Research On The Role Of Virtual Opinion Leaders In Brand Crsis Communication

In the modern world, virtual network is playing a more and more important role in the spreading of brand crisis information, for its openness and anonymity lead to the massive amount of information. Especially the virtual community and BBS, as the free market place of ideas, usually make a great pressure to the evolvement of incidents and have an effect on the final results. While virtual opinion leaders, regarded as the activists, focus people and opinion guides in a virtual social group, take a crucial part in the diffusion of brand crisis information and the communication of ideas.As the empirical study of filtering of virtual opinion leaders should be held in a specific virtual social group, we attempt to carry on the research through the way of case study, by taking the Johnson & Johnson crisis as a background, analyzing all the discussion and ID involved in the forum of"TIANYA ZATAN"in TIANYA virtual community, and filtering the possibly existing virtual opinion leaders. The result shows that in the discussion process of Johnson & Johnson crisis, there does have a virtual opinion leader, in compliance with characteristics of opinion leaders in this virtual group. Meanwhile, we also classify the other group members into different clusters, according to the following four indexes: number of posts, number of replies, scope of diffusion and level of recognition.On the basis of virtual opinion leaders filtering and member classifying, we continued to discuss about the relationship of virtual opinion leaders and other members, and the internal and external restricting factors of the virtual opinion leaders'influence. We still construct a model of virtual opinion leaders'influence diffusion process in brand crisis. Finally, according to the research result, we can offer practical advices from the angle of using the power of virtual opinion leaders to brand managers for their crisis management and crisis PR in the virtual world.