The Spread Of Microblog City Image

With the trend of globalization and Regional Economic Integration becoming more andmore visible, city is also turning to be increasingly important. The competition betweencountries has now become more of a contest among different regions, or more precisely,among cities. So city managers are gradually aware of the importance of the building oftheir cities. As the new media appears and the internet infrastructure becomes universal,the city managers have tried to shape their city images with those new channels. One ofthem is the Microblog, or Weibo, a brand new media that covers the shortage of lowinteractivity of portals and Blog, attracting rapidly large crowd of people with itsinstantaneity and convenience.This dissertation clarifies the foundation concept, characteristics and content of cityimage, its characteristics in the media and the significance of building a good city image.Taking the Sina weibo as sample, the thesis makes use of a content analysis method,analyzing first the big picture of the weibo owners of Shanghai, Wuhan and Chengdu,and then the detailed study of the image presented by the information in three weibos,namely “Shanghai Fabu”,“Wuhan Chilemao” and “Chengdu Fabu”.Analyzing the Weibo information of the three cities during the6months, the thesiscomes to the following results: First, looking from the big picture, the image presented ofShanghai and Chengdu are leading by government image, and then Citizen image andculture image, by contrary, Wuhan’s image in the weibo is leading by citizen and cultureimage, with almost no information that displays government image; Second, from theangle of detailed study of the three weibos(including the content, nunbers of fans andcomments and etc.) respectively, government image is still the leading image reflected inShanghai and Chengdu’s weibo, and then is citizen image and culture image, withShanghai more of citizen image and Chengdu more of culture image; In comparison, theimage of Wuhan is still leading by culture image and citizen image,“home of nice food”and “citizen that love food and enjoy life”. Lastly, taking the numbers of fans, commentsand retransmissions, the weibo of Shanghai and Chengdu have stronger influence thanthat of Wuhan. Based on the above analysis, the article presents some constructional suggestions forWuhan to build its image. Meanwhile, this thesis also put up suggesttions for other citymanagers to better their city image.