The Empirical Study Of Adoption And Diffusion Of Word-of-Mouse

According to Nielsen’s new survey,86%of Chinese consumers indicate that, in all communication products, they believe more of words of mouth from their friends and relatives. Under the background of social media of Web2.0, everyone can spread information freely, and hear almost anything. When choosing a product or a service, more and more customers changes their way of asking for advice or service from asking family, colleagues or friends to asking throughout the internet. As the Internet has the advantages of convenience, anonymity, highly interactive and personalized features, more people keen on searching for and getting information on the Internet-Word of Mouse. Word of Mouse has the characteristics of easy replication, forwarded and references,it provides convenient conditions for Word of Mouse diffusion. Then, how to grasp and understand, even to participate in this new form of customer communication mastered by customers, is a new challenge and opportunity for enterprises.The object of the study is adoption and diffusion of Word of Mouse. On the base of related theory research on social presence theory and social impact theory, this thesis builds up a conceptual model, which is used to explore the relationship about factors of social impacts, and adoption and diffusion of Word of Mouse. Social presence scale and social impact scale get purified through small-scale-focus interviews and pre-research, then we get a three-dimension scale of the social presence and a two-dimension scale of social influence. With the research on the validity of each variable through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). it indicates the ideas of social presence and social impacts the research use have great reliability and validity. Totally, we received205formal questionnaires,and we used the analyses of factor, variance and regression. During the research, it shows the presences of consciousness, emotional and cognitive societies are tending to have impacts on adopting Word of Mouse; willing to adopting Word of Mouse tending to have impacts on willing of spreading. Both informational influence and normative influence have impacts on intention to adopt and diffusion of Word of Mouse.This study has the following innovation points:(1) It is the first time to study the influence mechanism about social presence to Word-of-Mouse adoption and diffusion, deepening the former research of Word-of-Mouse adoption and diffusion.(2) It investigates the moderating mechanism of susceptibility of interpersonal influence between Word-of-Mouse adoption intention and Word-of-Mouse diffusion intention.This study affirmed the function and meaning of social presence and social impact on Word-of-Mouse. and puts forward reasonable countermeasures and suggestions for the enterprise. As well as it provides great reference value for scholars who are strive to understand adoption and diffusion of Word-of-Mouse.