The Empirical Study On The Influence Of Tie Strength On Word-of-Mouth In Virtual Community

The Internet has changed the traditional way of economic operation and business model, also changed the traditional mode of information access, the network become the main channel to search for information. With the expansion of Chinese Internet users, more and more online shopping, consumer shopping platform has began to shift to virtual communities. Customer Product information search behavior had become more and more common in the network, and these collected information would be a significant impact on consumer decision-making. The emergence of the Internet has facilitated people’s communication and access to information. Word-of-Mouth(WOM) is one of the powerful factors to impact the consumer attitudes and behavior and one of the sources of market power.The dissertation studies the impact effect of tie strength on the influence of WOM in virtual community. The emergence of network transcends time and space, offering people a new pattern of communication media. People gather together in search of common interests, transferring the interpersonal relationship in real life into virtual space and thus creating the virtual community. The virtual community studied by this thesis is virtual trading community, with the main features of information exchange to realize product and service consumption. The process of online Word-of-Mouth spread in virtual community is substantially the interpersonal interaction between members. The tie between them is not that firm, but it has the efficiency of fast speed, low cost and high performance. Online WOM can spread without high degree of trust.Tie strength has a direct impact on the influence of online WOM. With the Combination of content and purpose, this paper conducted a research both theoretically and empirically to explore the influence of tie strength on the influence of word of mouth in virtual community. The Theories include the review and summarize of word of mouth, word of mouth influence, word of mouth mechanism, which has provided prerequisite for empirical research and empirical study is to verify the theoretical model.The outline of this study can be summarized as:understanding the phenomenon of word of mouth from the network and reading the literature to find research topics and research methods; proposing the model and assumptions of the study based on the theory and empirical study of word of mouth; collecting data through the questionnaire survey; analyzing empirically and forming conclusions and recommendations based on the results of the analysis.In the literature review section, the traditional word of mouth and word of mouth spread of the network and factors that affect the relationship between the corresponding strength of word of mouth, trust, web search initiative were reviewed. There is a lot research on the traditional word of mouth research, which can be used as reference for study of word of mouth on the Internet. There is few research on the network word of mouth and specifically less literature of the research on the virtual trading community relations impact strength of word of mouth on the role of the network. In this paper, based on theoretical research, trust is the divided into two dimensions of the cognitive trust and emotional trust and used cognitive trust, emotional trust and search initiative as the intermediary variables to set up the theoretical model.The Data were collected by on-line and off-line, off-line is mainly through paper questionnaire and online questionnaire were via Email form. The data were analyzed by SPSS15.0to verify the relationships of the variables.The innovations of this study and conclusions are summed as follow:(1) The dissertation studied influence of tie strength on word of mouth in the Virtual community; the dissertation used trust and Online WOM actively sough as intermediary variables to set up the mechanism of the influence of tie strength on the influence of WOM in the Virtual community.(2) The mediator variable trust is divided into two dimensions of the cognitive trust and affective. The study proved that Online WOM actively sough play partially intermediary role between cognitive trust and the influence of online MOM. The empirical results showed that the both cognitive trust and Online WOM actively sough significantly affect the influence of online MOM, affective do not play a positive role. (3) The study proved that both cognitive trust and Online WOM actively sough play intermediary role between tie strength and influence of online MOM. The empirical results showed tie strength significantly affect the influence of online MOM, online WOM actively sough are important mediator of the two intermediate variables and play partly partially role.The study on relevant theories of the network word of mouth has a theoretical contribution. There is also some direction maybe useful for enterprises to develop online MOM marketing, study on tie strength between people on internet, virtual communities humanized construction.Furthermore, the dissertation presents the limitations and inadequacies, also has give suggestion and some direction maybe useful for future research.