• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.56
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• pp.194-218
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• 2011

Focusing on the individuals' structural positions and roles in the internet discussion network, this research explores whether and how the opinion leaders' network characteristics are associated with the message quality and interpersonal influence in terms of attention-drawing and response-generation, which prior studies often failed to fully explicate. Findings suggest that discussion participants with high message quality occupy more central positions in the discussion network, thus enjoy more attention and responses of other following participants. However, opinion leader's network centralities, which tap the structural positions and unique roles in the online discussion network, systematically mediate the effect of the message quality on interpersonal influence. Moreover, significant interaction between opinion perception and network centrality was found only on the majority opinion group, rendering the entire discussion structure toward more enclaved deliberation and group polarization. Taken together, the results imply that the influence of the online opinion leader can only be substantiated with participant's central positions in the discussion network, which has been ignored by the prior opinion leadership research.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.777-792
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• 2018

As social media has become a part of daily life, new types of online opinion leaders are emerging, and in turn, changes in traditional fashion leaders and leadership are expected. Considering such changes, this study attempted to reexamine fashion leader types and influence characteristics from the perspective of college students as fashion followers. Students were asked to write an essay identifying their fashion leader and how and why they were influenced by him or her. Sixty essays entitled "My Fashion Leader" were collected and content-analyzed. A total of 78 fashion leaders were identified and categorized into four types including celebrities, social media influencers, friends/family/acquaintances, and people seen on the street in order of frequency. Influence characteristics of the identified fashion leaders included superiority, role model, similarity, and familiarity. Similarity was observed across all types of fashion leaders, while superiority and familiarity were identified for celebrities and friends/family/acquaintances, respectively. The results imply that celebrities, mostly those from the TV, movie, and music industries, are still important as fashion leaders in society regardless of their communication style, while friends/family/acquaintances as opinion leaders within a consumer group are important to provide information, advice, and help. However, social media influencers between the two groups are expanding the influence.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.155-166
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• 2018

These days, online media, such as blogospheres, online communities, and social networking sites, provides the uncountable user-generated content (UGC) to discover market intelligence and business insight with. The business has been interested in consumers, and constantly requires the approach to identify consumers' opinions and competitive advantage in the competing market. Analyzing consumers' opinion about oneself and rivals can help decision makers to gain in-depth and fine-grained understanding on the human and social behavioral dynamics underlying the competition. In order to accomplish the comparison study for rival products and companies, we attempted to do competitive analysis using text mining with online UGC for two popular and competing ramens, a market leader and a market follower, in the Korean instant noodle market. Furthermore, to overcome the lack of the Korean sentiment lexicon, we developed the domain specific sentiment dictionary of Korean texts. We gathered 19,386 pieces of blogs and forum messages, developed the Korean sentiment dictionary, and defined the taxonomy for categorization. In the context of our study, we employed sentiment analysis to present consumers' opinion and statistical analysis to demonstrate the differences between the competitors. Our results show that the sentiment portrayed by the text mining clearly differentiate the two rival noodles and convincingly confirm that one is a market leader and the other is a follower. In this regard, we expect this comparison can help business decision makers to understand rich in-depth competitive intelligence hidden in the social media.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.17-35
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• 2010

As the internet has been used widely, many online communities have been appeared. Initially, many users used online communities for communication and information sharing. Recently, users start using online communities for building, maintaining, and extending social networks which they did in offline environments previously. The importance of online community is considered by many scholars and also companies to use it strategically. Therefore many studies have focused on exploring characteristics of online communities. Most of them have emphasized the importance of online community. Few study focuses on dynamics within online community. By using social network analysis (SNA), this study tries to explore dynamics of online community. Specially, By measuring the centrality of online community and tracing its changes, this study investigates how the relationships among participants in online communities have been changed over the time. Findings of this study indicate that, as participants has joined in an online community over the time, an opinion leader is appeared, and her/his power is changed.

• International Journal of Costume and Fashion
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-15
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• 2014

Fashion leadership is divided into visual influence, linguistic influence, and dual leadership. We refer to people exercising such influential power as fashion innovators, fashion opinion leaders, and fashion double leaders, respectively. Scholars and marketers have raised continuous questions on this issue: who are these fashion leaders and what characteristics do they have? In this study, social network analysis is applied to grasp the existence of three types of fashion leaders in college clubs, examine their positions in fashion process networks and investigate their individual and social characteristics. For this study, three college clubs were recruited through convenience sampling and surveyed online. Peer nomination questions for structuring fashion process networks and self-evaluation questions for measuring personal characteristics are included. Two fashion networks, an opinion leadership network and an innovativeness network, embrace four to six leaders and illustrate similar structure patterns in the three groups, which indicates that dual leaders enjoyed the lion's share in college clubs. The number of fashion innovators tends to be fewer compared to that of fashion opinion leaders, and we infer that peer relationship appears to intervene with fashion opinion leadership. Other personal characteristics supporting results from previous studies are also confirmed in this study.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.225-232
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• 2021

Nowadays, opinion leaders influence the formation of public opinion on various issues in social network services. There has been a lack of research on the personal characteristics that inspire users to interact with opinion leaders and show intent to act. This paper verifies how the disposition of Facebook users' self-identity affects the quasi-social interaction with opinion leaders on Facebook and the intention to share information. As the perception and behavior of users on social media platforms differ depending on the type of issue, an online survey was conducted by classifying issue types into life culture and political sectors. Research found that personal identity had a significant positive effect on quasi-social interactions in the life culture and politics sectors, while group identity negatively affected quasi-social interactions. In addition, the intention to share information was confirmed to have a significant effect only in the life and culture areas of self-identity (social and group identity). Quasi-social interaction was confirmed to have a significant positive effect on all issue areas. The results of this study suggest the need to consider variations in opinion leader marketing strategies based on the types of self-identity of Facebook users in the future. In addition, the study shows that raising the level of quasi-social interaction at the corporate level without distinction of issue types can lead to effective results.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.109-121
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• 2015

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore consumer behavioral trends, psychological characteristics and various cognitive types of Millennial Generation consumers, primarily in their 20s, who are familiar with sharing economy services based on the emerging social networking technology. Using Q methodology, this paper theoretically defines four and interprets via a social science perspective four different types of these young consumers who are skilled at state-of-the-art ICT equipment, devices or online networking services. Sharing economy services in Korea's academic and industrial services are influenced by government policy, and related research is relatively new. This study is focused on discovering unique psychographic characteristics called 'schemata' that include personal interest, preference, attitude, and opinion. On the basis of 40 Q-sorted data samples, the analysis examined 180 collected statements from meta-studies and interviews with 35 individuals born between 1997 and 1992. As a result, four consumer groups were identifies: Type 1 'Early majority', Type 2 'Laggard', Type 3 'Opinion leader', and Type 4 'Late majority'. The results of this research can be used to explore to study in greater detail the behavior and psychological aspects of Millennial General consumers'.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.141-163
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• 2011

The advancement of information technologies including the Internet has affected the way of social information processing as well as brought about the paradigm shift to the information society. Accordingly, it is very important to study the process of social information processing over the digital media through which social information is generated, distributed, and led to social consensus. In this study, we analyze the mechanism of social information processing, identify a process model of social consensus and institutionalization of the results, and finally propose a set of information processing characteristics on the internet media. We deploy the ethnographic approach to analyze the meaning of group behavior in the context of society to analyze two major events which happened in Korean society. The formation process of social consensus is found to consist of 5 steps: suggestion of social issues, selective reflection on public opinion, acceptance of the issues and diffusion, social consensus, and institutionalization and feedback. The key characteristics of information processing in the Internet is grouped into proactive response to an event, the changes in the role of opinion leader, the flexibility of proposal and analysis, greater scalability, relevance to consensus making, institutionalization and interaction. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a process model of social information processing which can be used as the basis for analyzing the social consensus making process from the social network perspective. In addition, this study suggests a new perspective where the utility of the Internet media can be understood from the social information processing so that other disciplines including politics, communications, and management can improve the decision making performance in utilizing the Internet media.