The role of culture in online organization-publics relationship building: Comparing design and content of corporate Web sites in the United States and China

This study intends to explore the role of culture in corporate Web site design and content in facilitating online organization-publics relationship building. The relational approach and Hofstede's cultural values are employed as theoretical frameworks to understand the similarities and differences in building online organization-publics relationships by corporate Web sites between the United States and China.; A content analysis of 233 corporate Web sites was conducted to examine the overall characteristic of corporate Web site design and content in targeting publics in the United States and China. The study also explored the similarities and differences of publics addressed by corporate Web sites (Web site content features) and the dialogic characteristics employed by corporate Web site (Web site design features) between the United States and China.; The findings regarding content features revealed that customer and investor were primary publics addressed by corporate Web sites content, whereas press was a secondary audience across countries. The findings also revealed that culture impacted corporate Web site content in targeting the government and addressing social responsibility issues (to target community). Compared with their Chinese counterparts, the U.S. Fortune 500 companies tended to address more social responsibility issues on their Web sites. Meanwhile, the China 500 companies were more likely to address policy issues and post news regarding political figures and government officials on their sites than their U.S. counterparts.; Regarding design features, the results showed that both the U.S. Fortune 500 and China 500 companies corporate Web sites did meet the prerequisites of dialogue, they were easily navigated, containing useful information for a variety of publics, and providing features to maintain visitors on the site. However, the sampled sites were not fully employing the dialogic capacity of the Internet as expected. The findings also revealed that the between-country differences were not significantly different, except the use of the principles ease of interface and conservation of visitors. The U.S. Fortune 500 companies were more user-friendly and tended to provide more features to keep visitors remaining on the sites than their Chinese counterparts.