Innovation and Social Media: Cultural Impacts on the Opinion Influence Process in Brand Communities

Abstract

Innovation is crucial for firms to gain competition advantages. Social media provides firms a new platform to facilitate innovation because consumers are getting more involved in the whole innovation process with the help of Web 2.0 technologies. Social media has been used as an important tool by firms to influence consumers’ attitude and behavior. Influence occurs in social media-based brand communities because community members have the control of discovering, producing, sharing, and distributing information and because the spread out of their experiences and opinions in the format of electronic word-of-mouth forms brand images. Because social media has the ability of global reach, cross-border factors should not be neglected in studying the influence process. As such, this paper adopts national cultural dimensions identified by Hofstede (1984), individualism/collectivism and power distance particularly, the index of cultural distance, and the social influence theory to explore how culture impacts the opinion influence occurring in social media-based brand communities. Furthermore, this paper predicts that the use of social media facilitate firms’ innovation due to consumers’ active involvement.