Research On The Influence Of Opinion Leaders' Information Characteristics On Audience Information Dissemination

The present study found that people has pay more attention to opinion leader with the widely application of social marketing.Opinion leader play a key role in information spread both in real life or Internet. Opinion leaders are individuals who obtain more media coverage than others and are especially educated on a certain issue. They seek the acceptance of others and are especially motivated to enhance their social status. Opinion leadership comes from the theory of two-step flow of communication propounded by Lazarsfeld.It is leadership by an active media user who interprets the meaning of media messages for lower-end media users. Typically, the opinion leader is held in high esteem by those who accept his or her opinions.Actually speaking, both of the individual character or the subjectivity would affect the spread of information. That is to say, The same information would achieve different spread effect due to opinion leader's subjectivity.The present study examines the influence of the information characteristics of opinion leaders on the communication effects through behavior experiment. The spread process of information through opinion leader is based on the stimulus-response theory. Theoretically speaking, the spread effect of information through opinion leader would differ from different information characteristics of opinion leaders.In order to study the influence of the information characteristics of opinion leaders on the communication effects, the trust way between opinion leader and lower-end media users. We introduced as moderating factors. We clearly observed the spread effects of the information by two behavior experiments. And both of the two factors affect the results together. The present study is an extension of the related researches, the purpose is to give an entirely new aspect for the study about opinion leader.The result shows that:(1)The spread effects of information through opinion leader would differ from manners and expression means of opinion leaders.(2)Both of the opposite attitude or the positive attitude would have different effects to the spread of information. And it would be different due to different ways of expressing. Compared with the factual information expressing way of opinion leader, it would achieve stronger effects through the emotional type.(3)The influence of the information characteristics of opinion leaders on the communication effects would have significantly difference because of different trust ways between opinion leader and lower-end media users.(4)The difference of the trust way between opinion leader and lower-end media users play a regulatory role in the research, which study the different influence of communication effects about manners and express methods of opinion leader.According to the experimental results of the present study, several referable advices are provided for company managers and marketers, and help them decide how to play the guiding role of opinion leaders, how to effectively spread the information of their products to attract the attention of potential audience, how to improve the audience's effect on the spread of information.