Research On The Opinion Leaders In The Virtual Book Communities

As the approaching of social media era,on the basis of reading value,the books develops new functions,which form virtual book communities that enable people with different interest to link each other effectively through the book media.In this community,people can share their information and then,on the basis of sharing,emotional resonance and group affiliations emerge up.On one hand,the diffusing effects of book information are strengthened greatly and the book contents are restructured and transformed to be ties connecting the community members.On the other hand,it provides a new thinking path for book marketing and production mode innovations.The industry has also realized the role of book media in creating new values and functions of community polymerization in a relatively early period.Various virtual book community based on reading interest rises up.Along with the booming and development of virtual book communities,the opinion leaders in virtual book communities,a special group in the community,have evident influences on other community members.This dissertation takes the opinion leaders in the virtual book communities as research objects trying to figure out the following questions:who are the opinion leaders in virtual book communities?How do they build up their leading positions?What are their characteristics?What kinds of influence do they have and how do they exert influence on others?To what limits or degrees are the influences?Firstly,the paper focuses on the basic theoretical issues of the opinion leaders in the virtual book communities,and sorts out the relevant concepts of the virtual book communities and opinion leaders.Secondly,this dissertation discusses the background and motivation of the formation of the opinion leaders in the virtual library community.Based on the arranges of the theoretical basis and analysis framework of the research on opinion leaders,this paper puts forward Giddens's structuration theory as the theoretical framework and analytical tools to examine the opinion leaders in the virtual library community structure.About "who are the opinion leaders in virtual book communities?",this dissertation erects a recognition theoretical model of virtual book community opinion leaders,combined with grounded theory,on the basis of relevant literature researches and theoretical researches,to confirm the three influencing dimensions——the opinion leader characteristic dimension,the opinion leader information releasing characteristic dimension and the opinion leader be-trusted dimension.According to the technology,it categorizes the recognition methods to ensure their operability.It recognizes different virtual book community opinion leaders under different categories to test the recognition model and quantified indicator system.Consider to the problem "how do they build up their leading positions?",it focuses on the relations between the opinion leaders and other community members.In this part,the main methods include Internet ethnography,observational method and content analysis to summarize basic path of the self-identification and position-structuring of opinion leaders:information exchange and sharing,discussion participating and answering questions,book commenting,creativity production and community activity organizing.Furthermore,it points out that they complete the self-identification processes by presenting excellent and abundant culture capital,manifesting their unique and personalized culture consumption and pursuing social position.To the issue that "What are their characteristics?" the dissertation uses content analysis to analyze quantitatively one case about releasing information and homepage information of opinion leaders of "Santi Bar".It summarizes with interviews and observational method:the personal features of the opinion leaders include information controlling power,information highly-involving and highly-interpreting and content producing abilities and social characteristics.The network tie of opinion leader embodies network key position,also called structural hole position.The information feature is presented from professional information degrees,high relevance,form diversification and highly-released information,etc.Consiering a series of "influence of the virtual book community opinion leaders" questions,this dissertation proposes an influencing mechanism that the opinion leaders express their opinions.It includes that opinion leaders' opinion-influencemechanism onword-of-mouth marketing,perception-influence and consumption-influencemechanism on community members and trust mechanism of intervening mechanism.Thereafter,it focuses on influence factors of virtual book community opinion leaders,divides them into 3 dimensions,opinion leader factor,information factor and receiver factors and proposes 10 variable indicators.Then,it uses the result of content analysis of "Santi Bar" to test the relations of influencing factors among 3 dimensions.