

紀要論文

Version of Record

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Japan

AA1224631X