earticle

영어

The WOM (Word-of-Mouth) is uncertain and uncontrollable, so marketers' interest turns to managing personal network in hope of managing WOM. In this regard, opinion leadership and social network analysis have become pivotal issues of WOM management. Central nodes, members having direct contacts with a great number of other members, play an important role in the WOM transmission as they can widely circulate information. Centrality degree, the counting of contacts of a node, is a sociometric technique used as a proxy for opinion leadership in lieu of a self-report method. In this paper, we have two purposes. First, we introduce two variables, centrality degree and prominence degree to jointly identify the true opinion leaders. While the centrality degree indicates the coverage capacity of opinion leaders, the prominence degree signifies the quality that the observed individuals' ideas and opinions are sought. Second, we attempt to reveal the behavior of opinion leaders regarding the WOM diffusion in that they generate as much NWOM as PWOM, as an evident of their unbiased opinion provisions.