Study On The Effectivenss Of Internet Word-of-Mouth Communication

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) effectiveness refers to the impact on its audience in the process of transmission. The influence on the consumer purchase decision and the ability of building or damaging a brand are two major features of word-of-mouth effectiveness. Due to the advancement of information communication technology and the development of Web 2.0 applications, recent years have seen more Internet word-of-mouth (IWOM) communication in various online social media, such as online discussion forums, electronic bulletin board systems, newsgroups, blogs, and social networking sites, traditional face-to-face WOM communication environment has been taken place by the online context, and several important factors concerning with the communication process (such as communication method, the way to express the information and the status of the interpersonal relationship) have also been changed. As a result, it is very necessary and important to review and re-study the WOM effectiveness in the new communication context.The definition of Internet word-of-mouth (IWOM) and WOM effectiveness are given at first, and then the current research status on the WOM effectiveness both in China and aboard is thoroughly summarized and reviewed to understand the overall research situation, and on the basis of this, we find that there has been limited research on the impact of factors concerning with the communication process. In addition, little prior research has studied the network structure of WOM interpersonal communication. It also remains unknown how to put all these valuable WOM effectiveness into practice. Aiming at bridging the research gap on IWOM phenomenon, this study is divided into two main parts, the first part focuses on the factors which stimulate consumers' emulate behavior, and the other part studies how can those factors which studied in the first part be used by companies to evaluate and manage their brand.In the first part (consumer behavior), we study the impact factors of WOM effectiveness in two perspectives. In the perspective of information communication, we use a 2×2×2 factorial experimental design to examine the impact of three factors on the effectiveness of IWOM communication, namely the way to express the IWOM message (message type), tie strength(sender-receivers'relationship), and IWOM message delivery method (communication channel); In the perspective of interpersonal network structure, we use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the impact of three factors of IWOM communication, namely network centrality, numbers of groups and network density.In the second part (enterprise application), the relationship between IWOM and enterprise brand management is clarified first, based on the factors studied in the first part, a brand evaluation scheme is set up. At last, IWOM of milk industry on tianya BBS are selected to do the empirical study.The innovations of this dissertation come as follows:(1) This is an initial study that examines the impact of WOM delivery method, which enabled and facilitated by information and communication technology; (2) Compared with the prior study in the WOM research, this dissertation is not only on the mirco-individual study level, but also has macro-structure view of study; (3) A tentative WOM-based brand evaluation scheme is put forward, which extends the understanding of WOM application in both academic circles and industry fields.The limitation of our research is that we only considered in "one-time, static" view, however, WOM communication can be a long path consisting of multiple interpersonal links in which individuals pass message from one to another dynamically over a longer period of time. Our future research will extend the current one by taking consideration of time evolvement and dynamical interaction, using larger samples, and experimenting on other types of products.