Abstract

Virtual communities are the uppermost communication spaces and channels for online word-of-mouth. And opinion leaders are the most important group for enterprises’ word-of-mouth communication. As enterprises are engaged in online word-of-mouth marketing activities, the key is to find out the opinion leaders in virtual communities. In this paper, after affirming the effects of opinion leaders and reviewing and summarizing the former ways of finding out opinion leaders, authors will introduce to us how to use the social network analysis method and the UCINET software, together with traditional observations and investigations, to analyze and identify the opinion leaders in virtual communities by case study.

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