i

A Network Approach to Web 2.0 Social Influence: The Influentials, Word-of-Mouth

(WOM) Effect, and the Emergence of Social Network on Facebook


by

Kyounghee Kwon
December 28, 2010

A dissertation submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Communication







UMI Number: 3440305






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ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dr. George Barnett, my beloved advisor who has trusted in my potential for five years! I
cannot say thank you enough.
Dr. Mike Stefanone, the best mentor, colleague, and friend. Cheerio!
Dr. Frank Tutzauer, the great teacher who guided me to a different way of looking at
communication process. I do want to get into math a bit more.
Dr. Sang-Gil Lee and Dr. Tae-Jin Yoon, you touch my heart and mind always. I just miss
old days I had spent with you at Sung-Ahm Kwan.
Parents and my sisters Sunwha and Mikyung, I could have not come this far without your
support. In my prayer, you are always with me.
One anonymous friend, you take my side unconditionally. You are a gift.
Sewhan oppa, thank you for putting up with me for all the years weve spent together. Ill
be better for you.
God. Thank you. I am nothing without you.
(Note: This dissertation project was supported by Mark Diamond Research Fund.)








iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ...........................................................................................................iii

List of Tables .....................................................................................................................iv

List of Figures ....................................................................................................................v

Abstract .............................................................................................................................vi

I.INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................1

II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND .................................12

III. SNS ENRICHES PERSONAL NETWORK ANALYSIS..........................................21

IV. PROJECT DESCRIPTION.....................................................................28

V. THE FACEBOOK INFLUENTIALS: ON THEIR SOCIAL NETWORK
CHARACTERISTICS.......................................................................................................39

VI. WORD-OF-MOUTH ON FACEBOOK: STRUCTURAL
APPROACH......................................................................................................................72

VII. EMERGENT GROUP STRUCTURES ON FACEBOOK: SCALE-FREE, SMALL
WORLD, AND NETWORK ENTRALIZATION..........................................................110

VIII. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSIONS..............................................144

REFERENCES... 153

APPENDIX .176







iv

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Terminology Summary .......................................................................35
Table 2. Curve Estimation for Group Evolution................................................................38
Table 3. Personality Strength Index Items.............................................53
Table 4. King and Summers Opinion Leadership Scale..................................................55
Table 5. Factor Analysis of Facebook Social Attributes...................................................57
Table 6. Means, Standard Deviations and Correlations of Variables............................64
Table 7. Multiple Regression Analysis for Predicting Self-Perceived Opinion Leadership
Measured by King and Summers Index. .........................................................................65
Table 8. Multiple Regression Analysis for Predicting Observed Opinion Leadership
Measured by Behavioral Influence Outcome....................................................................67
Table 9. Correlations between Network Variables and Opinion Leadership....................69
Table 10. Mean, Standard Deviations, and Correlations of IVs......................................100
Table 11. GEE Models Predicting Contagion Effect on Invitees Support for the
Advocacy Group .............................................................................................................104
Table 12. The Effects of Direct Contact and PNE at Three Different Levels of
Embeddedness......................105

Table 13. Descriptive Statistics of 67 Componets...........................................................133
Table 14. Small-world Effect on Network Recruitment..135
Table 15. Scale-Free Structure of Strategically Emerged and Generic Social Networks on
Facebook.137
Table 16. Small-World Network in Facebook: A Comparison...138
Table 17. Degree and Betweenness Centralization: A Comparison...140



v

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Layers of Personal Network.......................................................... 26
Figure 2. The Snapshots of the Advocacy Group Emerged from the Project................... 32
Figure 3. Over Time Increase of Group Membership, from January 25
th
to January 30
st
,
2010............................................................... 36
Figure 4. Plots of R- and S-Curve............................................................. 39
Figure 5. Ego-networks of Two Recruited Inviters, with the Same Size but Different
Density.. 59
Figure 6. An Example of Personal Network Exposure to Social Information.............. 81
Figure 7. Simple Representation of Three Social Contagion Mechanisms...84
Figure 8. Social Structures of Structural Equivalence and Cohesion........87
Figure 9. Presumed and Real Structure of Facebook Personal Networks.96
Figure 10. Centralization Comparison between Two Scale-Free Networks....125
Figure 11. Visualization of Network Formation: Real versus Theoretical Networks.....127
Figure 12. Degree Distribution of Members in the Advocacy Group.132
Figure 13. Log-log Plot to Test Scale-Free Network.......132








vi

ABSTRACT
Social Network Sites (SNS), the most prevalent Web 2.0 service, blossom with
interpersonal sharing practices. A culture of sharing and the subsequent production of
abundant social information are driven by the visibility of digital networked-ness. Social
information embedded in digital social networks influences the shaping of our attitudes,
thoughts, and online behaviors. Marketers and campaigners have been taking advantage
of SNSs social information for various instrumental goals. Based on a cyber-field
behavioral experiment on Facebook, this dissertation attempts to theorize underlying
mechanisms of the SNS social influence process and analyze the ensuing formation of a
collective communication structure. This dissertation particularly emphasizes the social
network effects on the influence outcome. Multilevel-perspectives are employed to
analyze the dynamics of Facebooks social network influence.
The findings are summarized as follows. First, an individual-level examination
was performed. Particularly, personal influence on mobilizing others online behaviors
was explored. The results found that the influentials in SNS were characterized as not
only having a leader-like personality, but also being digitally connected to a diverse and
large number of social contacts through participation in multiple virtual group activities
and maintenance of heterogeneous personal networks. The findings of this project
support the concept that the personal influence on Facebook should be understood as
normative rather than informational.
Second, structural social influence has been theorized based on three sub-
mechanisms: Direct recommendation, social contagion, and network embeddedness. The
study found the following: (a) message compliance was stronger when individuals were
vii

exposed to multiple direct contacts; (b) Facebook displayed the effect of indirect
exposure to others behaviors, not just the effect of direct recommendation; in other
words, it has a social contagion effect; and (c) While network embeddedness did not
directly affect an individuals online behavior, this positional property acted as a
moderator for direct recommendation and social contagion effects.
Lastly, a macro-structural analysis was conducted to explore the properties of
communication systems that emerged through social influence processing. The
community structure strategically formed by this field experiment was examined based
on the three well-known network topologies scale-free, small-world, and centralization,
finding the the emerged community was characterized as scale-free and small-world like
and weakly centralized. The implications of having such structural properties on the
effectiveness of communication system are discussed.






1

I. INTRODUCTION

1. 1. Background
More than half a decade has passed by since the term Web 2.0 was first
introduced to the public. OReilly and his colleagues, who popularized the term,
proposed a new vision of online culture during the first Web 2.0 conference they hosted
in 2004. According to OReilly (2005), Web 2.0 is characterized as a collection of Web
applications that leverage the long-tail composed of ordinary users participation, self-
service, sharing and collaboration. While some computer engineers including Tim
Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, criticized the term as a piece of jargon irrelevant
with technological innovation, the majority of users have been nevertheless experiencing
the popularization of sharing culture online.
Social Network Sites (SNS) are a prominent example of Web 2.0 services. The
sharing and participatory culture encompassed by SNS enriches networking practices
online. Although the Web is inherently a network of networks from its inception, recent
SNS substantiates the networked nature through end-users socio-cultural practices. In
SNS, users communication networks not only exist as an infrastructure under the surface
but also take part of the visible and utilizable content areas.
Online social networks brim with social information. On Facebook, for example, I
can easily check out my friends profile to see how he or she feels today; I know what my
friend watched on Youtube last night through the shared hyperlink; I receive a
recommendation from a friend for what he or she supports; and even when my friend did
not directly recommend it to me, a computer-automated advertisement would tell me who,
2

among my friends, are using a particular product or engaging in a certain action. Just with
Facebook alone, the examples of social information can go on and on. Thus, social
information is the outgrowth from the mixture of the technology that actualizes the
networked nature of the Web and the users willingness to participate in social
networking activities.
The abundance of social networking and the subsequent production of social
information are interesting characteristics because they lead scholars to reconsider the
conventional computer-mediated communication (CMC) literature that focuses on users
intra-psychological processes. The CMC literature has discussed communication
conditions unique to technologically mediated contexts and the subsequent effects on
social psychology. Particularly, the issue of anonymity is often highlighted in CMC
scholarship (e.g., Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Postmes, Spears,
Sakhel, & de Groot, 2001; Turkle, 1995). Some studies have attributed anti-social online
behaviors to anonymity (Davis, 2002; Suler & Philips, 1998). Others have shown that it
may foster a de-individuation process in group communication contexts (Jessup,
Connolly, & Galegher, 1990; Postmes & Spears, 2000). In contrast, communication
online is often characterized as "hyperpersonal," referring to the process of perceiving a
communication partner more favorably than offline due in part to anonymity (Nowak,
Watt, & Walther, 2005; Walther, 1996). Walther (1996) proposes that the hyperpersonal
effect occurs as a part of the social information processing of CMC, arguing that
anonymity can be ultimately overcome in developing interpersonal relationships in CMC
as interactions are accumulated over time between communication partners. Regardless
of which aspect is supported, these arguments are based on the common ground that
3

anonymity and the lack of social cues are a part of the inherent nature of CMC that is
worthy of distinctive attention in contrast to face-to-face context.
To what extent shall this common sense be applicable to CMC in SNS? Many
activities emerging in SNS actually depend on the interconnectedness among already
acquainted and thus non-anonymous social ties, widely ranging from the intimate to the
extremely superficial. It is hard to simply say that SNS lack social cues, either. Rather, a
different level of social cues are hinted at from personal portfolios that accumulate
pictures, gifts, status updates, thoughts, activities, preferences, friends information,
social relational states, and many other kinds of social information. On Facebook, in
particular, the richness of social information is evident from its own statistics that more
than three billion photos and five billion pieces of content are uploaded each month
(Facebook, 2010). Along with the reduced anonymity and the presence of physical and
various social cues, the CMC theories need to expand their coverage beyond intra-
psychological processes. Talking about hyperpersonal effect or de-individuation
processes with the negligence of social contextual effect may not be as insightful with
SNS as with more traditional modes of CMC.
This dissertation underscores that the use of preexisting CMC theories that put
heavy weight on anonymity or social cues is not enough to capture the newly emerging
interpersonal practices in Web 2.0 context, especially in SNS. To understand impacts of
social information produced through the Web 2.0 practices on users behaviors and
attitudes, instead, we can welcome a newer theoretical lens which sheds light on the most
essential nature of online relationships, the networked-ness.
4

Some online behaviors are based in the pursuit of self-interest, such as online
shopping or online banking. These actions are instrumental, purposive and goal-oriented.
When engaging in these actions, users are mindful of the consequences of the action at
varying levels. Some other behaviors, on the other hand, are expressly done for the
purpose of communication itself. Examples of these behaviors include leaving greeting
messages on a friends profile or exchanging emotional support messages in a support
group. Meanwhile, there are other behaviors neither purely instrumental nor completely
expressive. Back to the Facebook example, I may click a hyperlink without any well-
defined purpose, simply because it is followed by many likes. I may sign an online
petition as a response to a friends recommendation despite the fact I am quite indifferent
to the issue at hand. Also, I may become a fan of what my friends already are, not
necessarily because being a fan would be a mode expressive communication toward my
friends, but simply because that thing (or whatever it may be) looks cool. In these
examples, self-interest or expressiveness partially define the actions yet are not the
primary motivation.
This dissertation is based on the idea that these neither instrumental nor
expressive behaviors constitute a distinctive regime of online behaviors that are worthy
of scholarly attention. These behaviors are not mutually exclusive from instrumental or
expressive actions. Nevertheless, I observe one outstanding characteristic of such actions
that is distinctive from typical instrumental or expressive actions: The action is enacted
only when an actor receives the information about others behaviors or attitudes. The
information originates from the actors online social networks, whether it is in the form
5

of a straightforward request, recommendation or suggestion, or through the actors
unintended exposure to others who already engaged in the action.
In SNS, socially influenced behaviors are not just popular phenomena. Social
influence is a fundamental mechanism underlying more complex word-of-mouth (WOM)
effects that are aggressively utilized in online marketing and campaigning (e.g. Lescovec,
Adamic, & Huberman, 2007; Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003). Chapters 5 and 6 in this
dissertation particularly highlight social influence as a structural mechanism of WOM
processes and discuss the relevant processes and consequences on the micro and macro
levels.
Noting the prevalence and significance of behaviors responsive to social
information, this dissertation explores the dynamics of interpersonal influence occurring
in SNS. The dissertation covers multi-level perspectives, including the message senders
personal influence, social network effects, and the macro structure of emergent strategic
networks. As Monge and Contractor (2003) suggest, the multilevel approach enriches
discussions on the emergence of communication networks. The multilevel approach
accompanies a variety of theoretical frameworks, given that the explanation about
organizational behaviors needs to be multi-level ranging from the individuals traits to the
group as a whole. Monge and Contractor (2003) particularly propose statistical network
analysis techniques, called p*, as an integrated analysis tool. P* is used when the purpose
of the study is to see whether the macro-level of network properties are attributed to the
formation of networks even with the lower-level of properties put simultaneously in
consideration. Although the research questions posited in this dissertation are not
answerable by p*, the dissertation aligns with Monge and Contractors (2003) essential
6

idea that communication networks should be researched with a multi-level perspective.
Different levels of analysis are introduced in each of the following chapters.
2. 2. Overview of the Chapters
Chapter Two
Prior to reviewing the empirical analysis on SNS interpersonal influence, the
second chapter lays the theoretical background. The empirical exploration of this
dissertation is based on a cyber-behavioral experiment with the case of the formation of a
campus advocacy network on Facebook, which was actually initiated by the several
members of the student government at the University at Buffalo in Fall 2009.
The study was conducted on Facebook, a popular SNS (www.facebook.com). The
reputation of Facebook as a social networking media is already widely documented by
many researchers (e.g. Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe, 2007; Walther, et al., 2009; Wang,
Moon, Kwon, Evans & Stefanone, 2010). In this chapter, I invite personal and social
influence literature as important theoretical frameworks to understand the Facebook
social phenomenon.
Specifically, I review two approaches of influence that have been widely cited by
existing interpersonal influence literature in the Communication field. In the first
approach, interpersonal influence is conceptualized as personal influence. In this tradition,
the focus of inquiry is to define the influentials based on their personal and social traits. I
draw upon opinion leadership literature for this part (e.g. Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955;
Weimann, 1994). Defining characteristics and roles of opinion leadership have been an
important topic in strategic communication such as marketing and campaign research.
Given that the advocacy is also a strategic communication, it is worthwhile to investigate
7

how to characterize opinion leaders in SNS and what kind of impact they have on their
peers.
The other approach to study influence is to understand influence as the process of
learning or imitating through observing the social environment. In SNS, abundant social
information provides online actors with more chances to observe networked others
behaviors than any other traditional CMC context. Particularly, I take a structural
approach to explore how individuals positional properties within social networks
produce the normative influence they receive (e.g. Feeley & Barnett, 1997; Meyer, 1994).
Social network analysis is a method dedicated to the structural analysis of social
relationships (Barnett, Danowski, & Richards, 1993). In the tradition of social network
analysis, social influence has been a major topic of interest. In this chapter, I will review
the network theories of social contagion (Burt, 1987; Marsden & Friedkin, 1993) that
particularly highlight the influence of imitation or learning from the social context in
which an actor is located.
After the review, I discuss why both personal influence and the contagion effect
need to be considered in studying social influence in a SNS context. To do so, I
conceptualize interpersonal influence occurring in SNS as a dialectic outcome between
compliance (Cialdini & Trost, 1998; Kelman, 1958) on a dyadic level and structural
social influence on a network level (Fulk, Steinfield, Schmitz, & Power, 1987; Rice &
Ayden, 1991; Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). The effect of opinion leadership is
conceptualized as a part of the compliance process, while the effect of social information
is understood as contingent on the structural network effect.
Chapter Three
8

The third chapter addresses methodological aspects of the project. In
Communication, the contemporary literature on social influence shows two weaknesses:
First, although actual attitude or behavioral change must be the most explicit outcome of
social influence, most influence literature is based on self-perception or self-evaluation
rather than actual observation of change. Operationalizing interpersonal influence based
on self-perception can be problematic due to the inherent potential of disconfirmed
social projection, the false assumption that a respondent accurately estimates others
attitudes or behaviors (Gerard & Orive, 1987). Rice and Mitchell (1973) and Rice and
Aydin (1991) confirmed the existence of disconfirmed social projection, finding no
significant correlation between the subjects estimation of others attitudes and the others
actual reports on their attitudes.
The second weakness is that contemporary influence studies treat social influence
as if it were an intraindividual psychological process. This tendency disregards the fact
that people form or maintain their attitudes or behaviors not in isolation but in interwoven
social contexts (Visser & Mirabile, 2004). While the early influence researchers
arduously devoted themselves to uncovering social structural and positional impacts on
an individuals attitude formation (e.g. Cartwright & Harary, 1956; Festinger, 1954;
Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950; Heider, 1946), a recent trend of influence research
reveals the predominant orientation toward intraindividual attributes over social context.
As Eagly and Chaiken (1993) and Visser and Mirabile (2004) criticize, the insufficient
attention to the social structural dimension could result inserious omissions and
limitations to understanding the mechanisms of social influence (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993,
p. 682).
9

The communication field is not exempt from their criticism. Communication
research on interpersonal and social influence has been related to persuasion studies,
most of which put emphasis on the one-to-one communicative situation. Therefore, the
nature of embeddedness of an actor within a larger relational structure might have not
been of much interest. Even when it comes to a group-level context where the
composition of the social context beyond a source-receiver relationship must be
influential to the communication process, the concerns about the interdependence among
individuals have been largely disregarded due to the difficulty of measurement. The
academic predisposition to psychological exploration with individual unit of analysis
over social and relational structures plays a part as well (Barnett, Danowski, & Richard,
1993).
A full-fledged exploration of Web 2.0-based interpersonal influence, however,
requires attention to the social contextual effects on a users attitude or behavior. While
much of the past CMC literature focuses on the one-to-one communication situation or a
a small group with a limited boundary (e.g. Lee, 2006; Walther,1992, 1996; Walther,
Anderson, & Park, 1994), the spread of social influence through online social networks in
recent years is frequently not constrained to the dyadic context. Rather, it occurs in a
richer, more complex relational web. In other words, the scope of social information is
far broader on Facebook than offline or in older forms of CMC context. Extended social
information on Facebook is the combined product of interpersonal, group, and
broadcasting communication features. While the original sender of the message exists,
interpersonal visibility on Facebook is not exclusive to that original sender, but rather, it
embraces information about attitudes or behaviors of many networked others. In this
10

sense, composition of social networks needs to be seriously considered in order to
understand the process of social influence on Facebook. Fortunately, studying these
constructs on Facebook helps researchers lessen the burden of collecting structural data,
which often hinders offline influence studies from investigating social contextual effects
even if researchers are aware of its significance.
This dissertation attempts to supplement the limitations of preexisting literature.
To consider the social context effect, I look at how individuals are embedded in larger
personal networks online. This is possible by taking advantage of Facebook data and
utilizing concepts and measures developed in social network analysis. Social network
analysis is based on sociometric data that conveys relational information among pairs of
actors in a social system. This project could take advantage of the web-based Facebook
application that allows users to extract the sociometric information about friendship
networks (i.e. who are friends with whom). In chapter three, I describe how structural
exploration of personal networks can be enriched through Facebook sociometric data.
Chapter Four
This chapter explains how the project was conducted. To overcome the limitation
of the perception-based approach to social influence, I utilize observation data about
individuals actual social interactions and behavioral outcomes. A cyber-field experiment
was conducted by combining various methods of data collection, including the
behavioral-tracking experiment, the conventional survey, and computer-automated data
extraction. The project procedure is described in detail. The preliminary analysis of the
results of the project is also reported.
Chapter Five
11

From chapter five to chapter seven, I discuss the empirical analyses conducted to
explore the behavioral social influence processes on Facebook. Each chapter is written in
a complete format whose subsections consist of the background, hypotheses, method,
results, and conclusion. Rather than being independent projects from one another,
however, each chapter is a portion of the entire project.
The fifth chapter is based on the individual level of analysis with each message
sender as the unit of analysis. In this chapter, I attempted to identify those so-called
influentials among college students on Facebook with an emphasis on defining their
social characteristics. To do so, I borrow existing indicators of opinion leadership
developed in an offline context and associate them with my subjects actual capability to
mobilize their Facebook personal networks. Furthermore, I tried to operationalize their
social attributes from a structural perspective, particularly based on the characteristics of
Facebook personal network structures. Given that measurements of personal network
structures are developed from graph theory which is relatively new to CMC studies, I
provide formalized definitions of each measure in detail.
Chapter Six
The unit of analysis in the sixth chapter is not message senders but receivers. In
this chapter, I question whether individuals positions in a larger Facebook relational
network produce varied levels of interpersonal influence that motivates individuals to
enact a certain behavior. This chapter highlights structural social influence
conceptualized by three components: direct contact, contagion, and cohesion (Meyer,
1994). Furthermore, interaction effects among the contagion sources are tested to see if
the influence is synergized when multiple structural properties occur together.
12

The unit of analysis is still the individual as in the fourth chapter. However, I
argue that the analytic level in this chapter should be understood as meso-level in that
structural properties of each individual can be measured only when the presence of the
other actors is assumed within the network. Therefore, individuals are understood as
interdependent rather than independent of one another. This interdependent relational
context demands that a researcher should expect the possible correlations among the
observed cases, which violates the assumption of independence of observation. The issue
of dependency is addressed in the methods section, providing an alternative approach to
the conventional standard statistical testing.
Chapter Seven
The seventh chapter covers the most macro perspective for exploring the
structural patterns of the Facebook interpersonal influence. On Facebook, there are many
sub-communities, or groups, that emerge through spreading information such as peer
recommendations or computerized recommendations. The process of information
spreading is referred to as word-of-mouth (WOM) processes. As a result of the
experiment conducted in this project, I observed the formation of a new social network
among like-minded people regarding the advocated message.
The purpose of this chapter is to find whether the emergence of sub-communities
in Facebook through WOM processes shows any systematic structural pattern. Three
structural patterns are considered: scale-free network, small-world structure, and network
centralization. Well-established literature supports that real networks in social life do not
randomly emerge (Barbarasi, Wattz, & Strogatz, 1998; Moody, 2004). These three non-
random patterns are the prominent structures found in real social networks. After
13

explaining the characteristics of each network pattern, I posit the hypotheses along with
the patterns, and test which structural pattern is prominently observed from the emerged
advocacy group on Facebook. By looking at the emergence of structure, I attempt to link
the structural perspective to the spread of behavioral influence within a social system.
Chapter Eight
Finally, chapter eight summarizes the three empirical chapters. Although each
chapter deals with different aspects, the investigation targets one phenomenon occurring
from the single experiment. As mentioned earlier, a multilevel perspective is required to
fully understand the dynamics of social networking process on Facebook. By assembling
the pieces into a big picture, I attempt to integrate the findings of each chapter into a
theoretical frame of the Web 2.0 influence. The limitations of the project are also
addressed. Considering the contributions and limitations of the study, I propose the next
step to expand the project.










14

II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.1. Influence in Strategic Communication: Personal versus Social Contextual Influence
In strategic communication, interpersonal features of influence have been studied
in two major traditions. In one, interpersonal influence is conceptualized as influence
from individuals who possess attributes of influentiality. Influentiality has been defined
in various ways depending on topical interests. In persuasion studies, for example, source
influence is measured based on the sources credibility as perceived by receivers
(Cialdini, 1993). In campaign studies, personal influence has been a mediator or
moderator of mass media effects (Southwell & Yzer, 2007). The attribute of personal
influence in campaign studies is defined as opinion leadership and is measured with
indicators such as Weimanns personality strength (1994) and King and Summers scale
(1970). Sometimes, opinion leadership is associated with social characteristics such as
cosmopoliteness, gregariousness and information seeking behaviors (Katz, 1957; Nisbet,
2006; Rogers, 1995).
Opinion leadership is closely related to the individual aspect of the influence
mechanism of strategic communication such as public campaigns and marketing.
According to Kramer, Brewer, and Hanna (1996) and Scheufele and Shah (2000), trust in
opinion leaders results in effective social influence. Scholars understand that social
influence produced by contact with opinion leaders is informational influence
(Henningsen, Henningsen, Cruz, & Morrill, 2003) in that, as both active information
seekers and givers, they tend to be perceived as more credible and helpful for a high-
15

quality decision making by non-opinion leaders (Nisbet, 2006). A detailed discussion on
the literature of opinion leadership will continue in chapter 5.
Social structural aspects are another mechanism of influence. This line of
research suggests that social influence should be driven by an actors cognitive
processing of information about others attitudes or behaviors. According to Festinger
(1954), social influence is the result of social comparison: individuals want to change
their attitudes or behaviors to align themselves with the reference person or group with
whom they compare themselves. Banduras social cognitive theory (SCT, 2001) similarly
highlights that learning by observing their social environment exerts influence on
individuals attitudes or behaviors. Marsden and Friedkin (1993) call such social
influence interpersonal visibility, defining it as the extent an actor has information about
other actors opinions, attitudes, or behaviors (Friedkin, 1998). Within an organizational
context, the social information processing model similarly proposes that individuals
attitude toward the job or adoption of organizational technologies is not free from the
influence from co-workers with whom the individual interacts (Salancik & Pfeffeer, 1978;
Fulk, 1991). Chapter 6 discusses the structural social influence in-depth, with a particular
emphasis on the context of WOM communication.
2.2. Network Approach to Influence: Personal Influence and Social Contagion
Applying network analysis to interpersonal and social influence studies offers a
unique contribution to both traditions. While the conceptualization of influence in both
traditions is often based on the measurement of individual perception or personal traits,
the individual level of assessment does not uncover the essential mechanism of influence,
which is interpersonal. Interpersonal relationships are not individual traits. The properties
16

of the interpersonal relationship should be understood on a meso-level, which is
systematically explored through social network analysis. Social network analysis of
interpersonal influence helps scholars understand how relational structures affect the
process of influence.
The network approach has been adopted in both traditions. In opinion leadership
literature, the sociometric approach has been one of the main methods of identifying
opinion leaders. If an actor is designated by many others as the provider of advice or
information about an issue, the centrality of the actor in the social network is high. The
centrality represents the actors opinion leadership. According to Rogers (1995), the
sociometirc technique is a highly valid measure of opinion leadership although it is
applicable appropriately only when all (or most) members of a social system provide
network data (pp.309-310). The high validity of the sociometric approach is also
supported by Weimann (1991), who utilized the network-based measure as the reference
indicator of opinion leadership to test the validity of other measurement based on the self-
designating method. Applications of sociometric data to opinion leadership studies are
widely found in classical diffusion studies such as Coleman, Katz, & Manzel (1957) and
Becker (1970).
Social influence driven by network positions has been studied in other contexts as
well. For example, in the organizational context, the social information processing model
has been incorporated with network analysis, finding that an individuals job satisfaction
is affected by network proximity, which produces localized social influence and
centrality, and which signifies the individuals power position in the organizations
informal and formal networks (Ibarra & Andres, 1993; Rice & Aydin, 1991). Pollock,
17

Whitbred, and Contractor (2000) measured social environment influence by summing
social contacts job satisfaction scores weighted by the communication frequency to
which a respondent has with each of them. They found that social environment influence
accounted for an individuals job satisfaction in addition to job characteristics. Social
influence, however, was moderated by individual personality, particularly the self-
monitoring tendency.
It is manifest in the network approach that social influence occurs within social
context. Network scholars articulate that the emergence of normative attitudes or
behaviors is the result of social influence that is spread through interconnected members.
The contagion model (Burt, 1987; Valente, 1995; Meyer, 1994) is a representative model
that explains network effects on individuals decision-making. According to the
contagion model, the spread of normative attitudes or behaviors is not the consequence of
direct demand from a particular source but of learning and imitation driven by
information visibility (Friedkin, 1998).
Therefore, structural properties within communication networks are highlighted as
important predictors of contagion effects. For example, cohesively interconnected actors
are likely to behave in a similar way because members in a cohesive sub-group are likely
to share similar information or feel more intense peer pressure from one another.
Alternatively, even though not directly connected, two people who communicate with the
same individual can also behave similarly because they are influenced by the same
persons behavior. For example, if two professors are chairs in different departments,
they are not likely to communicate directly to each other. However, their decision-
making process can be similar to each others because their positions are equivalent,
18

including similar job descriptions and social interactions with the same personnel such as
the academic dean and provost.
2.3. Interpersonal Influence on User Behaviors on SNS
The structural approach to interpersonal influence can be applied to behavioral
influence occurring in SNS. Prior to applying network concepts to the phenomena of
interest, it is necessary to characterize the sub-processes that cause interpersonal
influence on SNS users behaviors. For some cases, behavioral changes or modifications
in SNS may accompany a cognitive commitment, as suggested by Banduras SCT. In
other cases, cognitive involvement may not be the preceding process for a behavior to
occur, such as in the case of herding or bandwagon behaviors and information cascade
(Danowski, Gluesing, & Riopelle, in press; Easley & Kleinberg, 2010). As exemplified in
Chapter 1, it is prevalent in SNS that the enactment of a certain behavior is instantaneous,
thus does not necessitate a learning process and the subsequent attitude change process.
Such behaviors are analogous to compliance in one-to-one persuasion context.
In both kinds, behavioral influence in SNS is unique when compared to traditional
forms of electronic social influence in that it simultaneously accompanies both direct
contact effect and social environment influence. In a traditional CMC context, a person
who receives a message demanding compliance tends not to display information about
other recipients responses unless the recipients communicate with each other about the
message. For example, let us suppose that one of my friends sends me an email saying,
It will be the happiest week in your life if you pass along this message to 10 people.
Even though I might know who else also received this message if the friend has emailed
me on a Carbon Copy (CC), I would be still blind to the information about who actually
19

enacted the pass-along action. If I want to know who did, I need to get in touch with the
other friends and ask whether they did the action. Let us suppose that the same scenario is
applied to a Facebook context, replacing emails with profile wall-posting. On Facebook, I
do not have to engage in separate communication with other friends to acquire the
information about their actions, because I receive RSS feed whenever my friends do
something to their profiles. Even if I missed the feed, I can conveniently check my
friends profile and see how they responded to the message. In other words, Facebook
offers an easy access to social information of others behaviors without necessitating
extra effort to communicate with others. Thanks to the greater accessibility to social
information, it is likely for users to perceive greater normative influence than through
older forms of CMC. From the network perspective, the normative influence through
online social networks is rephrased as users susceptibility to contagion effects (Burt,
1987).
However, influence in online social networks is not considered as merely a
contagion effect. This is because behavior contagion assumes that an actors behavioral
engagement occurs in a social interaction in which the informational source has not
communicated intent to evoke such a change (Polansky, Lippitt, & Redl, 1950, p. 322).
Accordingly, contagion is assumed to come from the social environment rather than from
a direct interpersonal request. Unlike this assumption, many SNS behaviors are enacted
as a result of compliance to peer recommendation or suggestion, as seen in the scenario
above. Although the recommendation system is widely adopted in other online contexts
such as shopping websites, many of these tend to be computer-automated or anonymous
recommendations. Therefore, interpersonal influence might intervene in the actors
20

decision process less than the perceived utility of the product or action. In SNS, however,
a recommendation can convey even larger personal influence than the recommendation
services found in online shopping websites because these suggestions do not come from
an anonymous recommender but instead from an actors real friend. Therefore, personal
influence from a message sender could also be an important determinant of social
behaviors on Facebook as well as a contagion effect.
In sum, Facebooks social influence should be understood as a mixture of one-to-
one personal influence and the normative influence inherent in a social environment. To
capture the dynamics of social influence occurring in Facebook, a researcher should
explore both personal influence and the contagion effect. To do so, one should embrace
multi-level perspectives in which both individual attributes of direct contacts and
characteristics of social contexts are subsumed.











21

III. SNS ENRICHES PERSONAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

3.1. Sociometric Data on Facebook
The purpose of this project is to explore individual and network effects on
behavioral influence on Facebook. As described above, the behavioral influence on
Facebook is spread through the combined process of personal influence and social
informational influence. Given that personal influence comes from direct contact with the
message sender, it is analogous to compliance, which is a widely discussed sub-process
of social influence (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). On the other hand, social informational
influence is defined as a network structure effect in that the information must be
embedded in the structure of Facebook personal networks. Considering the dual
mechanism of compliance and the network effect, this project attempts to adopt multi-
level perspectives ranging from the individual attribute-based approach to the macro-
level of structural analysis, to the examined topic.
Observing behavioral influence is not an easy task. Influence scholars interested
in behavioral influence can take advantage of an online environment in which user
activities are traceable in a real life context. Facebook is an online community
particularly useful for multi-level investigations thanks to its technological affordances.
In 2007, Facebook opened an application programming interface (API), allowing outsider
programmers to develop applications that would integrate with Facebook. Sociometric
data, which is burdensome to collect manually, are also accessible using the applications
developed based because of the open API. Along with sociometric data, higher order
22

predictors of social influence, such as actors positional properties within the network and
structural properties of the network as a whole, can be explored.
Since the introduction of the first generation of SNS such as Friendster in the
early 2000s, SNS have been adopted across all ages so rapidly that they have become the
most popular sites among contemporary online services. Numerous SNS appear not only
in the US but also on a global level, e.g. Qq in China, Orkut in Brazil, Cyworld in Korea,
Badoo in London, and Studivz in Germany. Furthermore, niche SNS have also emerged,
such as for professional networking (e.g. LinkedIn, Academia) and for like-minded self-
improvers (e.g. 43things). The history of the development of these SNS is well
documented in the literature (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Boyd, 2008; Rosen, 2007). Among
the various types of SNS, the use of Facebook is currently one of the most popular online
practices. According to the web information company Alexa Internet (March 26, 2010),
among more than one million global websites, Facebook holds the second-to-top traffic
rank with 776,492 websites hyperlinked to it.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Facebook is that it integrates a wide
variety of interpersonal relationships emerging on- and offline. Although not the perfect
representation of the complete personal network, the so-called friend list in SNS is
understood as the best intensive representation of active personal networks more than any
other approach, at least in terms of peer relationships. The accumulated social
connections on individuals profiles and various relational tools offered by Facebook,
such as notification service of a forthcoming friends birthday, help a user maintain
weak-tie relationships as well as strong ties with less cognitive effort and time spent.
Considering that cognitive and time constraints have been the primary barriers that limit
23

the size of active personal networks (Robert, Dunbar, Pollet, & Kuppens, 2009; Hill &
Dunbar, 2003), SNS is a useful time saver for maintaining relationships.
Along with the multitude of personal relationships displayed in a users profile,
Facebook technologically allows users to analyze their own complete network, which
includes not only the connections between the user himself and the configured social
contacts, but also among social contacts themselves. The full visualization of personal
networks offered by Facebook is especially attractive to social network scholars because
of the potential to integrate the egocentric network data into the whole network analysis.
3.2. Egocentric Network Analysis: Limitations of Preexisting Methods
Studies on personal community have been developed based on egocentric network
designs that assemble relational data composed of a focal actor (ego) and the focal actors
interpersonal relations (alters; Marsden, 2005). The conventional method for data
collection for egocentric network designs is to use name generator instruments. The
instruments are composed of name generators that are free-recall questions that
delineate network boundaries and name interpreters that elicit data about alters and
both ego-alter and alter-alter relationships (Marsden, 2005, p. 11).
Two limitations regarding the data for egocentric network studies have been
discussed: First, the data tend to underestimate weak ties. A personal network is
composed of a broad scope of social ties that a person has encountered and interacted
with throughout his or her lifespan (Marin & Hampton, 2006). Although the network size
and compositions may vary depending on individual traits and socio-demographic factors
(Robert, Dunbar, Pollet, & Kuppens, 2009), scholars have indicated that the global size of
personal networks is generally quite massive. Roberts et al. (2009) discuss that the crude
24

distinction between Granovetters (1973) strong and weak ties can be elucidated into the
concentric circles of acquaintanceship (p.138) with ego sitting in the center of the circle
(Figure 1). Specifically, the innermost layer, called the support clique, includes about 5
people with whom an ego maintains the most intimate and strongest attachment,
circumscribed by the next layer, called thesympathy group, consisting of 12-15 close
friends and family members (Robert et al., 2009, pp. 138-139). The majority of personal
network studies sets the boundary of social contacts as those who are identified in the
support clique or in the sympathy group at best (e.g. Campbell & Lee 1991; Fu 2005;
Hampton and Wellman 2003; Marsden & Campbell, 1984; Wellman & Wortley 1990).
Focusing on support cliques and sympathy groups lends researchers to tilt in favor
of a strong ties-based examination of personal relationships. However, it is evident that a
good portion of personal networks is composed of weak ties. Weak ties are often an
important relational reservoir in that a focal actor has access to novel information and
instrumental social capital through weak ties (Burt, 2001; Granovetter, 1973; Lin, 1999).
Despite the importance of weak ties as a part of network composition, it has not
frequently been highlighted, primarily due to the large network boundary and the
difficulty in generating names (Marin & Hampton, 2006). Because of the failure to
include weak ties, the structural level of social network measurements that assume that
the network includes the complete list of actors and relational information within the
boundary are not appropriately explored with full egocentric network data.
Zhou, Sornette, Hill, and Dunbar (2005) find that a distinct layer of relationships
emerges at around 50 members in personal network, termed a band. A band is the
intermediary between the layers of strong ties and of weak ties. Roberts et al. (2009) term
25

the layers of weak ties an active network, referring to social relationships an ego feels
that he or she has a personal relationship with, and makes a conscious effort to keep in
contact with (pp.138-139). Various possible sizes of active network were proposed.
Kilworth and Bernard (1978) used a method called the reverse-small world technique,
resulting in the size of about 250. McCarty, Kilworth, Bernard, Johnsen, and Shelley
(2001) used two different methods scale-up and summation method, finding an average
personal network size of about 280-290. As a more stringent approach, Hill & Dunbar
(2003) reasoned that the contact list of people to whom Christmas cards were sent is a
valid indicator to estimate active size. This approach produced personal networks with a
mean of 154.
The last layer of the concentric circle is called the global network (Roberts et al.,
2009, p.138-139). The global network layer includes those whose faces an ego can
recognize. Scholars introduced amazingly large numbers for the size of this layer, for
example, 1500-2000 (Stiller & Dunbar, 2007), 1700 _ 400 (Killworth, Johnsen, Bernard,
Shelley & McCarthy, 1990), and even reaching up to 5000 (McCarty, Bernard, Kilworth,
Shelley, & Johnsen, 1997). The global network is distinguished from weak ties in that
the members in this layer are not necessarily active in terms of social interactions. Instead,
they have the potential to be activated under certain opportunities or motivations. For
example, let us say that a focal actor, George, is superficially acquainted with Mike, who
is a friend of Johns friend Frank. Although Mike is simply one of the thousand members
in Georges global network, Mike has a chance to move into Georges active network if
Frank introduces him to George at the party Frank threw. In other words, members in a
global network are conceived as latent (Haythornthwaite, 2002), who are currently
26

hibernates yet have potential to be converted into active relationships of weak or strong
ties.

Figure 1. Layers of Personal Network
1



The number of weak ties, regardless of the global network size, presents a
humongous task for a focal actor to complete the relevant network survey if the survey
asks a respondent not to just list alters names but also to answer the relational states
between pairs of alters. Considering that finding out information about alter-alter
relationships should include N*(N-1)/2 numbers of questions (N = number of alters), the
expected time consumption to complete the survey increases multiplicatively as the size

1
Partly Adapted and Modified from Exploring Variation in Active Network Size, by S.
Roberts, and R. Dunbar, January 2008, Paper presented at SUNBELT conference, St.
Petersburg, FL.
27

of the network grows. Subsequently, data collection for a comprehensive egocentric
network composed of both strong and weak ties is unrealistic.
Another limitation that preexisting name generator instruments pose is the
possibility of egos imperfect recall. Inaccurate recall has been a non-trivial
methodological issue within personal network scholarship (Butt, 2003, p.107). For
example, Brewer and Webster (1999) found that survey respondents failed to recall 3% of
their best friends, 9% of their close friends, and 20% of their relatively weak ties (Lackaff,
2010). Forgetting and providing inaccurate information is misleading when measuring
structural properties of networks. The broader the personal network boundary is set, the
more aggravated the inaccuracy problem.
These two limitations often hinder personal network researchers from exploring
macro-level network properties for which measurements are developed based on the
complete or whole network analysis. In this sense, the access to SNS data, including
Facebook, is revolutionary for personal network research. Aligning with scholars who
have advocated the advantages of web-based instruments for egocentric network data
collection (e.g. Gosling et al., 2004; Hogan et al., 2007; Vehovar et al., 2008), using
Facebook data helps a researcher to explore the full-fledged ego-networks in several
ways (Hogan et al., 2007; Lackaff, 2010). First, the socio
metric data among alters are easily accessible by using Facebook API-based
software. On average, Facebook friendships consist of more than 300 individuals (Wang
et al., 2010), exceeding the size of active networks proposed by previous studies. Second,
the information about social connectedness is a well-acknowledged parameter of
producing a social network (Marsden, 2005). While the information about connectedness
28

can be inaccurate when dependent on the informants memory, online archives of
connectedness is hardly misled by inaccurate recall. Sociometric data form Facebook is
credible in this sense (Hogan, 2007). Lastly, even richer information about relationship
quality can be objectively measured without filtering the informants perceptual bias.
According to Easley and Kleinberg (2010), the histories of social interactions
accumulated on Facebook profiles offer a rigorous form of measurement to the extent of
communication frequency or emotional strength.
In sum, Facebook data are based on more reliable and valid information than
traditional approaches in that the network includes a broader range of alters and the
interpretation about alter-alter relationships is less susceptible to informants imprecise
memory and perception. Unfortunately, however, few studies have actually taken
advantage of Facebook network data to capture the process of social interactions within
personal networks (Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez, Wimmer, & Christakis, 2008).
According to Lewis et al. (2008), the majority of Facebook literature has framed the
relational information found in users profiles as one strategy of self-disclosure and
impression management. It has been regarded as the profile owners individual attributes
(e.g. Boyd, 2004, 2006; Boyd & Heer, 2006; Donath & Boyd, 2004; Fono & Raynes-
Goldie, 2006; Rosen, 2007; Skog, 2005; Wang, Moon, Kwon, Evans, & Stefanone, 2010;
Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008). Likewise, studies exploring
the benefits of having large personal networks in SNS tend to exclusively count on
conventional survey methods, disregarding the structures of relational ties among users
(e.g. Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). Despite the explicit articulation of personal
29

networks configured on Facebook, it is still premature to incorporate the structural
perspective into the study of user behaviors on Facebook.





















30

IV. PROJECT DESCRIPTION

4.1. A Cyber-Field Experiment: Mobilizing a Campus Advocacy Network on Facebook
This dissertation project is based on a cyber-field experiment that mobilizes
college students for a campus advocacy group on Facebook. At the end of 2009, four
undergraduate students at the University at Buffalo (UB) who were members of a student
government organization and were not satisfied with the library conditions created a
Facebook group called Students who want better UB libraries. The aim of the group
was to raise students awareness about the poor conditions of campus libraries and to
allow students opinions on ways it could be improved to be heard by administrators if
needed. Initially, it was a small, self-organized advocacy group of 34 members. Finding
the group suitable for this project, I contacted group administrators and asked their
willingness to expand the group through collaboration with this dissertation project.
The field experiment was conducted in this way: After getting confirmation from
the student government and the IRB, confederates were recruited from large
undergraduate lectures to play opinion leaders for the virtual advocacy action in
Facebook. The qualifications to play an opinion leader were (1) to have a positive stance
with the aim of the groups advocacy, (2) to be willing to recommend that their Facebook
friends support the advocacy and (3) to have at least 50 Facebook friends, at least 20 of
whom are UB-affiliated. Students who played opinion leaders got one hour of research
credit as a reward. Playing an opinion leader was voluntary, as non-players were
provided with many other alternatives to obtain the equivalent amount of credit. While
31

the players were also the subjects to be analyzed in Chapter 4, they were treated as
experimental confederates who were not included in the analyses in Chapters 5 and 6.
The advocacy group was open to the UB public, meaning that anyone could view
the content in the group regardless of membership status as long as they were affiliated
with the UB network. At the beginning, the group had 10 photos that showed the poor
conditions of the UB libraries such as empty book shelves, untidy study rooms and
unclean restrooms, as well as two discussion threads asking for students wish lists for
the libraries and their opinions about how to improve the conditions. The main page, or
so-called group wall, had a few of postings notifying viewers of the updates. The wall
later became a very active discussion forum accompanying group size growth. Figure 2
shows screen snapshots of the group as of March 2010.












32

Figure 2. The Snapshots of the Advocacy Group Emerged from the Project




33

4.2. The Role of Opinion Leader Players
The role of opinion leader players was to spread the information through the
advocacy group and recommend that their friends join the group to show support. To do
this, they would send messages to their friends through a Facebook tool called group
invitation. The tool allows a group member to gain access to his or her own friends list,
select the target friends to whom the person wishes to send a customizable invitation. To
control the variability of invitation content that might reduce internal validity, players
were asked to use message content that was customized by the researcher. Players were
guided to select and send the message to all of their friends who were identified as UB-
affiliates. Selecting UB-affiliated friends was easily enacted through the filtering option
afforded by the tool. If another player was selected in the list of invitation recipients, he
or she was removed.
After sending the invitations, players additionally participated in a survey asking
about their own demographic characteristics, opinion leadership and personality and
social characteristics. With their permission, I also gained access to the data describing
their egocentric networks in Facebook. The network data are composed of two types of
information. The first is simply a list of friends names, analogous to the data collected
from name generators in conventional egocentric network instruments (Marsden, 2005,
p.11). The name list was used to trace which new members received a recommendation
from which confederate. This procedure was done manually by matching the group
members names with the names identified in the list. The second type of information is
sociometric data about who-knows-whom. This is analogous to the data collected from
name interpreters in the egocentric network instruments (Marsden, 2005). The first row
34

and column of the matrix display all the friends names who received the invitation
messages and each cell identifies whether a pair of friends share a connection on
Facebook.
The sociometric data were used for three purposes: one, to characterize the
structure of each confederates personal network; two, to identify the positional
properties of each alter within the confederates personal network; and three, to capture
the structure of the emerged advocacy network as a whole. The sociometric data includes
only UB-affiliated friends.
4.3. Terminology Summary
Hereafter, I use various terms interchangeably to denote opinion leader players
and their Facebook friends. Some terms are contingent on this project, some from
personal network literature, and some from the mathematical terminologies used in social
network analysis. Table 1 summarizes the terminologies that will be used throughout the
remaining chapters.









35


Table 1. Terminology Summary
Basic Term Interchangeably used
with
Source
Opinion Leader Players Confederates, Inviter,
Recruiter, Recommender,
Message Sender
Project specific: Recruited by
a researcher for the purpose of
experiment to observe
subjects behaviors
Opinion Leader Project specific: Used to
discuss about personal
influence in Chapter 4
Ego Egocentric network
terminology: used to refer a
focal actor or owner of the
personal network
Players Facebook
Friend
Invitee, Recruitee,
Message receiver
(recipient)
Project specific: Targeted to
recruit to the group by the
opinion leader players
Alter Egocentric network
terminology: used to refer
egos social contacts
Actor, Node,
Vertex(Vertices)
Social network terminology:
used to refer to those whose
names are listed in the first
row and column of the socio-
matrix

4.4. The Evolution of Advocacy Network: A Brief Report
The increase in group membership and activities was tracked over a span of six
days since the opinion leaders action began (from 2pm January 25, 2010 to 2pm January
31, 2010). A total of 132 opinion leaders sent recommendations to 7,486 uniquely
identified UB-affiliated friends. After the week, the group size increased from 34 to 2,038
members.
Three days after the project began, the advocacy group received coverage on the
front page of the campus newspaper. The news article also included interviews from
36

several administrators including the director of the librarys technology department. The
next day, some administrators also joined the group. Figure 3 shows how rapidly the
group size increased within a week.

Figure 3. Over Time Increase of Group Membership, from January 25
th
to January 30
st
,
2010


One interesting point is that the aim to have student voices heard by
administrators was achieved in only three days since the action began. Fast diffusion is a
common phenomenon when information and communication technology (ICT ) takes a
major part in the process of propagation. The resulted diffusion curve is characterized as
r-curves (Henrich, 1999) which begin convexly with the maximum growth rate and
then slowly taper off toward equilibrium (Danowski, Gluesing, & Riopelle, in press,
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
1/24 1/25 1/26 1/27 1/28 1/29 1/30 1/31 2/1
M
e
m
b
e
r
s
Time
37

n.p.). This curve challenges the classical Bass model (Bass, 1969) which displays an S-
shaped cumulative adoption curve (Rogers, 2003).
Geroski (2000) and Rosenkopf and Abramson (1999) explain that the rapid
growth r-curve results when the diffusion process includes the bandwagon or herd
behavior effect, which occurs when (1) more information about the number of adopters is
available and (2) less learning process is required for adoption decision. These conditions
are met in many ICT-enabled communication situations because, first, messages about
others adoption behaviors are more rapidly and more easily spread than in face-to-face
communication and second, many online behaviors or innovations often do not require so
much cost or commitment to go through a serious learning process prior to making an
adoption decision. For example, Danowski et al. (in press) show that e-mail based
diffusion of innovation within an organization was better explained by an r-curve than an
s-curve.
The diffusion process resulting from this project can also be understood to include
the bandwagon effect in that the two conditions were met in this case. Specifically, as the
most cutting-edge ICT that maximizes the visibility of social information, Facebook
easily exposes users to the others adoption behaviors. Also, the advocacy group publicly
opened its page so that Facebook users could see, from time to time, how many members
the group had. Furthermore, joining the group was not a difficult task. Little cost or time
consumption was required for an actor to join the group. Accordingly, actors could
decide whether to comply with the recommendation to join or decide not to join without
in-depth learning about the advocated action.
38

Barnett (in press) explains that diffusion can be described as a convex r-curve
when the external source of influence predominates over the interpersonal
communication process. He states that the diffusion curve begins convexly with the
maximum growth rate slowing only when most potential adopters have adopted when
the external agent forces adoption nearly simultaneously (n.p.). Considering that the
recommendation message was sent out almost simultaneously by the confederates who
are outside of the pool of potential adopters, Barnetts discussion also support the
possibility of an r-shaped evolution of the group.
I estimated increase of the membership curve by reordering the data every two
hours. Both Sigmoid (the representation of the s-curve) and Cubic curves (the
representation of the r-curve) were tested within that period of time as an independent
variable and the cumulative membership as a dependent variable. While both curves were
statistically significant, the larger variance was better explained by the cubic model (R
2

= .97) than by the sigmoid model (R
2
= .89), supporting the existence of a convex r-curve
emerging during the group evolution (Table 2). Figure 4 plots the observed and the
expected curve.

Table 2. Curve Estimation for Group Evolution
Model Summary Parameter Eestimates
R
2
F Sig.

Constant b1 b2 b3
Cubic
.97 487.61 .000 23.94 134.32 -3.14 .03
Sigmoid
.89 446.72 .000 7.65 -5.04



39

Figure 4. Plots of R- and S-Curve


The group evolution also implies that the group information was passed along
multiple steps of relationship chains beyond the initial contact made by confederates. In
other words, only 43.33 % of the total group members (N = 883) turned out to be the
direct recipients of group invitations from the confederates of the experiment. Excluding
34 original members and 132 confederates, the rest of the members (N = 989) joined the
group through other informational channels: They could have heard about the group
through the campus media or through the chains of WOM spread throughout Facebook
networks. The success of the advocacy group can also be attributed to the bi-directional
effects between the increase in membership and the increase in group activities. Indeed, I
observed discussions had been actively developed during the week. Simple statistics tell
40

that a total of 137 discussion threads, 47 wall postings, 63 sub-comments, and 93 likings
were shared in a week since the action started.
It is noteworthy that the evolution of the Facebook advocacy group followed the
convex r-shaped curve, which has recently been highlighted as the distinctive pattern for
ICT-enabled diffusion from the diffusion through face-to-face interpersonal
communication. The diffusion process might be due to the direct social contacts but also
to potential actors exposure to the information about the membership growth and the
intensity of group activities. Also, the evolution of the advocacy network was inherently
a self-organizing phenomenon, displaying voluntary interactions among the members.
However, these evolutionary aspects are beyond the scope of this dissertation and are
thus reserved for future research agendas.











41

V. THE FACEBOOK INFLUENTIALS: ON THEIR SOCIAL NETWORK
CHARACTERISTICS

5.1. Who are the Influentials?
5.1.1. Profiles of Opinion Leaders
In this field experiment, the most explicit source of influence for students to be a
part of the advocacy action is the direct recommendations made by the opinion leader
players. Because the researcher was blind to each players social and personal
characteristics when recruiting opinion leaders, their individual capacity to mobilize
members would be dissimilar to one another. Those who exert greater influence on others
attitude or behavior can be defined as the influentials, or opinion leaders.
Opinion leadership has been widely studied within the contexts of marketing,
political communication and health campaigns. According to the classical theory of two-
step flow, the effect of media messages is not directly applied to mass audiences but
instead is moderated or mediated by interpersonal communication (Katz, 1957; Southwell
& Yzer, 2007). In the process of interpersonal communication, there is a subset of the
population called opinion leaders, who are more influential than the average population
in promoting behaviors or attitudes advocated by marketers or campaigners.
Opinion leaders are regarded as a valuable asset in the promotion of new products,
ideas, attitudes, and actions. Rogers (1995), a prominent scholar in diffusion studies,
emphasized that the change agents should be able to identify opinion leaders out of their
potential clients to expedite diffusion process. As Chan and Mistra (1990) elucidate,
personal influence exerted by opinion leaders becomes particularly important when word-
42

of-mouth communication is a critical component in consumers (or publics in cases of
non-commercial sectors) decision making processes, in which forming a favorable
attitude or behavior toward the advocated object is more important than simply informing
untargeted mass audiences. Subsequently, identification or creation of opinion leaders has
risen as a major topic in diffusion literature (Chan & Mistra, 1990; Mancuso, 1969).
Profiling opinion leaders has been studied based on three categories of traits:
demographics, social and attitudinal traits, and product-oriented characteristics (Summers,
1970). Scholars contend that there is little overlap among opinion leaders of different
products as far as product-oriented variables (e.g. product experience, knowledge, skill,
or involvement) play a significant role in characterizing the influentials. Nonetheless,
decades of studies have documented more or less universal profiles of opinion leaders
in terms of their personal and social attributes.
In particular, opinion leaders tend to reveal higher innovativeness (Gatignon &
Robertson, 1985; Myers & Robertson, 1972; Summers, 1970), less dogmatism
(Goldsmith & Goldsmith, 1980), higher self-confidence (Mancuso, 1969), and higher
public individuation (Chan & Mistra, 1990). Extensive studies have also indicated that
opinion leaders are consistently shown to be more gregarious, cosmopolite, and socially
active (for a review of the findings, refer to Weimann, 1990).
5.1.2. Measuring Opinion leadership: Four Approaches
Rogers (1995) defines opinion leadership as the degree to which an individual is
able informally to influence other individuals attitudes or overt behavior in a desired
way with relatively frequency and opinion leaders as individuals who lead in
43

influencing others opinions (p. 300). Evidently, an individuals opinion leadership is
the direct indicator of his or her social position as the influential.
The measurement of opinion leadership has been proposed based on four methods:
Sociometric techniques, key informants ratings, self-designating techniques and
observation. Rogers (1995) and Weimann (1994) discuss the strength and weakness of
each method. First, the use of sociometric technique enables researchers to analyze real
social networks of information flow (about who gives and receives advice about an
innovation) among community members of interest. Given that opinion leadership is
measured through the respondents actual choices of receiving information, advice, or
influence, this method is a highly valid measurement. Unfortunately, this method is
burdensome to use because the researcher needs to have every member within a social
system to report social network data. Accordingly, data retrieval without missing cases
becomes less feasible as the community size increases.
An alternative method to the sociometric approach is to construct social networks
based on informants ratings. Key informants should be regarded as knowledgeable about
members relationships in a community of interest. Network data is formulated based on
the key informants nomination of individuals whom other people contact for information
or advice about a subject. While this approach is much more conveniently employed than
the sociometric approach, the data validity depends greatly on the selection of informants.
Unless a researcher does have enough of an insightful understanding about the target
community to identify knowledgeable informants, the validity is hardly guaranteed.
The self-designating technique is the most commonly employed method due to its
convenience. The exemplary instrument for the self-designating method is King and
44

Summers (1970) index, the modified version of Rogers instrument (1995). King and
Summers index will be described fully in next section. While it is convenient to use, the
self-designating technique is the least valid measurement in that it depends on the
accuracy with which respondents can identify and report their images (Rogers, 1995,
p.311). Perception-based measurements can incorrectly estimate the relationship between
themselves and others, causing such problems in social projection as the false
consensus, which refers to the overestimation for ones own behavior (Rice & Aydin,
1991, p. 221). Considering that opinion leadership is measured based on individuals self-
belief in their own expertise or knowledge, it is not surprising that opinion leadership
resulting from the self-designating technique tends to show high correlations with
personality attributes, such as confidence or innovativeness, which are also measured
based on self-evaluation.
Finally, observation is the most valid measurement of all four techniques (Rogers
1995; Weimann, 1991). The observation technique can be applied in situations where a
researcher can observe and record interpersonal interactions among community members
throughout the diffusion process. While it is seldom used in retrospective studies due to
the difficulty of data retrieval, the technique provides a researcher with the most certain
and richest information once it is possible to archive interactional history during a given
period of diffusion. The observation technique is advantageous in situations where a
researcher conducts a controlled trial of interventions or field experiments.
5.1.3. Profiling the Influentials in Web 2.0.
Rogers (1995) had pointed out the dual characters of the Internet: It is a one-to-
many process resembling conventional mass communication, but it has the personalized
45

nature of communication. Along with the technological progress that affords the
integration of the two modes of mass and interpersonal communication, the potential of
the Internet to facilitate word-of-mouth processes has been widely noted. According to
Sun, Youn, Wu, and Kuntarapon (2006), online communication intensifies the word-of-
mouth effect thanks to its asynchrony, one-to-many mode of communication, written
form of interpersonal interaction, speedy transmission of information, and easy access to
opinions of strangers as well as of acquaintances.
Recent academic interest in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is reflected by
many studies that attempt to find recommenders psychological motives to exert
informational influence (e.g. Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004; Phelps,
Lewis, Mobilio, Perry, & Raman, 2004; Sohn, 2009). Cakim (2006), the director of
Burson-Marstella Marketing Research, coined the term e-fluentials particularly to
denote the opinion leaders in the eWOM process. Cakim (2006)s report suggests that
about 10 percent of online adult populations are categorized as e-fluentials, having an
impact on approximately 155 million consumers purchasing decisions. Noting the
potential role they could play in viral marketing online, a few studies attempted to
characterize e-fluentials, borrowing from the literature of traditional opinion leadership.
For example, Sun et al. (2006) tested opinion leaders personality and online social
attributes. They found that, while opinion leaders were defined as showing high
innovativeness, other variables such as product involvement and online social connection
were not significantly revealed. Lyons and Henderson (2005) found that online opinion
leaders are similarly characterized as their offline counterparts, showing high
innovativeness, involvement, and self-perceived knowledge. While these exploratory
46

studies initiated an important task to identify characteristics of e-fluentials, their findings
are preliminary to some extent due to the limited measurement of opinion leadership:
They measured opinion leadership exclusively based on the self-designated technique.
Accordingly, more valid techniques need to be employed to enrich the discussions of e-
fluentials.
Studying online opinion leadership is timely in the Web 2.0 environment.
In Web 2.0, the viral spread of influence is particularly prominent, often acting as the
major driving force for commercial, political and sociological changes. For example,
social context advertising has blossomed with the popularity of SNS, acting as the major
strategy for e-commerce and advertising revenues (Steel & Fowler, 2010, July 7). Also,
information spread through social media facilitates self-organized collaboration, as seen
in the example of Twitter use during the Haiti earthquake (Oh, Kwon, & Rao, 2010).
Examples exist to show how the WOM process lubricates successful collective actions
(Hintikka, 2008). Given the rise of social influence during eWOM communication, it is
important to profile opinion leaders in the Web 2.0 context.
5.2. Research Questions and Hypotheses
5.2.1. Aim of the Study
The aim of this chapter is to characterize the influentials in one of the most
popular Web 2.0-based services, Facebook. While considering other attributes such as
demographics and personality, the study particularly weighs social attributes configured
in the computer-mediated context, including online gregariousness, social activities, and
cosmopoliteness as important predictors of online opinion leadership. The special focus
on social characteristics is driven by the nature of opinion leadership inherent in its
47

definition. By definition, opinion leaders are the social influentials distinguished from the
innovators. Rogers (1995) suggests practitioners to be cautious not to mistake opinion
leaders for innovators. According to Rogers (1995), opinion leaders have followers,
whereas innovators are the first to adopt new ideas and are often perceived as deviants
from the systems normsThe innovators behavior does not necessarily convince the
average members of a system to follow suit (p.388). Opinion leaders produce followers
by serving as a role model that others can imitate, by persuading or convincing others,
or by way of contagion (Nisbet & Kotcher, 2009). Attention to social attributes of
opinion leaders is also prominent in applied marketing or campaign contexts as reflected
by terms that practitioners coined, such as maven, buzzer, navigator, social connector, or
network hubs (e.g. Gladwell, 2002; Keller & Berry, 2003; Rosen, 2002; Sosnick, Dowd
& Fournier, 2006). Although other attributes are also important in conceptualizing
opinion leaders, this study is grounded on the concept that the social aspect is inherent in
a straightforward definition of opinion leaders as well as delineating general
characteristics of opinion leaders across different topical categories.
The study aims to uniquely contribute to the literature of online opinion
leadership in three ways: First, there is no precedence that characterizes opinion leaders
in the Web 2.0 environment. At the cutting-edge of computer-mediated social networking
practices, the question needs to be explored whether digital social networks amplify
opinion leader influence in accordance with offline influence or impair such influence
attributed to the poor quality of virtual interactions (Nisbet & Kotcher, 2009). To explore
such an inquiry, the preceding task is to characterize and identify who the influential
actors are online, second, while traditional opinion leadership literature relies on
48

respondents self-evaluation to construct the variables of social attributes, this study adds
behavior-based measurements to the preexisting instruments. To operationalize variables
of social attributes, I attempted to utilize the archived records in users Facebook profiles
about their interpersonal or group activities and actual social networks they maintain.
Three, distinctive to the preexisting studies of e-fluentials that are based on the self-
designating technique, this current study measures opinion leadership applying the
observation technique through the cyber-field behavioral experiment. In addition, I try
to compare how opinion leadership constructed from observation and self-designating
techniques related to each other and suggest which might be a more valid instrument to
identify the Facebook influentials.
5.2.2. Hypotheses
As mentioned in the previous chapter, a field experiment was conducted by
recruiting opinion leader players. The players were chosen randomly. Therefore, it was
questionable who might be qualified to be the authentic influentials who would present
differentiable Facebook social attributes and contribute significantly to the successful
mobilization compared to the less influential players.
Personal and social characteristics are hypothesized against two criterion
variables: observed and self-designated opinion leadership. Observed opinion leadership
refers to the degree of behavioral influence, measured as the actual number of Facebook
friends each player mobilized through solicitation. For self-designated opinion leadership,
King and Summers (KS)s index (1970) was employed. First, I examine whether
observation and self-designation approaches represent a common dimension of opinion
49

leadership. If they share same dimensionality, they will show high correlation to each
other. Accordingly,
H1. Observed and self-designated Facebook opinion leadership will be correlated
with each other.
Second, as in traditional opinion leadership studies, I hypothesize that personality
traits should contribute to the identification of Facebook opinion leaders. Specifically,
Weimann (1994) reviewed existing literature of opinion leaders personality
characteristics and integrated relevant items into the Strength of Personality Scale (PS
scale) (p.255). This scale showed a positive association with influenceability and
individuals sociometric network position and has been validated through many existing
studies (e.g. Nisbet, 2006; Nistbet & Kotcher, 2009; Scheufele & Shah, 2000; Shah &
Scheufele, 2006; Weimann, 1991; Weimann, Tustin, & Vuuren, 2007). Based on those
studies, the following are hypothesized:
H2a: Opinion leader players personality traits will positively predict the
observed opinion leadership
H2b: Subjects personality traits will positively predict their self-designated
opinion leadership.
According to traditional opinion leadership literature, social attributes are also an
important characteristics of opinion leaders (Katz, 1957). Equivalent to offline context
studies, Facebook-specific social attributes are expected to show significant association
with Facebook opinion leadership. Hypotheses are posited regarding social attributes,
including gregariousness, social activities, and cosmopoliteness. In regards to
gregariousness and social activities:
50

H3a: Facebook gregariousness will be positively related to the observed opinion
leadership (i.e. the behavioral influence subjects have on their Facebook friends).
H3b: Facebook gregariousness will be positively related to the self-designated
opinion leadership of the subjects.
H4a: Participation in Facebook social activities will be positively related to the
observed opinion leadership.
H4b: Participation in Facebook social activities will be positively related to the
self-perceived opinion leadership of the subjects.
The study takes a somewhat novel approach to operationalize cosmopoliteness.
Traditionally, cosmopoliteness has been indirectly measured, for example by the number
of places in which individuals have lived (Katz & Lazarsfeldt, 1955). Physical mobility
has been highlighted in operationalizing cosmopoliteness because of the assumption that
experiences with various local communities give individuals more opportunities for
diverse experiences and heterogeneous social contacts (Summers, 1970). This conception,
however, might not be appropriate in the online community in general as well as in the
special context of Facebook in that digital networks enable participants to engage in
heterogeneous social communication without the necessity of physical encounters.
Therefore, a different measurement of cosmopoliteness is required instead of highlighting
physical mobility.
Fortunately, more straightforward measures of cosmopoliteness are available
from personal network data in Facebook. Considering that the Facebook personal
network is constructed through social interactions between the network owner and his or
51

her Facebook contacts, heterogeneity of the personal network could be understood as an
indicator of diverse social communication, in other words, Facebook cosmopoliteness.
A personal network can be characterized as either cohesive or heterogeneous.
According to network theories, network cohesion and heterogeneity are the competing
concepts. The cohesive and integrated social network is advantageous in achieving
benefits of expressive action (Coleman, 1990). Borrowing from Heiders balance theory,
Krackhardt (1992) also suggests the prominent role of affective ties, defined as philos,
in the situation of instability. Social capital theories argue that it is the cohesive nature of
social relations that returns collective benefits to the members of a community (Coleman,
1989).
Meanwhile, network cohesion is not a panacea. Cohesion sometimes causes
negative consequences, such as exclusion of others, too many demands of conformity and
reduced individual privacy and autonomy within a community (Portes, 1998; Simmel,
1955). Moreover, as Rogers and Kincaid (1981) and Burt (1992) argue, an open and
sparse network can be beneficial for instrumental actions because it embeds diverse
information. The benefits of an open network tend to be more like a private good
(Borgatti, Jones, & Everett, 1998). Burt (1992) argues that individuals benefit from
instrumental actions by having relational holes or disconnections in their personal
networks. Because dense social networks are more likely to circulate the same
information among the members, there is information redundancy. In contrast, if social
contacts are not connected to one another and are involved in different social clusters, an
actor has the advantage of accessing diverse and new information from direct and indirect
social contacts (Burt, 1992). Accordingly, less cohesive and more heterogeneous personal
52

networks may represent an egos cosmopoliteness, which leads the ego to gain access to
new resources such as information outside immediate environment (Summers, 1970,
p.178). Similarly, Burt (1999) discusses that opinion leaders are structurally positioned as
brokers who trigger contagions across different social boundaries and as network
entrepreneurs who maintain heterogeneous personal contacts (pp. 46-49). Drawing from
the network theories, I operationalize cosmopoliteness as personal network heterogeneity
and posit research questions as follows:
RQ1: Will Facebook cosmopoliteness, measured by personal network cohesion
and heterogeneity,be positively correlated with (a) observed opinion leadership and (b)?
5.3. Methods
Participants
The study is based on a field behavioral experiment in which recruited players
send recommendations to friends affiliated with the UB network. Specifically, 104
subjects sent messages on the first day of the experiment and 28 sent messages on the
second day. 4 missing cases were excluded, leaving a total of 128 opinion leaders for
further consideration.
Measures
Control Variables. Demographic variables including sex and school year were
included as control variables. Another important control variable is the number of
invitees to whom each opinion leader sent the message (simple network size) because it is
evident that the more people who are invited, the more will join the group.
Personality Strength. While there are various personality-related variables that
can be tested, Weimanns PS index (Weimann, 1994) was adopted in this study. This
53

index integrates personality items relevant to defining the characteristics of the
influentials. The index is composed of 10 additive binary items. The possible score
ranges from 0 to 10. Table 3 includes the content of the index. Although the reliability
was not very high ( = .67), the scale was widely used and justified by previous literature
(see Scheufele & Shah, 2000).
Table 3. Personality Strength Index Items.
Items (Binary response: 1 = yes, 0 = no)

I usually count on being successful in everything I do.

I am rarely unsure about how I should behave.

I like to assume responsibility.

I like to take the lead when a group does things together.

I enjoy convincing others of my opinions.

I often notice that I serve as a model for others.

I am often a step ahead of others.

I own many things others envy me for.

I often give others advice and suggestions.


Self-Designated Opinion Leadership. Kings and Summerss (KS) opinion
leadership scale is applied to measure self-perceived opinion leadership. The KS scale is
the modified version from Rogers (1962/1995) scale in his original diffusion study. King
and Summers (1970) adapted this scale to explore whether opinion leadership is
generalizable across different topical or product categories. Accordingly, the strength of
the index is its flexibility for customization contingent on a product or an object of
54

interest. While Weimanns scale (1994) delineates a general self-concept to characterize
the influentials personality, the KS scale intends to measure self-evaluation as an
opinion leader on a specific topic. The KS scale is composed of 7 additive items. The
possible score ranges from 7 to 16, = .75 (Table 4).



















55

Table 4. King and Summers Opinion Leadership Scale.
KS Index Items (number in parenthesis is the score for each item)

In general, do you like to talk about campus community issues
*
with your
friends? (No =1, Yes =2)

Would you say you give very little information (1), an average amount of
information (2), or a great deal of information about campus community issues
to your friends (3)?

During the past six months, have you told anyone about some campus
community issues? (No=1, Yes =2)

Compared with your circle of friends, are you less likely (1), about as likely (2),
or more likely (3) to be asked for advice about campus community issues?

If you and your friends were to discuss about campus community issues, what
part would you be most likely to play? Would you mainly listen to your friends'
ideas (1) or would you try to convince them of your ideas (2)?

Which of these happens more often? Do your friends tell you (1) or do you tell
them about campus community issues (2) ?

Do you have the feeling that you are generally regarded by your friends and
neighbors as a good source of advice about campus community issues? (No = 1,
Yes =2)

*
Examples are provided as follows: tuition, policies and regulations, budget
allocation, events, facility improvement, quality of student services, advocacy
actions led by administrators, etc.

Observed Opinion Leadership. To produce this variable, a researcher matched
the membership list with invitee lists acquired from each player, inducing the number of
members mobilized by each players invitations sent through the players Facebook
personal network. The severe skew of the variable, with a range from 1 to 75 friends
mobilized, raises the issue of normality of dependent variables for linear regression
modeling (Trabachnick & Fidell, 1996). Accordingly, I transformed the raw scores into a
56

seven-point scale, meeting the normality assumption (1~5 transformed to 1, 6~10 to 2,
11~15 to 3, 16~20 to 4, 21~25 to 5, 26~30 to 6, more than 30 to 7).
Facebook Gregariousness and Social Activities. Items for social attributes are
collected by asking players questions about their social communication and by collecting
data about social activities recorded in each players Facebook profile. There are no
previously devised scales for this variable in the Facebook context. Therefore, I came up
with the scales as follows.
First, I devised survey items by modifying offline questionnaires about social
attributes, partly adapting from Summers (1970). Specifically, I asked subjects their
perceived self-popularity (How popular do you think you are on Facebook? (1)),
interpersonal interactions through profiles (Among various activities you can do on
Facebook, how important it is to look at others profiles? (2) Among various activities
you can do on Facebook, what proportions are made up of leaving your traces at your
friends' profiles, for example, commenting on their walls or pictures, poking, and posting
likings? (3)), the size of recent communication partners on Facebook (Among those
who are listed as friends in your profile, with how many friends have you communicated
through Facebook during the last 7 days? (4)) and the intensity of Facebook use (On
average, how many hours do you use Facebook per day? (5)). All questions were asked
on 7-point scale items.
Second, I retrieved information from subjects profiles about their actual
participation in Facebook groups, including the total number of Facebook groups of
which they are currently members (6) and the number of issue-relevant groups that are
among those they joined (i.e. Facebook groups sponsored by student government or
57

advocacy organizations) (7). The number frequencies were converted into 7-point scales
to make them compatible with the scales used in the first part.
A principal component analysis with varimax-rotated factor solution was
employed to explore whether the seven items comprised different dimensions of social
attributes. The factor solution indicated two distinctive factors whose eigenvalue loadings
were greater than 1. The results showed that items related with group activities, the size
of communication, and Facebook use were bundled in the first factor and the items
related with interpersonal interactions and popularity were in the second factor. The first
factor was then defined as Facebook social activities and the second as Facebook
gregariousness. The inter-item reliabilities were not very high; however: = .53, = .59
respectively. Two factors explained 49.76 percent of the total variance (Table 5).

Table 5. Factor Loading of Facebook Social Attributes
Items
Component
1 2
Membership in FB group
(General)
0.73 0.04
Membership in FB group (Student
organization)
0.72 -0.23
Number of friends recently
communicated in FB
0.67 0.09
Facebook use intensity 0.54 0.30
Interaction through FB profiles 0.16 0.82
Checking friends' FB profiles -0.28 0.68
Popularity 0.13 0.54
Eigenvalues
1.91
1.57
% of total variance explained 27.29 22.47



58

Network-based Measure of Facebook Cosmopoliteness. Out of 128 opinion
leaders, 72 allowed me to use their social network data. Accordingly, cosmopoliteness
was measured with 72 respondents personal networks.
Three network properties are used as the indicators of network cohesiveness or
heterogeneity: density (Wasserman & Faust, 1994), the clustering coefficient (Watts &
Strogatz, 1998), and the number of different subgroups occurring by community structure
analysis based on the Girvan-Newman algorithm (Girvan & Newman, 2002). The details
of these properties are explained based on graph theoretic formalization. To do so, I use
the term vertex to denote each Facebook friend identified within an opinion leaders
personal network and edge to refer to the relational tie in a pair of Facebook friends.
Accordingly, an opinion leaders personal network is defined as G = (V, E), consisting of
a set of vertices v and a set of edges e.
First, density is defined as the proportion of existing edges to the maximum
number of edges that can exist in a network. Figure 5 shows examples of two opinion
leaders personal networks which both consist of 140 individuals. Even though the
network sizes are the same, the number of existing edges is different: the network
visualized in Figure 5a has 1,786 edges with a density of 0.09, while the network
visualized in Figure 5b presents only 838 edges with a density of 0.04.



59

Figure 5. Ego-networks of Two Recruited Inviters, with the Same Size but Different Density (Ego is not visualized).
(a) Network size N =140; Number of edges =1886; Density = .09 (b) Network size N = 140; Number of edges =838; Density = .04




60

Density indicates the extent to which friends identified in an opinion leaders
Facebook profile are also listed as friends in each others profiles, meaning that they are
known to one another. Accordingly, when the network size is held constant, high density
implies that friends are interconnected to one another within a network, thus more
cohesive. In reverse, low density means that friends are not acquainted with one another
and likely to be known to the ego in different social contexts. To formalize, density D is
=
cij
n
]=1
n
i=1
Lm
: i, ] I onJ c
ij
E, (1a)


where eij is the tie between vertices i and j and Em

is the maximum number of ties
possibly existing, which is calculated as n(n-1)/2 for the network of size n. Accordingly,
(1a) is re-written as
=
2 cij
n(n-1)
(1b)
Second, a clustering coefficient indicates the extent to which acquainted friends
share mutual friends. The rationale that the clustering coefficient is an indicator of
network cohesion is derived from Simmels discussion of triadic relationships (1950). In
a triadic relationship where two actors have a mutual friend between them, the relational
rule is applied in a qualitatively different way from a dyadic relationship. In a dyadic
relationship, there is autonomy for an actor to make a relational decision because both
parties equally rely on each other. In a triadic relationship, however, autonomy is greatly
reduced in that even though one actor is not compliant to the partner, the partner still can
rely on the third party. Accordingly, a triadic relationship embeds greater social influence
toward conformity than the dyadic relationship. In addition, Granovetter (1982) argues
that the completely connected triangle among three actors is likely to occur when their
relationships are based on strong ties. With the triad as a unit of analysis, a traditional
61

clustering coefficient (Luce & Perry, 1949; Wasserman & Faust, 1994) is defined as the
following:
C =
3(numbc o] compIctcI conncctcd tungIcs)
numbc o] conncctcd tpIcs o] ctccs
(2)
In a sense, C is understood as the density of vertices that compose triads. In this
study, the calculation of a clustering coefficient is based on the extended version of (2)
introduced by Watts and Strogatz (1998). It begins by defining a local clustering
coefficient, which is the density of a sub-graph N
i
= (V', E'), consisting of a set of
neighboring vertices that are directly connected to the vertex i and the subsequent edges.
Formally, the nlocal clustering coefficient of vertex i is
C

=
2 cij
k(k-1)
: ] I onJ c
ij
E (2a)
where k is the size of N
i
. Based on Watts and Strogatz (1998), the clustering coefficient
of an opinion leaders personal network G, denoted as C
G,
is calculated by averaging
local clustering coefficients of all vertices in G. That is,
C
G
=
1
n
C

n
=1
(2b)
Next, the number of subgraphs in an opinion leaders personal network is used as
an indicator of heterogeneity. The number of subgraphs is computed with a Girvan-
Newman algorithm. The Girvan-Newman algorithm utilizes the measure of edge-
betweenness to detect the sub-structures of a network (Girvan & Newman, 2002,
p.7822). Edge-betweenness is analogous to Freemans (1978) betweenness-centrality of a
vertex. Specifically, edge-betweenness is defined as the number of the shortest paths
between pairs of vertices that run along the edge of interest. Equivalent to the vertex
betweenness, if there is more than one shortest path between a pair of vertices, each path
is given equal weight. The betweenness of edge k in G(V, E) is formalized as
62

B
E
(k) =
Sij(Ek)
Sij
, i, ] I, k E (3)
where S
ij
is the number of shortest paths from i to j, and S
ij
(E
k
) is the number of shortest
paths from i to j that pass through an edge k.
Edge-betweenness is used to find cut-edges that should be removed to break a
network into sub-networks. According to Girvan and Newman (2002), cut-edges must
have high edge-betweenness because if a network contains groups that are only loosely
connected by a few intergroup edges, then all shortest paths between different
communities must go along one of these few edges (Girvan & Newman, 2002, p. 7822).
By removing cut-edges, sub-groups are separated from one another, revealing the
underlying community structure. The Girvan-Newman algorithm is processed by three
steps: (1) calculating edge-betweenness of all vertices; (2) removing the edge of the
highest betweenness; (3) recalculating edge-betweenness of the remaining vertices; and
(4) repeating from (2) until no edge remains (Girvan & Newman, 2002).
Applying this logic to Facebook personal networks, I assume that subgroups
found by the Girvan-Newman algorithm should have been formed in distinctive social
contexts. For example, if an individual is a member of a Chinese student club as well as a
member of the Catholic campus ministry, friends from the Chinese student club must
know one another will friend each other on Facebook, as do friends from the Catholic
ministry. However, only a few friends from the Chinese student club might know anyone
from the Catholic ministry and vice versa. Accordingly, there are only a few ties bridging
the two groups. The more sub-groups are identified by removing such bridging ties
within the personal network, the more the ego is likely to have diversified social
relationships from different backgrounds.
63

5.4. Results
Descriptive Analysis and Correlation Test. Among 128 opinion leaders, 55.8
percent of respondents were females (N = 72) and 43.4 percent were males (N = 56). (SD
= 6.09). Opinion leaders have attended the university for 2.02 years on average (SD
= .93). The average number of invitees was 59.63, although the variability was large (SD
= 56.10). Among them, 23.51 friends were mobilized for the advocacy group per person
(SD = 15.33). To make the outcome variable normally distributed, the number of
mobilized invitees was transformed into a 7-point scale, resulting in a mean score of 2.81
(SD = 1.49). In terms of self-designated opinion leadership, opinion leaders scored 7.05
out of 10 on average (SD = 2.17) for the personality strength and11.30 out of 16 on
average (SD = 2.31) for KS opinion leadership. The average score for Facebook
gregariousness was 4.10 out of 7 (SD = 1.10) and for social activity 3.67 (SD = 1.18).
Correlation analysis revealed that larger friendship networks are correlated with
having been in school longer (r = .20, p < .05), being higher in gregariousness (r = .19, p
< .05), and more active in social activity participation (r = .28, p < .01). Personality trait
showed significant correlation with both opinion leadership measures, KS index-based
measure (r = .29, p < .01) and observation-based measure (r = .19, p < .05). However,
there was no correlation revealed between the two opinion leadership measures (r = .09, p
= n.s.). Accordingly, Hypothesis 1 is not supported. Descriptive statistics and zero-order
correlation among these variables are found in Table 6.



64

Table 6. Means, Standard Deviations and Correlations of Variables

(N = 128).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 SEX -
2 School YR -0.11 -
3 Gregarious 0.14 -0.10 -
4 Social Activity 0.05 -0.10 0.03 -
5

UB Friends

0.13 .20
*
.19
*
.28
**
-
6
Weimann
Scale

0.09 0.00 0.17 -0.04 0.05 -
7
KS Scale

-0.12 0.09 0.11 0.01 0.06 .29
**
-
8
Recruited
Friends
0.09 0.08 .25
**
.38
***
.49
***
.19
*
0.09 -
Mean
0.56 2.02 4.10 3.68 59.63 7.05 11.30 2.81
(SD)
(0.50) (0.93) (1.10) (1.18) (56.10) (2.17) (2.31) (1.49)
Note: *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Opinion Leadership and Social Attributes. To test Hypotheses 2, 3, and 4,
hierarchical regression analyses were performed with two criterion variables, one of
which is the KS index based self-designated opinion leadership and the other
observation-based opinion leadership measured by counting the number of mobilized
friends. In both analyses, the control variables including gender and school year were
entered into the first block. The size of total UB friends was included in the second block.
All the missing variables were excluded list-wise.
The multiple regression analysis indicated that the overall model with self-
designated opinion leadership as a dependent variable was marginally non-significant, F
(6, 107) = 2.109, p = .06, only accounting for small variances, adjusted R
2
= .06. The
65

only significant predictor of self-designated opinion leadership was the PS index, another
self-perception based variable ( = .31, p < .001). Accordingly, Hypothesis 2a was
supported, while 3a, 4a, and 5a were not supported.

Table 7. Multiple Regression Analysis for Predicting Self-Perceived Opinion Leadership
Measured by King and Summers Index (N = 114).
B SE t
p
First block
Gender -.33 .43 -.08 -.79 .432
School year .09 .18 .05 .50 .624
F (2, 111) = .48, p = .62, R
2
= .09, adjusted R
2
= .09
Second block
Gender -.37 .43 -.08 -.86 .392
School year .06 .18 .03 .34 .737
UB friends .00 .00 .06 .64 .523
F
change
(1, 110) = .41, p = .52, R
2
change
< .01
Third Block
Gender -.51 .41 -.11 -1.23 .221
School year .04 .17 .02 .22 .826
UB friends .00 .00 .07 .72 .475
Weimann** .32 .10 .31 3.36 .001
F
change
(1, 109) = 11.29, p < .01, R
2
change
= .09
Fourth Block
Gender -.52 .42 -.12 -1.24 .218
School year .05 .18 .03 .28 .777
UB friends .00 .00 .06 .56 .579
Weimann** .32 .10 .31 3.32 .001
Gregarious .02 .07 .02 .22 .824
Social Activity .01 .05 .02 .25 .807
F
change
(2, 107) = 0.05, p = .95, R
2
change
< .01
The overall model: F (6, 107) = 2.109, p = 0.06, adjusted R
2
= .06.

Note: **p < .01; Missing cases were excluded list-wise.

66

On the other hand, when predictors were regressed against the observed opinion
leadership as a dependent variable, the model showed a good model fit with much higher
accounted variances: F (6, 103) = 8.49, p < 0.001, adjusted R
2
= .29.
When the control variables were entered into the first block, neither gender ( =
.09, n.s.), nor school year ( = .06, n.s.) were statistically significant. Unsurprisingly, the
number of friends on Facebook was positively associated with the number of recruited
friends, = .48, p < .001, accounting for 22.4 percent of variance change.
When the personality trait variable was included in the third block, the variables
uniquely explained 4 percent of the variance in the observed opinion leadership
represented by the number of recruited friends, p < .05. In other words, Weimanns PS
score was a significant predictor of the observed outcome of opinion leadership, = .19,
p < .05, indicating that the higher a person was scored on the Personality Strength index,
the more friends the person could influence for the advocacy behavior. Therefore,
Hypothesis 2b was supported.
When two variables of Facebook social attributes were put into the model,
another 7 percent of variance was uniquely explained. Among the two social attributes,
gregariousness and social activity, only social activity showed a significant association
with observed leadership, supporting only Hypothesis 5b: For gregariousness, = .16, p
= .09; for social activity, = .23, p < .01. Among the three hypothesized predictors,
Facebook social activity was the strongest predictor of the opinion leaders influence on
their friends advocacy behavior. Table 8 summarizes the results of regression model of
observed opinion leadership.

67

Table 8. Multiple Regression Analysis for Predicting Observed Opinion Leadership
Measured by Behavioral Influence Outcome (N = 114).
B SE t p
First block
Gender .27 .29 .09 .94 .349
School year .08 .12 .06 .66 .511
F (2, 107) = .59, p = .55, R
2
= .01, adjusted R
2
< .01
Second block
Gender .10 .26 .03 .38 .702
School year -.05 .11 -.04 -.49 .627
UB friends .01 .00 .48 5.45 .000
F
change
(1, 106) = 29.74, p < .001, R
2
change
= .22
Third Block
Gender .04 .25 .01 .18 .864
School year -.06 .11 -.05 -.57 .573
UB friends*** .01 .00 .48 5.58 .000
Weimann** .13 .06 .19 2.28 .025
F
change
(1, 105) = 5.20, p < .05, R
2
change
= .04
Fourth Block
Gender -.01 .25 -.00 - .04 .968
School year .01 .11 .00 .04 .965
UB friends*** .01 .00 .39 4.40 .000
Weimann** .13 .06 .19 2.37 .019
Gregarious .07 .04 .15 1.74 .085
Social Activity** .07 .03 .23 2.76 .007
F
change
(2, 103) = 5.15, p < .01, R
2
change
< .07
The overall model: F (6, 103) = 8.49, p < 0.001, adjusted R
2
= .29.

Note: *p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001; Missing cases were excluded list-wise.

Personal Network Heterogeneity and Opinion Leadership. Network-related
variables were calculated with sociometric data of 72 opinion leaders. To do so, I used
the software ORA 2.0 developed by Carley (2009). The mean density for 73 personal
networks was 0.22 (SD = 0.13) and had a clustering coefficient of 0.53 (SD = 0.17). On
average, each personal network had 5.57 subgroups (SD = 3.61). Hierarchical regression
68

modeling was not conducted due to small sample size. Instead, correlation tests were
conducted to explore research questions 1a and 1b.
The correlations between network variables and opinion leadership measures are
presented in Table 9. First, I tested the bivariate correlations. The results revealed that the
observed opinion leadership was negatively correlated with density (r = - .40, p < .01)
and positively correlated with the Girvan-Newman subgroup (r = .35, p < .01).
On the other hand, as seen in the table, observed opinion leadership was highly
correlated with personal network size. Considering the impact of the network size, I
additionally tested partial correlations with network size controlled. The pattern revealed
similar results, except for the relationship between the Girvan-Newman subgroup and
observed leadership whose significance was weeded out. Given that density is the
indicator of network cohesiveness and the Girvan-Newman subgroup measures network
heterogeneity, the results find positive correlations of network heterogeneity with
observed leadership and negative association with the cohesive personal network. On the
other hand, the clustering coefficient seems not an appropriate measure to operationalize
Facebook cosmopoliteness.
Meanwhile, Research Question 1b explores the relationship between self-
perceived opinion leadership and Facebook cosmopoliteness. The results showed that any
network-based measurement of cosmopoliteness did not show significant correlation with
the KS score.



69

Table 9. Correlations between Network Variables and Opinion Leadership (N = 72).
1 2 3 4 5
Network
Size


1 KS_partial -
0.066
KS_bivariate -



2 Observed_partial -.06 -
0.64***
Observed_bivariate .06 -



3 Density_partial .1 -.21* -
-0.36**
Density_bivariate .04 -.40** -



4 Clustering_partial .16 -.11 .68*** -
-0.1
Clustering_bivariate .15 -.15 .67*** -



5 GN_partial .09 .11 -.47** -.33** -
0.36**
GN_bivariate .13 .35** -.54*** -.35** -



Mean 11.09 2.89 .21 .53 5.57

(SD) 2.24 1.51 .13 .17 3.61

Note: *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001; KS = King and Summers scale, Observed =
observed opinion leadership based on the recruited friends, GN = number of sub-
groups created through Girvan-Newman algorithm


5.5. Conclusion and Discussions
Strategic communication planners have attempted to identify a subset of the
population who can influence peoples attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. Studies have
adopted four approaches sociometric, self-designated, informant rating and
observation to indentify opinion leaders and their role in the diffusion process of
innovation. Identifying opinion leaders and having them as early adopters is an important
task for marketers and campaigners to accelerate the diffusion process. In the context of
Web 2.0 in which the interpersonal visibility is greater than offline or traditional CMC,
70

personal influence emerges as a even more crucial factor to expedite word-of-mouth
communication.
The current chapter conducted a cyber-field experiment by having subjects play
opinion leaders and by observing how they actually influenced their Facebook friends
behaviors. The study employed two techniques, self-designated and observation, to
represent the degree of each players opinion leadership. By comparing the results from
the two techniques, I attempted to find a more valid indicator for the Facebook
influentials. Interestingly, the study found no correlation between the two methods.
Furthermore, the measurement of self-designated opinion leadership based on the KS
scale was not predicted by Facebook social characteristics, although it was significantly
associated with personality strength. Observation-based opinion leadership, on the other
hand, showed positive association with individuals Facebook social activities and
cosmopoliteness as well as personality characteristics.
The incongruence between the two methods has several implications for future
online opinion leadership studies. First, it revisits the issue of false consensus (Rice &
Aydin, 1991), that is, the over-estimation of ones ability to exert influence on others
opinion or behavior. It is important to note that self-designation is based on self-
perception, not on the perspective of the influenced. Perceiving oneself as being
influential may not necessarily be linked to the actual ability to influence, at least in the
Facebook context. Although the self-designated technique might be a handy approach to
identify the influentials preliminarily thanks to its convenience, a researcher should be
aware that those scored high in self-designation will not always turn out to have many
followers in actual performance.
71

Meanwhile, another possibility for the discrepant results is attributed to the
particular experimental context. The project intended to mobilize college students to
create a cyber-advocacy network. Because joining the network does not require much
commitment or cost, potential adopters might not engage in in-depth cognitive processing
for a cost-benefit assessment whether to do it or not (e.g. Clicking join the group button
on Facebook requires definitely less cost than, say, purchasing an iPod). Accordingly,
potential adopters might not be very dependent on informational influence. Given that the
KS scale measures a persons expertise or skill on a certain issue or object, it represents
opinion leadership based on the degree of informational influence. From this perspective,
it is not surprising that self-designated opinion leadership was not a valid indicator of the
influentials.
Cao, Knotts, Xu, and Chau (2009) discuss that there are two non-mutually
exclusive types of influentials: influencer and connector. An influencer exerts
informational influence through his or her knowledge and expertise. A connector has
many social connections and is thus capable of spreading a message to wider audiences.
The result of this project suggests that the influentials in this project turned out to be
more like connectors than influencers. This conclusion is evident in that the actual
capacity of changing others behavior was positively predicted by a persons social
attributes reflected by his or her social networking practice on Facebook. Although not
hypothesized, Facebook personal network size, the simplest indicator how actively a
person engages in social networking with others, greatly contributed to the mobilization
outcome. In addition, the positive associations of the extent of group activities in which a
person participates on Facebook and the heterogeneity of the ego-network structure with
72

the persons recruitment capacity imply that social connectors are probably a more
important source of influence than knowledge-based influencers.
This result is tentative, however, given that the experimental design provoked a
non-profit and relatively simplistic behavior. To confirm whether the discrepancy
between self-designated and observed opinion leadership is attributed to the problem of
false consensus, to the experimental design, or to the particularity of the Web 2.0 context,
future research might be needed to apply the methods to other situations in which more
dynamic cognitive processing is required in adoption decision-making.
Another contribution of this chapter is that it introduces the network-based
measurement of cosmopoliteness. A physical mobility-based conceptualization of
cosmopoliteness is not well-suited in the online context where heterogeneous social
interactions from different cultural backgrounds are possible without necessarily moving
around. Taking advantage of the visibility of online social networks (Xu, Zhang, Xue, &
Yeo, 2008), I borrowed the Facebook network structure properties as parameters to
measure the degree of individuals cosmopoliteness. The rationale to use network
measures is based on the assumption that the cosmopolite person will maintain a more
heterogeneous personal network, which is structurally less dense and includes more sub-
groups. The result of a positive correlation of network heterogeneity with the observed
opinion leadership suggests that the network-based understanding of cosmopoliteness can
be a justifiable approach to measure one dimension of social characteristics of the
influentials. The structural approach to social characteristics, however, is a novel
approach in opinion leadership literature. Additional research in different contexts needs
73

to be added to confirm that a network-based measurement is a proper approach to
characterize social aspects of online opinion leaders.





















74

VI. WORD-OF-MOUTH ON FACEBOOK: STRUCTURAL APPROACH

6.1. Structural Approach to WOM Effect on Social Organizing on Facebook
6.1.1. WOM Communication in Facebook
The Word-of-Mouth (WOM) communication strategy, which refers to the use of
informal interpersonal communication channels to promote products, brands or services
(Brooks, 1957), has been regarded as the most effective alternative to the traditional
forms of strategic communication (Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels, 2009). Traditionally,
WOM research relies on two approaches: self-reports on surveys, stemming from the
original research on interpersonal influence by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), and adoption
studies inspired by Coleman and his colleagues (1966) pioneering diffusion research.
Unfortunately, because neither approach could provide straightforward evidence of
WOM effectiveness, researchers could only infer the presence of WOM effects from the
data (Trusov et al., 2009).
During the past decades, digitally connected social networks through which
preexisting as well as newly formed relationships are maintained, enhanced, and
extended (Haythornthwaite, 2002; Wellman, Boase, & Chen, 2002) have been
particularly spotlighted as the amplifier of WOM processes with lower costs and fast
diffusion. Along with the buzz for the prospect of electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM),
scholars have endeavored to supplement the scant evidence of WOM effects in the
traditional offline context by taking advantage of easily accessible online archives of
referral histories. Examples include usenet posts (e.g. Godes & Mazline, 2004), online
product reviews (e.g. Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Liu, 2006; Mishne & Glance, 2006)
75

and pass-along emailing (Norman & Russel, 2006; Phelps et al., 2005). Even those e-
WOM studies, however, are limited for two main reasons. (1) Except only a few cases of
e-WOM research (e.g. De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008; Trusov et al., 2009), literature are
predominantly predisposed to message senders (or transmitters) rather than the effect of
WOM on message recipients. (2) Discussions revolve exclusively for the sake of for-
profit marketing, while somewhat disregarding the implications of e-WOM on less
commercially driven areas such as social marketing, cause-related campaigns, or non-
profit advocacy.
In recent years, social networking sites, notably Facebook, have emerged as one
of the most successful venues for e-WOM. The so-called social context ad rises as a
novel advertising strategy, lending Facebook the selling power equivalent to major search
engines such as Google and Yahoo!, the forerunners of interactive advertising (Steel &
Fowler, July 7, 2010). Facebooks social context advertising garners the spotlight from
marketers thanks to the full-fledged use of online connectedness for a viral effect.
Social context advertising is performed based on the software that Facebook
developers call social plug-ins, including Like Buttons, Recommendations plug-in,
Login Button, Comments, Activity Feed, Like Box, Friendpile plug-in, and
Live Stream (for description of each plug-in, see
http://developers.facebook.com/plugins). Once embedded in advertisers websites, social
plug-ins allow visitors to share their attitudes, thoughts or behaviors about products or
activities advertised on the websites with other friends on Facebook. The impact that the
rise of social context advertising has on the interactive advertising market is not trivial.
Fowler and Efrati (August 2, 2010) report that the implementation of social plug-ins
76

results in one- to five-fold increase in referral traffic from Facebook (p. B1) and
visitors from Facebook stay on advertisers websites for 20 percent more time than
visitors from search engines.
Not just profit-oriented markets that can benefit from Facebook-like WOM
communication; non-commercial sectors benefit from e-WOM as well. Examples are
abundant. Thackeray, Neiger, Hanson, and McKenzie (2008) discuss the advantage of
using social networking sites or micro-blogging services to enhance personal
recommendations-based health promotions. On Facebook, for example, a Facebook page
of the American Public Health Association (APHA) is run solely for recruiting new
members to APHA and sharing information (Thackeray et al., 2008). Regarding the
impact on political campaigns, Williams and Gulati (2007) empirically examined the
effect of using Facebook social networks on political candidates actual voting shares.
Particularly, the implemented software Election Pulse on Facebook not only creates
candidates profiles but also helps supporters become easily informed about their
candidates updates, share their candidate preferences (who they like) with other less
political-minded friends, and connect themselves with other supporters. Williams and
Gulatis 2007 results showed that successful utilization of Facebook contributed to
candidates winning a higher percentage of vote shares. Additional examples include
Support the Campaign for Cancer Research which has over 3 million members and has
raised nearly $60,000, Stop Global Warming with 1.7 million members and $21,000 of
fundraising, and the successful activism group "One Million Voices against the FARC
that drove 10 million protesters on the street world-wide. These examples suggest that
Facebook social networks prevalently play a role in social organizing and fundraising and
77

contribute the spread of social consciousness and promote civic engagement, pro-social
behaviors and community participation (Maderazo, 2008; Neumayer & Raffl, 2008).
In sum, WOM communication on Facebook potentially benefits social marketers,
non-profit organizers and cause advocates as well as commercial marketers. E-WOM
research can take advantage of observable social network structures on Facebook to find
empirical evidence of WOM effects on message recipients attitude or behavior changes.
6.1.2. Facebook WOM as Social Influence Process: Structural Approach
WOM communication can be seen as a process of social influence. Various social
psychological motives are offered to explain how social influence occurs. One motivation
is the desire to seek informational accuracy: People try to perceive the state of reality
correctly to react properly to social situations they encounter (Cialdini & Goldstein,
2004). When there is uncertainty regarding perception, people compare their own
opinions, attitudes or beliefs to those that are held by others with whom they interact. As
a part of the continuous effort to reduce uncertainty, social comparisons induce
informational influence from reference groups (Festinger, 1954).
Second, social influence becomes normative when others attitudes or behaviors
are a role model that is desirable for an individual to conform. Normative influence
occurs when people are motivated to be affiliated with the reference group or to maintain
a positive self-concept within the group (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). If an individual
perceives that a certain belief or behavior is shared among those with whom the
individual wants to maintain meaningful relationships, the individual would be likely to
commit him or herself to the belief or behavior to be affiliated with the group of people
or to avoid social sanctions as the result of deviation. By expressing desirable opinions or
78

attitudes, the individual will also gain social rewards such as popularity, affinity or a
reputation that increases his or her self-esteem and positive self-image (Visser & Mirabile,
2004).
Aligning with social influence literature in other topical areas (Rice, 1999;
Iyengar, Ban den Boulte, & Valente, 2010), the WOM process reveals two sources of
social influence: individual influence and structural influence. Individual factors refer to
variables such as personal expertise, skill, personality and psychological traits. Much of
the opinion leadership literature is exemplary in underscoring the contribution of such
individual traits on the information givers motivation and influence on others decision-
making. In this sense, the previous chapter can be considered as testing the individual
factor underlying the WOM communication.
On the other hand, social structural influence on WOM has been relatively less
studied. As Contractor, Seibold, and Hellor (1996) argue, structures have no reality
independent of the interactions they constitute and in which they are constituted (p. 458).
In other words, a meticulous investigation of structural factors requires a researcher to
know where to locate a WOM participants social position in relation with other
interactants. Given that the task to identify the social structural position of each
individual is hardly easy, a paucity of literature focusing on structural influence is not
surprising.
Nonetheless, structural factors are equivalently important to individual factors in
that our attitudes or behaviors cannot be but socially constructed (Fulk, 1993). The effect
of WOM communication also indebts itself to the message recipients socially
constructed perception toward the advocated product or service. In this sense, this
79

chapter can contribute to the progress of the WOM literature by exploring structural
influence on the WOM processes occurring through Facebook informal social networks.
6.1.3. Theories of Structural Social Influence
In organizational theory, Salanciks and Pfefffers (1978) social information
processing model (SIP) explains how an individuals perception, attitude and behaviors
are influenced not just by objective attributes of the task and his or her personal traits but
also by the opinions, beliefs, and behaviors of salient others (Rice & Aydin, 1991,
p.220). Based on Festingers social comparison theory (1954), SIP proposes that
individuals are adaptive agents to their social contexts in which social information is
produced. Several sub-processes are stated to explain how social information affects
individuals attitude or behavior towards organizational tasks to which they are assigned
(Salancik and Pfefffer, 1978).
First, social information can be direct statements uttered by other organizational
members. When an individual is exposed to the other members overt evaluation about a
certain dimension of the job, the exposure to such social information will put the
individual in the situation in which he should align himself with the others by verbally
agreeing with the statement. According to Salancik and Pfeffer (1978), the verbal
agreement may eventually convince the individual himself (p. 229).
Second, even though there are not direct statements articulated by others, the
repeated observation of others attitudes or behaviors can make a person perceive a
certain aspect of environment more prominently than before. The aspect of the
environment that the person has not been previously cognizant is recognized through the
repeated infusion of social information produced through social interactions. Not only
80

does this information help the individual perceive certain aspects of the environment,
social information also makes him or her learn how to interpret the situation through
value-laden (positive and negative) evaluations. If a negative interpretation is assigned to
the issue, the individual finally learns what needs, values or requirements would make the
job environment better.
While the direct sub-process of social information produced through verbal
utterances is analogous to the solicitation effect on compliance behaviors, the indirect
sub-process of the repeated infusion of social information resonates with the network
exposure effects found in the threshold model of diffusion (Valente, 1995) and collective
behaviors (Granovetter, 1978). That is, the point to which the infusion of social
information eventually triggers the attitudinal or behavioral change can be understood as
a persons threshold, which refers to the extent the person is exposed to others attitudes
or behaviors within his or her personal networks enough to be influenced by it
(Granovetter, 1978). Valentes network model of diffusion (1995) conceptualizes social
influence from salient others behaviors as personal network exposure (PNE) (p. 43).
Figure 6 delineates how PNE is associated with the proportion of adopters among the
individuals with whom the individual interacts.






81

Figure 6. An Example of Personal Network Exposure to Social Information

(a) social information about no one;
PNE = 0
(b) social information about one
person; PNE = 20%

(c) social information about three; PNE
= 60%
(d) social information about four; PNE
= 80%
(If the actor follow salient others
behavior at this time, the actors
network threshold is 80%)

Note. Black dotted people are the ones of whom the actor is aware as an adopter of the
attitude or behavior of interest.

Because an individuals threshold is independent of PNE, equivalent exposure
rate does not lead to a homogeneous behavioral outcome (Valente, 1995; 2005): For
individuals with low threshold levels, even a small magnitude of social information could
trigger social influence. On the other hand, others may be resistant to social influence
even with much greater degree of PNE.
82

One important issue arising with SIP theory is how to identify socially relevant
others who serve to influence individuals (Shaw, 1980, p. 45). Meyer (1994) and Rice
(1994) point out that the majority of SIP studies fail to specify who the socially relevant
others should be. According to Rice and Aydin (1991):
[Most] studies rely on a generalized other, where the other does not refer to
specified, named individuals in the local social context but to a general category,
such as "coworker" or "best friends." The reliance on such generalized others
makes it difficult to specify the exact source and mechanisms of the social
information process. The use of generalized others also assumes that the
respondent can accurately estimate other's attitudes or behaviors. However, Rice
and Mitchell (1973) found that there was no significant correlation between
subjects' ratings and the ratings of the subject's coworkers of the extent of their
collaboration or their social interaction (p. 221).

To overcome the operationalization problem, it is advantageous to incorporate a
network analytic approach to the social information processing model. As Pollock,
Whitbred, and Contractor (2000) note, adopting network analysis to social influence
studies can help overcome this operationalization problem. For example, Schmitz and
Fulk (1991) adopted an ego-network method, in which a subject is termed ego and a few
frequent communicators selected by each ego are termed alters. Schmitz and Fulk (1991)
quantified the degree of social information for each ego by averaging alters actual
evaluations about a product. Even with this specified technique, however, their approach
does not contain the full information about socially relevant others because alters were
arbitrarily chosen from within a fixed number of friends (six in Schmitz and Fulks study).
Rice and Aydin (1991) pointed out this limitation and introduced more rigorously
network-based measures of social proximity, emphasizing the importance of looking at
the multilevel structural context from dyadic relational strength to network positions and
to spatial proximity. Network analysis of social proximity was also used in predicting the
83

effect of social influence on employee turnover behaviors (Feeley & Barnett, 1997;
Feeley, Hwang, & Barnett, 2008).
The network structural effect on individuals susceptibility to social pressure to
conform has been theorized as social contagion process (Burt, 1987; Burt & Janicik, 1995;
Hartman & Johnson, 1989). Social influence psychologists distinguish the contagion
process from social facilitation or compliance process, defining contagion as an event in
which a recipients behavior has changed to become more like that of the actor or
imitator. This change has occurred in a social interaction in which the actor has not
intentionally communicated intent to evoke such a change (Polansky, Lippit, & Redl,
1950, p. 322).
Social contagion theory has been applied predominantly in an organizational
context, given the relative easiness of explicating positional structure within definite
organizational boundaries. Social contagion theory aligns with SIP in that it also argues
that organizational behavior does not arise free from social structure. Meyer (1994)
highlights the similarity of the two and proposes the incorporation of social contagion
measures into the SIP model. He specifies that contagion occurs through three
mechanisms: simple direct contact, cohesion or group affiliation and structural
equivalence mechanism (1994). Figure 7 describes how the three mechanisms are
structurally different.


84

Figure 7. Simple Representation of Three Social Contagion Mechanisms
2



Simple direct contact is the most parsimonious description of the SIP process: The
interpersonal interaction will increase the perceptual or behavioral similarities among the
social contacts. Accordingly, frequency of contacts is regarded as important; repeated or
multiple direct contacts will increase social pressure to conform. On the other hand, the
simple direct contact mechanism is simplistic in that (a) it only assumes nothing more
about the relationship with comparison others than that they interact directly with one
another and (b) it only implies an inherently dyadic perspective rather than triadic or
higher-order relational structure (Meyer, 1994, p. 1021).
The second mechanism is cohesion (Burt, 1987; Marsden & Friedkin, 1993;
Meyer, 1994). Cohesion is conceptualized as the influence occurring through frequent
and empathetic communication that increases interpersonal attachment (Hartman &
Johnson, 1989, p. 524). Interpersonal attachment triggers the attitudinal, belief or
behavioral congruence among the actors. Cohesion can be measured in different ways:

2
From Social information processing and social networks: A test of social influence
mechanisms, by G. W. Meyer, 1994, Human Relations, 47(9), p.1024, Copyright 1994
by The Tavistock Institute. Adapted with permission of the author.
85

one, measuring tie strengths or communication frequency on a dyadic level; two, a
psychological assessment about over-socialization toward a designated group; and three,
structural analysis of cohesive subgroups (Wasserman & Faust, 1994, p.249).
Structural social influence highlights the third approach. When the third approach is
adopted, one can reveal unique structural properties of a network and an individual: At
the network level, the cohesive network reveals integrated connections among the
members; on an individual level, an individuals embeddedness within the network can
be measured and used as a predictor of his or her social behavior (Moody & White, 2003).
Although three methods show different operationalizations, they are closely
related to one another. Specifically, when two actors are strongly tied, they are likely to
share mutual friends, forming higher-order interconnections together (Granovetter, 1973;
Simmel, 1954). According to Coleman (1989; 1990) and Granovetter (1985), members
embedded in such a dense network are likely to perceive a strong sense of emotional
attachment to the group and undergo an enhanced socialization process by sharing social
support and by building trust in the group. At the same time, strong group affiliation also
increases informal surveillance, privacy invasion, and a sense of obligation to group and
social pressure toward conformity, reducing autonomous behaviors. In other words, the
cohesion effect on social influence emerges under the mechanism of group affiliation.
Unlike direct contact or the cohesion mechanism, the structural equivalence
mechanism does not assert that direct social contact among members has to be a
prerequisite for social influence to occur. Instead, it emphasizes that the positional
similarity between actors results in attitudinal or behavioral similarity, even in the
absence of direct interaction with each other. The extent of positional similarity depends
86

on the identical relational patterns through which actors receive similar information. Burt
(1987) argues that actors who are in the same position in a social system are likely to be
in a competing relationship in which actors will monitor each other through a third party,
and thus are aware of each others attitude or behavior. The structural equivalence
mechanism provides an alternative perspective to interaction-based mechanisms,
suggesting that the similarity in relational pattern can determine the socialization process
as well as the existence of direct contacts (Burt, 1987).
Conventional understanding is that, by cohesion, contagion occurs between
individuals in the same primary group, and by structural equivalence, contagion occurs
between competitors (Burt & Janicik, 1995). Although cohesion and structural
equivalence are conceptually independent mechanisms (Marsden & Friedkin, 1993), they
are not in opposition to each other. While cohesion and structural equivalence are often
proposed as competing theoretical explanations (e.g. Hartman & Johnston, 1989; Meyer,
1994), real social networks often reveal that they are not always contrasting to each other.
As seen in Figure 8, Figures A and B exemplify situations where cohesion and
structure equivalence compete with each other: In A, the cohesion effect is reduced
because of unequal positional structure; in B, contagion occurs not through direct
interaction with each other but through structural equivalence in which the third party
provides both actors with the same information. As presented in Figure C, however,
certain social structures lead to identical understanding of both concepts. Figure C
resonates with Simmel (1954) and Granovetter (1973) that interpersonal attachment
emerges from integrated social structures: The network of cohesive triadic relationships
creates the complete network as seen in Figure C. In a complete network, actors not only
87

directly communicate to one another but also are positioned in a way that they are
structurally equivalent because their relational patterns are identical. In this sense, the
network in Figure C suggests that structural measures of cohesion be regarded as a
special case of structural equivalence, making identical predictions of contagion
outcomes between the two mechanisms.

Figure 8. Social Structures of Structural Equivalence and Cohesion
3


3
From Social contagion and innovation: Cohesion versus structural equivalence, by R.
S. Burt, 1987, The American journal of Sociology, 92(6), p.1292. Copyright 1987 by The
University of Chicago. Adapted with permission of the author.
88

6.1.4. Typology of Structural Influence Mechanisms for Facebook WOM: Personal
recommendation, social contagion, and embeddedness
The SIP and social contagion theories were developed in a formal organizational
context. The theories, however, are also applicable to Facebooks WOM-based social
organizing phenomena. Many social organizing practices on Facebook intend to achieve
instrumental goals such as mobilizing collective action, promoting advocacy, raising
donations, or social problem-solving. The formation and development of such groups can
be understood as an organizational behavior composed of micro-level decision-making
enacted by group members.
In the initial stage of group formation, potential members may encounter an
uncertainty to some extent in deciding whether to join the group or not. Various questions
may arise, such as whether the advocated issue is a problem worthy of their own effort, to
what extent the organizational effectiveness is expected, whether their role as a group
member is well-defined, and in what way the group activity will contribute to real life. To
reduce uncertainties, they will observe their Facebook friends behaviors. If they find that
their friends react to the group favorably, they are likely to perceive that the issue
promoted by the group is important enough to be assessed. Furthermore, if there are more
friends who show positive attitudes or behavior toward the group, the person will be
more convinced about the value of organizational action and are likely to become a
member.
Based on the SIP and social contagion theories discussed above, I propose a
typology of structural mechanisms underlying how WOM communication leads to the
group formation in Facebook. The first mechanism is the direct personal
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recommendation effect. This mechanism is analogous to the sub-process with direct
statements uttered by other organizational members in the SIP model or simple direct
contact mechanism explained by Meyer (1994). This mechanism is the most
straightforward influence of WOM communication. Simply speaking, the more
recommendations a person receives, the more social pressure he or she will perceive and
will thus be likely to comply with the recommendation. Based on the first mechanism,
H1: The more Facebook friends who make a personal recommendation about the
Facebook group to an individual, the stronger social influence the individual will
experience such that the individual will be more likely to comply with the
recommendation.
The second mechanism is the contagion effect. Individuals are exposed to social
information not only by receiving direct recommendations, but also by roaming
interpersonal networks on Facebook. Facebook interpersonal networks are the major
venue for Facebook WOM communication in that it facilitates friends behavioral or
attitudinal updates. In other words, Facebook social networks enable users to observe and
learn about others thoughts and activities through mundane social contacts, which should
produce more or fewer contagion effects. Likewise, similar to the first mechanism, the
second mechanism is also based on the influence occurring from direct social interaction.
It is differentiated, however, from the direct contact mechanism in that the influence from
this mechanism is unintentional and based on learning or imitation rather than
compliance with recommendations.
Wheeler (1966) states that the probability of contagion occurrence should increase
as psychological barriers, such as perceived cost, uncertainty toward the usefulness,
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boredom, or lame motivation, get low. For example, a lower degree of prohibition of an
action is more likely to lead to a persons deviation when he or she is exposed to others
deviation than a stricter degree of prohibition. The inherent conflicts whether to perform
online activity is usually set at a lower level than that of offline actions, because adoption
of a certain online activity tends not to demand substantial effort, cost and commitment,
or any harm to others.
Decision-making regarding online behaviors is generally based on lower
psychological barriers than offline. Likewise, the exposure to others behavior on
Facebook could easily resolve an actors internal conflict and motivate a potential actor
to go along with the advocated behavior. Based on the social contagion mechanism,
H2. Higher Facebook network exposure to the behavior will lead to a greater
social contagion effect such that an individual with high exposure to others involving in
the advocated Facebook group activity will be more likely to get involved in the group.
Meanwhile, there are two distinctions between Facebook groups and conventional
formal organizations that should be considered prior to explicating the third mechanism
of Facebook WOM. First, the organizational or group behaviors in Facebook are initiated
and developed through loosely connected informal friendship networks that present the
absence or minimal number of hierarchical superior-subordinate relationships.
Hierarchical authority has been an important factor that causes compliance and
conformity behaviors (Marsden & Friedkin, 1993). On Facebook, however, the authority
effect may be considered as a less explicit source of influence. Even if the boss of a
company is on a Facebook personal network, his authority can be exerted only implicitly
at best rather than directly affecting the activities emerging on Facebook, because the
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roles of boss and subordinate in the workplace is not expected on Facebook, the informal
social space, anymore. Therefore, vertical relationships are less visible on Facebook in
comparison with the formal organizational context.
Second, conventional organizational behaviors assume intra- or inter-
organizational competitions. Accordingly, the network advantage that boosts
entrepreneurship is often emphasized in the social contagion process. Particularly, Burt
(1987) argues that actors who are in structurally equivalent positions tend to get access to
similar resources and play common roles assigned to the position. Positional similarity
would lead actors to observe and imitate one another in an attempt not to lag behind.
Such competition induced from structural equivalence is much less likely to exist in the
process of Facebook WOM in that their influence networks are primarily composed of
friendship-based affective ties. Of course, some relationships on Facebook might have a
stake in offline social contexts, for example being coworkers in the same company. The
interests underlying offline social contexts, however, do not directly intervene in the
process of social organizing on Facebook because the causes and motivations pursued by
most Facebook activities are independent from formal organizational situations.
Particularly, the influence from structural equivalence should be even more diluted when
it comes to college students social networks whose predominant proportions are
composed of primary affective ties rather than stakeholder relationships.
The structural equivalence effect may function not only in hierarchical or
competitive relationships but also many other social contexts. Feeley and Barnett (1996),
for example, discuss that employees turnover is affected by structural equivalence
depending on who people communicate with. While hierarchical authority and
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competition might be minimally presented, the structural equivalence effect can exert
influence on Facebook. For example, it is possible that if certain information is shared by
A to B and C, the information helps B and C share the same attitude, even if B and C do
not directly communicate with each other. The structural equivalence mechanism,
however, is not explicated for further theoretical discussion in this paper due to the
computational difficulty with the vast network size. Nevertheless, one cannot assert that
the non-inclusion of this mechanism in the model neglects the implication of positional
characteristics on the social influence process. Although the proposed typology will not
convey additional theoretical discussions on structural equivalence, the prediction from
positional similarity will still be retained by considering structural cohesion. As stated
earlier, structural cohesion results in the same prediction of structural equivalence when
the operationalization is based on a complete network.
Structural cohesion is an important structural characteristic for effective WOM
because it determines an individuals level of embeddedness within a network, which
refers to the third mechanism. According to Granovetter (1985), an individuals social
action is coordinated within social networks. The more embedded an individual is within
a network, the less autonomy he or she maintains in decision-making because self-
interests are more dynamically interwoven with other members through the accumulated
social exchanges over time. Given that embeddeness implies the intensity and range of
social interactions, the extent of embeddedness on Facebook social networks can be the
indicator of the degree of social proximity an individual has with the others in a network.
If an individual is more strongly embedded in a network, the individual may be more
93

strongly affected by social proximity, and thus perceive a greater social pressure to adopt
what others do. Based on the embeddedness mechanism,
H3. Higher embeddedness will cause greater social pressure such that the
individual will be more likely to become involved in Facebook group activities than less
embedded individuals will.
Finally, these three mechanisms may reveal interaction effects on an individuals
decision making. One possible direction is the synergy effects. For example, if an
individual received a personal recommendation about a group from multiple friends and
also observed that many of his or her network friends also support the group, this direct
recommendation and contagion can produce a synergic effect to motivate the individual
to be a part of the group more intensively than either of the two mechanisms alone.
Likewise, if a person is deeply embedded in a network and observes that many others
follow the recommendation, the persons stronger sense of group affiliation may intensify
the contagion effect from observing others behavior.
Alternatively, different scenarios can hypothesize compensatory interaction
effects. For example, social contagion may be helpful to facilitate WOM outcomes only
when there is no personal recommendation effect found, or vice versa. Given the possible
scenarios about the interaction effect among the mechanisms, the existence of interaction
effects among the three mechanisms are hypothesized.
H4: There will be interaction effects between (a) the frequency of direct
recommendations and the degree of social contagion, (b) the frequency of direct
recommendation and an individuals embeddedness in a network, (c) the degree of social
contagion and an individuals embeddedness in a network.
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RQ1: If any significant interaction effect is found, is the interaction pattern
synergic or compensatory?
6.3. Methods
6.3.1. Procedure
When the experiment was designed, I assumed that the ego networks would be
independent from each other. However, in reality each egos personal networks
overlapped in a non-trivial manner. Specifically, out of 72 egos, 56 turned out to be
identified as a friend of at least one of the other egos. Furthermore, 911 alters repeatedly
appeared across different personal networks. Figure 9 compares the real structure of
overlapping ego-networks with the independent personal network structures in theory.
A non-negligible portion of network overlap could mislead positional properties
of each alter if not given proper consideration. As exemplified in Figure 7, if personal
networks were treated as if they were perfectly independent of one another in contrast to
the real structure including overlaps, vertex As degree centrality would fail to be
properly calculated because the degree centrality would be differently defined depending
on which personal network vertex A is considered to be nested in. More importantly, an
alters multiple occurrences across different ego networks imply that the alter actually
receives the invitation message multiple times from different egos.
The solution for properly considering the network overlap is to aggregate all 72
personal networks into a system-level network and use the union network for analysis. In
the process of aggregation, I removed 6 non-human vertices, including Buffalo Hillel,
Buffalo RHA, Schussmeister Skiclub, Take Fresh Galaxy Molson, UBOAC and
UB Rock Climbing. Ten were also removed due to their failure to match the names
95

with other information. After calculating the relevant structural measures, egos were
removed from the further inferential tests simply because they were not the samples to be
observed. To conclude, a total of 3,971 invitees were put into the statistical models.




















96
Figure 9. Presumed and Real Structure of Facebook Personal Networks

(a) Presumed structure of Facebook social networks, each of whose ego-
networks is independent to each other

(b) Real structure of Facebook social networks. The vertex As degrees vary
depending on where A is considered to be nested (1, if A is nested in Egonet 1, 3
in Egonet 2 and 5 in the whole network).
Note.
: edges connecting egos
: edges connecting between alters
: edges hidden until the networks are aggregated.

: e
97

6.3.2. Network Measures
Direct Personal Recommendations. The frequency of personal recommendations
an individual received was computed by simply counting the number of invitation
message senders (egos) who directly contacted the individual. Formally stated, direct
personal recommendations an individual i receives, Di, is defined as
B

= A
]
I
] ]
(4)
where A
ij
is the adjacency matrix in which the cell a
ij
is 1 if i and j are friend with each
other on Facebook and 0 if not, and L
j
the column vector indicating whether j is a
message sender (1 if message sender, 0 if not).
Social Contagion Effect. Social contagion occurs through the exposure to the
networked others. Accordingly, I borrowed the measure of PNE from the diffusion
literature as a proxy of the contagion effect (Valente, 1995). PNE refers to the degree to
which an individual witnesses others adoption behaviors within his or her personal
network. To formalize the variable personal network exposure PNE
i
for an individual i,
PNE

=
A
i]
M
]
-
i ]
A
i] j
(5)
where, A
ij
is the adjacency matrix mentioned in (4) and M
j
is the column vector indicating
whether j is a member of the Facebook group. Di is subtracted, because direct
recommenders are not the source of contagion. As evident in (5), PNE ranges from 0 to 1,
expressed as a proportion of the enacted friends to the degree of all connections an
individual has.
Embeddedness. To examine the effect of structural cohesion, embeddedness was
operationalized as follows. Specifically, an individual is understood as being more
embedded in personal community depending on the extent to which an individual is
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included in a cohesive subgroup. I utilize the concept of Krackhardts simmelian-ties
(1998) to define a cohesive subgroup. According to Krackhardt (1998), the formal
definition of Simmels triadic relationship (1950) and Luce and Perrys concept of the
clique (1940) share a great similarity. Specifically, Krackhardt (1998) operationalizes
that two actors are simmelian-tied to each other if they are co-clique members. Therefore,
if an individual is a co-clique member more frequently, he or she is understood as having
more integrated relationships with other network members. Formally, the clique matrix
C

is,
c
k =
_
1, i i is tc mcmbcr o cliquc k
u, i not
(6a)
where C is a two-mode network. Multiplication of C with the transposed form C results
in K
K = CC (6b)
where K is the co-clique matrix whose off-diagonal value indicates the number of cliques
two individuals share. The row sum of K (excluding the diagonal value) is the total
frequency of an individuals being in co-cliques.
I assume that the increment of the embeddedness effect decreases as the level of
embeddedness becomes larger. For example, the difference between a person with 150
simmelian ties and a person with 151 simmelian ties will be much smaller than the
difference between a person with no simmelian tie at all and a person with one simmelian
tie. Considering the reduced incremental rate as the embeddedness level increases, I
propose to log-transform the row sum of K to quantify the score of embeddedness of each
individual. Therefore, the embeddedness of an individual i, E
i
, is
E
i
= ln ( K
ij
+1), i
]=1
j (6c)
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where 1 is added for cases K
ij
= u
]=1
.
6.4. Results
6.4.1. Descriptive Analysis.
The union network aggregates 72 recruited egos personal networks. The sizes of
the ego network varied a great deal, ranging from 6 to 222. As mentioned earlier, after
the computation of network properties, egos were removed from further statistical tests.
Accordingly, 3,971 invitees were considered. The software ORA 2.0 (Carley, 2010) and
UCINET 6 (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002) were used to create the system-level
network and to calculate the subsequent network variables.
Among the 3,971 invitees, a total of 883 supported the advocacy by joining the
group (22.2 percent). A single inviter (or ego) contacted the majority of invitees (N =
3,060, 77.1 percent). Among 22.9 percent invitees who received multiple invitations, 648
(16.3 percent) received the invitations from two inviters, 194 (4.9 percent) from three, 51
(1.35 percent) from four, 12 (0.3 percent) from five and 6 (0.1 percent) from more than
six inviters (M = 1.32, SD = 0.68).
Beside the direct personal recommendation received from egos, 63 percent of the
invitees were exposed to other invitees who became members of the advocacy group.
Specifically, 554 invitees (14 percent) were connected to one of the supporting invitees,
356 (9 percent) invitees to two, 316 (8 percent) to three, 251 (6.3 percent) to four, 181
(4.6 percent) to five and 843 (21.1 percent) to more than five supporters. On average, an
invitee was exposed to 3.39 friends who turned out to be a supporter of the group. As a
proportionate, the mean score of PNE was .12 (SD = .13), indicating that, on average, 12
percent of the invitees social contacts became group members.
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To compute embeddedness, simmelian ties were first counted for each invitee. 14%
of invitees (N = 556) were not simmelian tied to anybody. For the rest of invitees who
had at least one simmelian tie, the variation was very large, ranging from 2 to 208. As
mentioned, the log-transformed value of simmelian ties was used as the variable of
embeddedness (M = 2.35, SD = 1.3). As seen in Table 10, all network variables were
correlated to one another.

Table 10. Mean, Standard Deviations, and Correlations of IVs (N = 3971).
1 2 3
1 Direct Contact -
2 Personal Network
Exposure
.04
**
-
3 Embeddedness .42
**
.31
**
-
Mean 1.32 0.12 2.35
(SD) (0.68) (0.13) (1.3)
Note: **p < .01.

6.4.2. Hypothesis Testing.
One evident feature of the dataset is the violation of the assumption of
independence of observations. The network properties of each invitee are non-
independent to other invitees properties within the network. For example, if actor A and
B are friends with each other, their PNE cannot be independently calculated from each
other because their friendship networks are very likely to contain mutual friends.
Given that the interdependence of cases is a frequently observed phenomenon in
social network datasets, one should be careful when performing standard multivariate test
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because the correlated data can result in incorrect statistical inferences derived from the
biased standard errors (Zorn, 2001).
Two approaches may be proposed to consider the correlated data: The cluster-
specific (or subject-specific) model and the population-averaged model (Zorn, 2001).
Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) is a representative technique for the cluster-specific
model. HLM is advantageous if a researcher hypothesizes that the covariates specific to
cluster-level should have a fixed or random effect on outcome variable. On the other
hand, Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) is the technique to assess the population-
averaged differences in outcome variables as a function of the covariates (Hu, Goldberg,
Hedeker, Flay, & Pentz, 1998). Although HLM is advantageous to model the unit-
specific effects, HLM assumes the normal distribution of random effects at each level
(individual and cluster level). GEE results in robust estimates when the normality of
random effects are not certain or the exact nature of the intra-cluster dependence is
unknown (Zorn, 2001, p. 472). I used GEE considering that the clustering in my dataset
is not clear-cut for some invitees who are affiliated with more than one opinion leaders
personal network as well as the fact that the cluster-level effect is not of interest in the
current study. GEE requires missing cases to be excluded, thus I included 3,958 invitees.
All variables were mean-centered before being put into the models.
Table 11 presents the results of the GEE predicting whether invited friends joined
the advocacy group. The result shows that those who receive multiple invitations are
more likely to join the advocacy group with the log odds B = 0.27, Wald Chi-square =
21.64, p < .001. The exponent of log odds was 1.31, indicating that the predicted odds of
joining the group changes by 1.31 times given one unit increase in direct contacts,
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holding other variables constant. Therefore, based on these results, the null hypothesis of
H1 is rejected.
In regards to H2, the null hypothesis of no difference from PNE is rejected. The
results revealed that invitees with a higher PNE toward supporters of the advocacy were
significantly more likely to show their support by joining the group: log odds B = 1.25,
Wald Chi-square = 17.48, p < .001. The exponent of log odds was even greater, 3.49 with
a large confidence interval ranging from 1.94 to 6.26. In other words, a one-unit change
in PNE increases the likelihood of being a group member 3.49 times when other variables
are held constant.
H3 hypothesized the effect of individuals embeddedness on their likelihood of
joining the group. Although H3 was not supported, the tests of interaction effect revealed
the contribution of the variable as a moderator. Specifically, embeddedness moderated
the influence of both direct contacts and PNE: for the interaction with direct contact, log
odds B = -0.13, Wald Chi-square = 4.55, p < .05; for the interaction with PNE, log odds B
= .89, Wald Chi-square = 11.47, p < .01. Therefore, H4b and H4c were supported. The
interaction between direct contacts and PNE was not significant, so H4a is rejected.
To examine further the way embeddedness interacts with direct contacts and PNE,
I reran the model with two different levels of embeddedness. Specifically, the high level
of embeddedness, calculated by re-setting the mean score as one standard deviation
above (SD = 1.3), was put into the model to see how the high level of embeddedness
affected the degree of influence occurring from direct contacts and PNE.
Comparing to the results from Model 1 in Table 11, which shows that the direct
contacts effect increased the likelihood of joining the group 1.31 times, the addition of
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the interaction term with the embeddedness increased the odds to 1.59 (Model 2 in Table
11). As described in Table 12, while the interaction effect on direct contacts was
significant across all three points of embeddedness, the interaction effect was the most
contributory when the embeddedness was low: When an individuals position within the
network is not highly embedded, the direct contacts effect increases, resulting in the odds
increase to 1.89 times given the one unit change of direct contacts. In other words, less
cohesively located individuals are more greatly influenced by the direct contact from
opinion leaders.
On the other hand, the interaction effect between the embeddedness and PNE
showed a different pattern. Compared to the Model 1 (in Table 11) that revealed a 3.49
increase in the odds of outcome by one unit increase in PNE when the embeddedness is
not considered, the addition of the interaction effect increased the PNE influence to 4.86,
indicating that one unit increase in PNE increases the odds of joining the group 4.86
times if the individuals network embeddedness is considered. As seen in Table 12, the
interaction effect is even greater for those who are highly embedded in the network: For
those who are deeply embedded in the network, the one unit change in PNE increased the
odds of joining the group 15.55 times! On the other hand, for those who are not located in
an embedded position within the network, the influence of PNE was not significant. In
other words, the influence of PNE was synergized when an individual is highly
embedded, or cohesively positioned, in a network.


104

Table 11. GEE Models Predicting Contagion Effect on Invitees Support for the Advocacy Group (N = 3958)

Model 1
B SE Wald

Exp(B)
CI for Exp(B)
Sig. Lower Upper

DC***

0.27

0.06

21.64

0.000

1.31

1.17

1.46

PNE*** 1.25 0.30 17.48 0.000 3.49 1.94 6.26

Embeddedness -0.05 0.03 1.90 0.168 0.96 0.89 1.02




Model 2
B SE Wald

Exp(B)
CI for Exp(B)
Sig. Lower Upper

DC***

0.46

0.10

22.12

0.000

1.59

1.31

1.92

PNE*** 1.58 0.35 20.80 0.000 4.86 2.47 9.60

Embeddedness -0.07 0.04 3.42 0.064 0.94 0.87 1.00

DC x PNE -1.25 0.66 3.59 0.058 0.29 0.08 1.04

DC x Embeddedness* -0.13 0.06 4.55 0.033 0.88 0.78 0.99

PNE x Embeddedness** 0.89 0.26 11.47 0.001 2.44 1.46 4.10
Note: * p < .05, ** p< .01, *** p < .001; DC: Direct contact with opinion leader(s), PNE: PNE; Variables are
mean-centered.



105


Table 12. The Effects of Direct Contact and PNE at Three Different Levels of
Embeddedness.

Predictor Embeddedness
1SD Below M 1SD Above
Direct
Contact B 0.63 0.46 0.3
Exp(B) 1.87*** 1.59 *** 1.34***

PNE B 0.42 1.58 2.74
Exp(B) 1.52 (n.s.) 4.86*** 15.55***

Note. n.s.: non-significant, *** p < .001, PNE: Personal Network Exposure


6.5. Conclusion and Discussions
Along with the popularity of Web 2.0-based communication technologies, e-
WOM is a commonly observed communication phenomenon in virtual social spaces.
While the majority of the literature on e-WOM targets its contribution to profit-driven
marketing and advertising sectors, e-WOM has also been an important communication
mode for social organizing activities such as social marketing and public campaigns. This
study underscores the potential of WOM communication to make Web 2.0-enabled
strategic communication particularly for the sake of the public good.
Social influence, consisting of individual and structural aspects, is understood as
the fundamental mechanism driving WOM effectiveness. Despite being as important as
individual influence, structural social influence has not been explored as rigorously as
individual influence due to the difficulty in accessing to relevant data. Taking advantage
of affordable online social network data, this chapter examined structural effects
occurring during the Facebook WOM process.
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Three mechanisms of Facebook structural influence - direct personal
recommendation, social contagion effect, and embeddedness - were conceptualized based
on the organizational social influence models: SIP and the social contagion model.
Borrowing the mathematical formalizations from social network analysis, each
component was measured and tested for how each component affected the likelihood of
the potential actors behavior. The findings indicate that both direct recommendation and
the contagion effect made significant contributions toward determining how the message
recipient would react.
In particular, the effect of personal network exposure was even larger than the
effect of direct recommendation. Normative influence occurs through Facebook social
networks such that people tend to follow or adopt the attitude or behavior of their own
friends. This finding suggests that the online social networks configured in Web 2.0 offer
an effective strategic communication alternative to the traditional mode of direct e-
solicitation such as sending recommendation emails or other kinds of online messages.
Such direct contacts online can be risky in that the message could possibly be perceived
as a sort of spamming that arouses a feeling of intrusiveness to a recipient. The
intrusiveness felt toward the message sender can be aggravated as the frequency that the
senders solicitation messages haunt the recipients inbox increases (Cao et al., 2009). As
advertising studies suggest, the level of intrusiveness is negatively associated with the
message effectiveness, inducing the selective avoidances against the message (e.g. Ha,
1996; Li, Edwards, & Lee, 2002; Nam, Kwon, & Lee, 2010).
On the other hand, the indirect exposure to significant others attitudes or
behaviors can effectively help an individual change his or her attitude or behavior toward
107

the desired direction. The strategic planner can maximize contagion effects by adapting
Web 2.0 strategies that boost the accessibility to social information about others
thoughts, attitudes, ideas, or behaviors, so-called interpersonal visibility (Friedkin, 1993).
Facebooks social context advertising is a very exemplary strategy that attempts to pull
the most benefits from interpersonal visibility inherent in the digital networked-ness.
Because social the contagion effect occurs in a more subtle way than direct solicitation,
the emotional byproducts such as intrusiveness, boredom, or message avoidance is less
likely to be produced.
The contagion effect depends greatly on the social-structural context in which the
person is situated than the direct solicitation effect. It is evident from the findings in this
study as well in that the interaction effect between embeddedness and the contagion
effect was much greater than the interaction between embeddedness and direct contact.
While embeddedness was not an independent predictor of the outcome variable, it acted
as a moderator for other structural effects on the behavioral outcome. Particularly, a
direct personal recommendation was more effective when actors were not strongly
embedded within the network. This finding supports the argument that direct personal
recommendation is the compensatory communication mode for social influence on those
who were less integrated in interpersonal networks thus less likely to receive normative
influence from the network.
On the other hand, the embeddedness synergized the network exposure effect
such that contagion occurred 15 times more when actors were embedded in cohesive
groups than when actors were sparsely located. In other words, the role of the structural
cohesion as a moderator was more prominent when interacting with indirect exposure
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than with direct solicitation. In this sense, understanding the structural aspect of the
WOM process is a valuable task in the Web 2.0 contexts in which WOM is one of the
most common behavioral phenomena. While this project was based on a behavioral
experiment, the social-network analytic methods applied to this project lent a good start-
up to explore naturally occurring real-life WOM phenomena on Facebook or other SNS.
The project supports the potential for Facebook social networks to be an effective
venue for strategic communication. However, one should be cautious about asserting the
significance of the impact of social context advertising on promotions of the pro-social
behaviors that ask for more commitment than simple clicking. Hart and Greenwell
( 2009), for example, argues that the influence of communication technologies on the
process of fundraising might be exaggerated. They reported that less than three percent of
all fundraising is actually done online. In addition, among various online tools, the
Facebook Cause, a Facebook application developed for the purpose of nonprofits
campaign and fundraising, raises money even less than the direct e-mail solicitation (Hart
& Greenwell, 2009). Hurst (2009), the founder of the award-wining pro-bono service
foundation Taproot, criticizes that Facebook Cause lets millions of people get on the
wall with no donation, giving away one of the few benefits nonprofits can offer
donors (n.p.).
Considering social reward as a motive is important as a public-good oriented
motive that drives social participation (Klandermans, 1984), the concern is that
Facebook-driven social organizing could impede the non-profit performance by
increasing the number of good-person-pretenders who contribute little for actual social
change. Scholars need to be aware of the tension surrounding Web 2.0, between the
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bright prospect of its potential as an effective social organizing venue and the concern
about its inane achievement. It will be the future task to explore to what extent of
commitment is expected to be stood by online actors so that social influence through
digital social networks produces a meaningful change for the social goods.



















110


VII. EMERGENT GROUP STRUCTURES ON FACEBOOK: SCALE-FREE,
SMALL WORLD, AND NETWORK CENTRALIZATION

7.1. Literature Background
7.1.1. E-WOM as an Online Community Building Practice
The previous chapters discussed the two factors personal influence and
structural social influence - that determined the effectiveness of the e-WOM process.
Both are micro-level variables that influence individuals behaviors. This chapter
explores an emergent organizational phenomenon on the macro level: How does e-WOM
communication form a social organizing process on Facebook? While WOM has been
widely viewed as a marketing effort to garner consumers awareness and purchasing
behaviors, the applicability of this communication mode is not limited to commercial
marketing.
The WOM process is also observed in the mobilization processes for other types
of social actions. For example, scholars have shown that social movements follow a
diffusion cycle in which social network effects determine the rate of movement progress
(Oliver & Meyer, 2003). During the mobilization process, many recruited participants are
socially influenced by members of their personal networks who are already activists (Opp
& Gern, 1993). The network effect becomes more crucial for collective action in the
digital environment in which movement organizations are transformed toward loose
social networks among members who gain increased autonomy in searching for relevant
information and pursuing tactics for action coordination (Rheingold, 2003). In this
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context of online activism, broader mobilization through individual activists personal
networks without institutional intervention has been noted as being even more salient
(Bennett, Breunig, & Givens, 2008). Especially along with the prevalence of social
networking services online, WOM is de facto one of the most widely adapted strategies
for social organizational goals such as social marketing, public communication
campaigns and collective political actions.
The noteworthy aspect regarding the incorporation of web services into the big
picture of strategic communication is that the audience can take an active part in the
process of communication. Web-based interactive campaigns encourage social
interactions, not only between campaigners and audiences, but also among the audiences
themselves, on which audiences can spontaneously create issue- or product-relevant
communities (Lieberman, 2001). Web 2.0 services including SNS magnify this tendency
that transforms institutionalized top-down strategic communication into a community-
building practice among likeminded end-users.
7.1.2. SNS as a Network of Personal Communities
Conceptualizing strategic communication as the process of community building
necessitates revisiting sociological discussions about how to understand community. As
Wellman, Carrington, and Hall (1988) note, community in contemporary worlds does not
merely depend on the localism or predefined socio-demographic conditions. Rather than
designating who should be members by a fixed set of criteria, community shifts from a
bounded set of membership owners who qualify the prerequisites to permeable social
networks in which the degree of social interactions with others becomes a core element to
decide a persons affiliation with the whole.
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In other words, in contrast to modern sociologists concerns about the loss of
community (for details about the sociological skepticisms on the demise of community,
see Wellman, Carrington, & Hall, 1988, p.125) and the subsequent reduction in social
capital (e.g. Putnam, 2000), communities flourish in contemporary generations.
Communities have been transformed from being densely knit, unified and locality-based
to the sparsely knit, fragmented, and common interest-based (Wellman, 1996).
Computer-mediated communities characteristically present how the traditional
notion of community is replaced with the notion of social networks (Wellman, 1996).
Scholars have analyzed online communities in relation to offline communities. Some
implied concern that the Internet decreases community by drawing peoples attention to
mediated entertainment from face-to-face social interactions or local community
activities (e.g. Nie, Hillygus, & Erbring, 2002). Others have proposed a transformative
perspective that traditional offline communities would transmute into a new nature
affected by social, political and cultural consequences stemming from virtual community
activities (e.g. Rheingold, 2003).
Between the two extreme perspectives, it seems that scholars have dialectically
converged into a supplementation view, highlighting that online communication helps the
pursuit of relational ends by adding a means of social interaction to preexisting modes
such as telephone and face-to-face contacts. For example, the majority of online women
use email to communicate with their immediate families, relatives, and close friends
(Rainie, Fox, Horrigan, Lenhart, & Spooner, 2000). Stefanone and Jang (2007) indicate
that the majority of bloggers adopt the tool as an alternative communication mode to
share personal thoughts and feelings with others within their personal networks, although
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personality traits may moderate their usage behaviors. Scholars have noted that the
Internet helps users maintain expanded ranges of weakly tied relationship, often
uncovering latent ties that might have not been in touch if it were not for the digital
connectedness (Haythornthwaite, 2002; Wellman & Gulia, 1999; Wellman, Quan-Haase,
Boase, Chen, Hampton, et al., 2003). Wellman and his colleagues (2003), who have a
supplementation view, characterize the online community as computer-supported social
networks which sustain multiplex social ties that convey information and social support
for personal life, organizational collaboration and societal mobilization.
The supplementation perspective on online communities is especially compatible
with the rise of recent Web 2.0 social networking technologies. The tendency to build a
personal community through mediated interpersonal communication is particularly
prominent along with the recent rise of SNS. As evident in its name social networking
site, the essential goal of SNS is to serve as a web platform of building a personal
community. The goal is effectively obtained through Web 2.0 technologies by, first,
easily integrating private single-sender CMC applications (e.g. email) and open
groupware (e.g. discussion boards, listserv) into a unified interface (e.g. Facebook
personal profile) and, second, fomenting networking behaviors through recommendation
systems. When the SNS is successfully adopted, the website itself becomes a giant social
network that amasses individual users personal communities.
As Donath (2007) proposes, one innovative feature of SNS is that it enables
individuals to maintain immense egocentric networks. She calls SNS a social supernet,
which makes social grooming temporally efficient and cognitively effective (n.p.). A
prevalence of social supernet is an interesting online phenomenon that encourages ego-
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network scholars to redefine the preexisting understanding of personal community.
According to the anthropologist Dunbar and his colleagues (e.g. Dunbar & Spoors, 1995;
Robert, et al., 2009; Hill & Dunbar, 2003), cognitive and time constraints have been the
primary barriers that limit the size of active personal networks. Ordinary people maintain
intimate social circles of around ten individuals in which social support and emotional
attachment are primarily produced, not because of spontaneous preference to the
particular size but because of given cognitive and temporal limitations. Considering that
SNS is a useful mnemonic and time saver for relational ends, the effective utilization of
SNS may increase individuals capacity to manage larger social circles.
Using SNS helps users to not only enlarge the boundary of intimate personal
community but also to maintain a greater number of weak ties. This is possible by
cumulating relational histories in an online personal space and by rediscovering
relationships once forgotten through a recommendation or notification system. Moreover,
as long as relationships are interwoven (e.g., a friend of mine is also a friend of another
friend), SNS unfolds its interconnected nature across personal communities. Explication
of social interconnectedness reduces anonymous behaviors and subsequently enhances
trustworthiness toward an individuals virtual actions.
In sum, the features of SNS, including the enlarged size of intimate relationships,
heightened reliability of virtual interactions, and the ability to reach a wide range of
social contacts, make this particular CMC platform a useful communication technology
for social organizing activities such as collective actions and information diffusion.
7.1.3. Social Network Structures in SNS
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On a micro-level, individual users construct and maintain personal communities
on SNS led by their psychological motivations, for example the desire of reputation-
building, self-presentation and impression management (e.g. Boyd, 2008; Boyd & Ellison,
2007; Lamp, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2007; Wang, et al., 2010; Walther, et al., 2009). The
majority of SNS studies discuss individual motivations based on the theoretical
framework proposed by traditional CMC research.
Although fully appreciating the insights learned from such literature, the
individualistic approach tends to limit the investigation to either a dyadic relational
situation or a controlled small group condition. Consequently, the individualistic
approach may disregard larger social contextual effects and structural outcomes
(Wellman & Guilia, 1999; Wellman et al., 2003).
Two reasons can be suggested as to why SNS scholars need to highlight structures
configured in SNS. The first is that, as far as SNS is a social space, an individuals
behavior in SNS cannot be purely spontaneous. Once a person is aware that the self is
embedded in a larger social context, the persons action is not solely based on his or her
free will. For example, the person might reciprocate what he owes because of the
awareness that his behavior is visible to other social actors. As much as individuals are
embedded in social networks, their behaviors in a dyadic interaction are likely to be
recognized by not only the communication partner within the dyad but also other social
relations beyond the dyads. Stated differently, social embeddedness reduces anonymous
communication and reinforces trust-building processes among community members
(Granovetter, 1985). CMC scholars need to delve into this aspect, given that anonymity
has been an important topic associated with other CMC issues such as self-disclosure,
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privacy, and disinhibition. Considering that a deceitful identity management would cost
more than the benefits if an individual is tethered to social contexts than if the individual
meets a person in isolation, elucidated interconnectedness in SNS is likely to produce a
norm of truthfulness (Donath, 2007).
The second reason SNS scholars need to look at the structural aspect is because
the collection of individuals micro-interactions results in the production of macro-level
group or organizational properties that can be properly understood by a structural
approach. Like other offline organizations (Monge & Contractor, 2003), SNS evolve
along with the emergent properties that are more than the mere aggregation of individual-
level activities. In a SNS, a very large network composed of multiplexed egocentric
communities, serves as a social world, which nurtures norms, conventions, roles and
responsibilities. The inquiries posited in this chapter are based on the idea that the SNS is
a form of social organization whose emergent properties can be captured through a
structural approach.
The analysis of network structural features helps reveal social mechanisms
underlying collective contingencies. Organizational studies have adopted network
analysis actively to examine the longitudinal evolution of group structures (Barnett &
Rice, 1985; Burkhardt & Brass, 1990; Shah, 2000; Barnett, 2001). The performance of a
certain community as a whole system may be predicted by evaluating network properties
such as heterogeneity, connectivity and cohesion. For example, Barnett and his colleague
have analyzed longitudinal changes in structures of international telecommunication
networks: When the individual uses of telephony were aggregated into a national level,
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the whole picture revealed a core-periphery network, supporting the validity of World
System theory (Barnett, 2001; Barnett & Choi, 1995).
While Barnett and Choi (1995; 2001) take a structural approach to understand
communication activity on a global level, other scholars have examined the structure
patterns within a bounded organizational or community settings. For example, Moody
and White (2003) found that the structure that emerged from the longitudinal co-
authoring practices among sociologists was a well-connected social network (or so-called
cohesive network), yet there was a large inequality in numbers of collaborators. This
network structure indicates that the collaborative networks among social scientists do
include superstars who have much more influence shaping ideas than others, perhaps
acting as pumps for ideas that are then quickly circulated through the well-connected
regions of community, generating generalized consensus (Moody & White, 2003, pp.
235-236). Some scholars investigate network structures to discuss selection and social
influence processes that govern the homophily phenomena. Christakis and Fowler (2007),
for example, indicate that obese and non-obese people clustered in separate networks
more highly than the random expectation. Moody (2001) studied friendship interactions
among secondary school students. He found that the network structure exhibits the
densely-knit racially homogeneous social circles that were weakly connected to each
other, empirically supporting the existence of racial homophily among young social
actors.
Surprisingly, however, communication scholars are hesitant in applying the
structural perspective to study the evolution of online communities including SNS. It is
partly due to the lukewarm interest in using a structural approach to look at
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communication systems among the scholars, having only a few scholars in this line.
According to Newman (2001), analysis of social network structure has been an intriguing
topic for social scientists due to its important implications for the spread of information
and disease. According to him, it is clear, for example, that variation in just the average
number of acquaintances that individuals have (also called the average degree of the
network) might substantially influence the propagation of a rumor, a fashion, a joke, or
this year's flu (Newman, 2001, p.404).
Likewise, analyzing macro-structures of the social organizing process in SNS can
contribute to the understanding of sociological mechanisms for information and social
influence diffusion process. In an applied context, specifically, this type of analysis can
be useful to assess what kinds of social processes are underlying SNS-mediated
communication campaigns: Mapping the emergent structural patterns may help locate
positions of the influentials or the boundary-spanners. Such findings may help educate
practitioners how to recruit changing agents for more effective campaign communication
with the target community (Rogers, 2003).
7.1.4. Scale-Free, Small-World Network Structures, and Network Centralization
Network scholars have found two structural topologies widely exhibited in social
as well as natural systems: scale-free and small-world networks. These two topologies
have been observed in the formation of many social organizations, such as collaborative
networks among artists (Uzzi & Spiro, 2004), the scientific community (Newman, 2001),
co-authorship networks (Moody & White 2003) and the World Wide Web structure
(Barabasi, 2009; Park & Barnett, 2005; Barnett, Chung, & Park, in press; Hindman, 2009;
Park, Barnett, & Chung, in press). Assuming that the formation of the virtual community
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in Facebook should be a process of social organizing (e.g. mobilizing collective
behaviors), I propose that the two network properties also be observed as emergent
structures in this project.
1) Scale-free Network: A scale-free network is a network type formed based on
the rule of popularity. According to Barabasi (2009), a scale-free network is found
universally across varied ranges of real networks from biological systems to computer
networks. A scale-free network is characterized as being highly imbalanced in the
distribution of degree centrality (i.e. number of connections a node gets from other
nodes). In other words, there are only a few extremely highly linked nodes followed by
the majority who have much fewer links. Barabasi (2009) explains that the emergence of
scale-free networks is based on two mechanisms, growth and preferential attachment:
The scale-free typology explains the process of network growth in which a new node is
added with its preference to attach to the more prestigious nodes. Stated differently, the
process of network formation follows a rich-get-richer model in which popular nodes
exponentially boost their own popularity as the network evolves (Easley & Kleinberg,
2010).
There are several motivations for preferential attachment in real social networks.
For the example of in-links structure of the Web, a scale-free network emerges because
users may be prone to hyperlink to popular websites because of the high credibility
attributed to well-acknowledged websites (Barabasi & Alberto, 1999). In cultural markets,
such as books, movies, and music, winner-takes-all happens not just due to the
straightforward induction from quality to success but also because consumers choice of
something particular over the competitors is influenced by others decision-making
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(Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006). The expectation of the halo effect can also be a
motivation. In SNS, for example, people are more attracted to befriend a so-called
superstar who already has many followers because befriending a popular individual can
produce a halo effect through which a person might take advantage of the friends
reputation.
Being a real social network in which such motivations are expected to affect users
relational behaviors, the Facebook social network is also likely to form a scale-free
topology. Furthermore, as in the offline context, communication activities on Facebook
can be conceived as investments to relationships through which (a person) gains
access to embedded resources to enhance expected returns of instrumental or expressive
actions (Lin, 1999, p. 39). In other words, Facebook is a social space in which users
build social capital through social interactions with their friends (Ellison, Steinfield, &
Lampe, 2008; Lewis, et al. 2008). In this sense, those highly connected are likely to build
more social capital, particularly entrepreneurial capital that is highly embedded in a
personal network consisting of sizable weak ties (Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973), than
the less connected. Entrepreneurial capital is analogous to bridging capital in that it gives
the individual the advantage of informational access and instrumental returns, rather than
emotional support inherent in bonding capital (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Lin, 2002; Putnam,
2000).
Strategic communication can be successful by taking advantage of
entrepreneurial capital of the highly connected who can exert greater social influence and
mobilize more resources than the rest of the less connected. Accordingly, when a sub-
community on Facebook is formed as a consequence of strategic communication, the
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community is likely to reveal a scale-free network structure which includes a few leading
actors who draw many new members and large portions of marginal actors.
H1: The online community formed on Facebook will show a scale-free network
structure.
2) Small-world network: Another widely observed network topology is the small-
world network. This network typology is characterized as including local clusters that are
connected by a few numbers of bridging actors. Even though members within a local
cluster may not acquaint directly with those in other clusters, members in different
clusters are able to be contacted if one passes through a few contacts. This characteristic
is widely known as six degrees of separation, which was first explored by Milgram
(1967) who experimented whether a letter from a randomly chosen local actor could
reach the unknown designator through social connections. Despite being imperfect, his
1967 study provided evidence for the existence of a short path in global friendship
network, triggering many follow-up studies across various disciplines (Easley &
Kleinberg, 2010, p. 537).
The existence of small-world networks has been empirically supported by many
real social networks, for examples scientific collaboration networks (Newman, 2001),
diffusion networks of infectious disease (Watts & Strogatz, 1998), German corporate
ownership (Kogut & Gordon, 2001), and Broadway musical collaborations (Uzzi & Sprio,
2005). Watts (1999) and Watts and Strogatz (1998) formalized the condition for small
world networks in terms of two parameters: Clustering coefficients and average path
length (the average shortest distance between pairs of vertices). Their study (1998)
identifies that a small-world network shows (a) a similar average path length to the
122

average path length of random network and (b) a significantly larger clustering
coefficient than that of a random network.
The Facebook social network is assumed to present small-world tendencies
because our personal community includes multiplexed social ties that are from different
group affiliations. Accordingly, the personal network is likely to display alters being
clustered in a few groups. In addition, some alters are likely to be affiliated with multiple
groups (e.g. if a housemate is also a church member, the housemate stretches over the
cluster of housemates and the cluster of church friends, possibly playing the role of
intermediary between the clusters). However, it is expected that the extent of the small-
world tendency will be different depending on an individuals own relational
characteristics. For example, an individual who has attended two different high schools
and transferred from one to another college will maintain a different personal network
structure particularly in terms of number of local clusters and number of friends who
traverse different clusters from an individual who has attended only a single high
school and college. Accordingly,
H2: The extent of exhibiting small-world tendency will be significantly different
among the examined ego-networks.
Small-world network scholars have argued that this network topology might
account for how quickly disease, rumors, and ideas can spread in a certain community or
society (Uzzi & Spiro, 2005). Carley et al. (2009) describe how the small-world network
is conceived by a graph theoretical approach:
[Small-world network] is a type of graph in which most nodes are NOT neighbors of
one another, but most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of
hops or steps. A small world network, where nodes represent people and links connect
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people that know each other, captures the small world phenomenon of strangers being
linked by a mutual acquaintance (p.134, capitals in original).
In a small-world structure, although the majority of actors are embedded in local
clusters and are thus not aware of others ideas or behaviors in different clusters, the
disconnected actors are not independent because they are connected by intermediaries.
Therefore, even though locally enacting, community members are able to reach general
consensus or uniform actions on a collective level. Moreover, the pace of diffusion is
much more rapid than in a regular network (with the equal distribution of degrees) thanks
to the bridging actors who shorten path lengths between pairs of nodes (Watts & Strogatz,
1998). In this sense, as a social network reveals stronger small-world tendencies, the
network is likely to spread information and social influence more promptly and is thus
easier to be mobilized for a collective action. Based on this rationale, I hypothesize:
H3: Small-world tendency of a personal network will positively contribute to
mobilize group members.
3) Structural Difference Between the Mobilized Group and the Group of Non-
actors: I mentioned earlier that Facebook as a social organizing practice is affected by
WOM communication. The hypotheses posited above assume that scale-free network and
small-world phenomenon are the two structural characteristics that are expected to be
generically observed in Facebook social networks. One remaining question, then, is what
structural feature can uniquely be attributed to WOM-based formation of social
organization. If there is a difference between strategically evolved community and
general networks formed through ordinary networking processes, it is worth highlighting
the difference and discussing the cause. To examine the structural differences, I will
124

compare three commonly investigated network characteristics: scale-free, small-world,
and additionally, network centralization.
Structural configuration of centralized network is similar to scale-free topology.
While scale free network focuses on the degree distribution of the whole network,
centralization measure highlights the discrepancy between individual actors who occupy
the most central and marginal positions. While all scale free networks should be
characterized as being centralized to some degree, there can a difference to what extent it
is centralized. Figure 10 presents two computer-generated scale-free networks that reveal
different network centralization scores. Centralization has been adopted as a useful
parameter to examine system level structures of communication networks (e.g. Barnett &
Sung, 2005; Park & Barnett, 2005; Barnett et al., in press; Park et al., in press; Lee,
Monge, Bar, & Matei, 2007).
R1: Are there structural differences particularly, in terms of scale-free, small-
world, and network centralization between a strategically-formed Facebook group (i.e.
formed through WOM) and the general structures configured in Facebook social
networks?








125



Figure 10. Centralization Comparison between Two Scale-Free Networks
Scale Free Network 1 Scale Free Network 2
Visualization

Node 100 100
Edges 341 215
Density 0.03 0.02
Mean of
Degree 4.78 4.3
SD of Degee 8.07 3.78
Degree
Centralization 0.27 0.18


126


7.2. Methods
7.2.1. Network Data for the Inquiry
The data used in this chapter is same as in the chapter 5: personal networks of 72
recruited egos who spread the recommendation messages to a total of 3981 alters. Among
the 3981, 883 alters successfully joined the advocacy group. Because egos who initiated
the diffusion were arbitrarily recruited by a researcher, they are essentially confederates
of the experiment. Given that it was in egos personal networks that the recommendation
messages were spread, it is not surprising that egos are located in the emerged
community as highly central in terms of their degrees and betweenness. Therefore, as
long as egos are put into considered, scale-free and small-world structure are highly
likely to appear because both properties assume a few highly central nodes.
Considering that egos involved in the community on the experimental purpose
rather than through naturally occurring influence process, egos and their edges were
removed from examining community structure. As a consequence, the examined
advocacy network retains only 883 alters. Figure 11 visualizes (a) a real advocacy
community with 883 nodes, the theoretically ideal (b) scale-free network and (c) small-
world network, and (d) the network with the random distribution of edges. (b), (c), and (d)
include the same number of nodes and edges to the real network.
Testing the emergence of scale-free network (H1) is based on the whole advocacy
network of 885 nodes. On the other hand, the effect of small-world tendency on the
recruitment performance (H2 and H3) is tested with each 72 ego-network as a unit of
analysis. Lastly, detecting the characteristics of advocacy community distinctive from
127

general Facebook social network (R1) is based on the comparison between the advocacy
network of 885 nodes and the network composed of alters who did not join the group, in
other words, those who were not susceptible to WOM message.

Figure 11. Visualization of Network Formation: Real versus Theoretical Networks
(N
nodes
= 883, N
edges
= 4,479)


a. Real network of interest b. Theorized small-world network

b. Theorized scale-free network d. Randomly generated network


128


7.2.2. Formalizations
Scale-free network
A scale-free network is characterized as its degree distribution following a power-
law such that,
P(k)~ k
-
(7)
in which the probability that a vertex in the network has connections with k other vertices
(degree k) in a power law with the exponent r (Barabasi & Alberto, 1999). The power-
law distribution is represented linearly when plotted on a log-log scale (Moody, 2003).
Put mathematically,
P(k) = ok
-
lnP(k) = ln(o) r ln(k) (8)
To examine scale-free network, degree distribution of the advocacy group was
computed. Then, the degree and the frequency of each degree were log-transformed to
test whether a linear relationship is established between the log-transformed values.
Small-world network
A small-world network is characterized by two network properties: Average path
length (L) and average clustering coefficient (C). Average path length refers to the
average of the shortest distance, so-called geodesic (Wasserman & Faust, 2004), between
every pair of vertices. The average clustering coefficient is the average of the density of
sub-graphs, each of which is composed of a set of neighboring vertices that are directly
connected to each vertex i, and the subsequent edges. For a detailed formalization of the
clustering coefficient, refer to the formula (2a) in Chapter 4.
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Watts and Strogatz (1998) formalize the properties of a small-world network
(with N vertices and K edges per vertex) such that:
I I
undom
~
InN
InK
(9a)
and
C C
undom
~
K
N
( 1) (9b)
Accordingly, if a network is considered as small-world, L/L
random
(L- ratio)

is
close to 1 (but not less than 1) and C/C
random
(C-ratio) is much greater than 1. Based on
these formalizations, I computed L and C of each ego-network and the expected
approximates of L
random
and C
random
of the counterpart random network of each ego-
network.
4
Exploration of the small-world network also needs to meet two preconditions:
First, every node needs to be reachable (Watts & Strogatz, 1998; Moody, 2003) and
second, the number of edges per vertex K has to be bigger than the network size N (Watts
& Strogatz, 1998). Accordingly, the examination of the small-world phenomenon was
based on the biggest component (the network in which nodes are all connected;
Wasserman & Faust, 1994) of each ego-network. The networks that include K less than N
were left out for computation.
Network Centralization
Network centralization quantifies the range or variability of the individual
actors (centrality) indices (Wasserman & Faust, 1994, p.176). If the gap between the

4
To make sure that the computed L
random
and C
random
are the correct representation
of random network properties, I generated 100 random networks including the same
number of vertices and edges to the real network and compared the mean score of L and
C of 100 random networks with L
random
and C
random
, which were computed following
Wattss and Strogatzs procedure (1998). The results were close, justifying the use of
Wattss and Strogatzs (1998) computation.
130

most highly central individual(s) and the least central individual(s) is big, the resulting
centralization score is also large.
Degree centralization measures how imbalanced the vertices are in terms of the
number of edges they have. It is formalized by Freeman (1978/1979):
C

=
| C
D
(n

)- C
D
n
i=1
(n
i
)]
MAX| C
D
(n

)- C
D
n
i=1
(n
i
)]
(10a)
where the numerator C

(n

) is the largest observed value of degree and the C

(n

) is the
degree of the vertex i and the denominator is the maximum possible difference between
C

(n

) and C

(n

). The denominator is directly calculated as equal to (n-1)(n-2). Thus,

C

=
| C
D
(n

)- C
D
n
i=1
(n
i
)]
|(n-1)(n-2)]
(10b)
Betweenness centrality is defined as the heterogeneity of the betweenness of the
members of the network. Here, betweenness refers to the extent to which a vertex is
located on the shortest path between two other vertices (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). The
more a vertex is passed through, the higher the vertexs betweenness centrality is. In a
social network perspective, betweenness centrality represents an actors ability to control
social interactions or information transfer between pairs of other actors in the network.
Therefore, betweenness centralization refers to the imbalance of individual actors ability
to control the information or behavioral flow. Freeman (1978/79) formalized
betweenness centralization,
C
B
=
2| C
B
(n

)- C
B
n
i=1
(n
i
)]
n
3
-n
2
+ 5n-2
(11)

7.3. Results
Scale Free Network?
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The mean degree of the 883 group members was 5.07 (SD = 5.61) and non-group
members (M = 16.05, SD = 19.07). Although non-group showed higher mean degree
when un-scaled, the comparison between normalized versions, which divides simple
degree by the maximum degree possible (Freeman, 1971), results higher mean degree for
group members than no-group member (for group members, M = .00573, SD = .00635;
for non-group members, M = .0052, SD = .00619). There was a statistical difference
between normalized mean degrees, t(3,970) = - 2.23, p = .026.
Figure 12 shows the degree distribution resulting from the advocacy group.
Evidently, the distribution is highly skewed, revealing the possibility of a power-law
relationship. Statistical testing showed that the observed distribution fit a power law,
showing a significant linear relationship between the log of degree and the log of
frequency in which each degree appeared: F(1, 32) = 228.60, r
2
= .88, adjusted r
2
= .87, p
< .001 (Figure 13). Therefore, the null of hypothesis 1 is rejected.
Meanwhile, the relationship is not strictly linear in that 13 percent variances
unaccounted for by the power-law. The regression analysis with an additional block
including a squared term to the regression explains 6.6 percent more of the variance,
F
change
(1,31) = 35.54, p < .001, improving the model fit to r
2
= .94, adjusted r
2
= .94. In
other words, whereas a scale-free typology plays a large part in structuring the emerged
network, additional mechanisms also contribute.



132

Figure 12. Degree Distribution of Members in the Advocacy Group (M = 5.07, SD
=5.61).

Figure 13. Log-log Plot to Test Scale-Free Network.

133

Small-World Effect on Mobilization
As mentioned above, one of the preconditions that needs to be qualified prior to
testing the small-world phenomenon is connectivity among the nodes: All nodes have to
be reachable by one another. To meet the precondition, the subnetworks composed of the
biggest component were generated from the original data of each ego-network (I term the
component-based sub-network of each ego network componet hereupon).
Another precondition for the investigation is that K should be larger than N. A
total of 68 components met the second precondition, and were thus analyzed further.
While the mean size of the original ego networks was 79.10 (SD = 53.82), the network
size reduced to 73.00 (SD = 52.45) for the components. The average number of edges a
vertex has is 14.15 (SD = 12.70). The average path length of each componet was 2.12
(SD = .52) with an average clutersting coefficient of 0.55 (SD = .15). The mean of small-
world parameter L-ratio was 1.20 (SD = .25) and C-ratio was 3.03 (SD = 1.69). Table 13
summarizes the descriptive statistics.

Table 13. Descriptive Statistics of 67 Componets.
Min Max M SD
Component Size (N) 4.00 222.00 73.00 52.45
Size of Original Network 5.00 222.00 79.10 53.82
Edges Count 8.00 9984.00 1354.15 1868.76
Edges Count/N (K) 1.53 72.88 14.15 12.70
Average Path length (L) 1.19 3.39 2.12 0.52
Clustering Coefficient (CC) 0.19 0.88 0.55 0.15
L/L
random
(L-ratio) 0.20 1.58 1.20 0.25
CC/CC
random
(C-ratio) 1.03 9.99 3.03 1.69
Note. Only the biggest components considered for each ego-network

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Hypothesis 2 posits that ego-networks will have a differentiated tendency toward
small-world structure due to the dissimilar personal background in which an ego has
formed and maintained social relationships. Two parameters of small-world structure, L-
ratio and C-ratio revealed significant differences among the components: For L-ratio, t(66)
= 39.838, p < .001; for C-ratio, t(66) = 14.716, p< .001, supporting the hypothesis.
Hypothesis 3 posited the positive effect of the small-world structure on the actual
outcome of mobilization. To test the hypothesis, I split the cases into two groups: one
showing the small-world tendency and the other not showing it. The division was based
on the theoretical parameters, i.e. the L-ratio should be close to 1 (but not less than 1) and
C-ratio should be much greater than 1. Here, I used the mean scores as specific criteria
such that a network is considered as small-world, if (a) the L -ratio is equal to or less than
1.20 with the lowest bound 1 and (2)the C-ratio is equal to or larger than 3.03.
Following this criteria, 27 networks were identified as having a small-world structure,
while 40 were not considered so.
Regression analysis was conducted with the number of recruited alters as a
dependent variable.
5
The dependent variable was coded into a 7-point scale due to the
skewness. As previously explained in chapter 4: On average, 3.89 (SD = 1.42) alters were
mobilized to join the group from the ego networks that had a small-world structure, and

5
One might argue that a sample size of 67 is too small to use as a model for the
sequential regression analysis. Given that the unit of analysis is not an individual but a
whole network, however, difficulty in data collection has been widely understood and a
relatively small sample size has also been excused. Many preexisting
group/organizational studies that explore network effects on group-level performance
conducted regression analyses with even smaller numbers of cases (and with more
independent variables). For examples, see Sparrowe, Linden, Wayne, and Kraimer (N =
38 cases; 2001) , Mehra, Dixon, Brass, and Robertson (N =28; 2006) , and Rulke and
Galaskiewicz (N = 39; 2000) .
135

2.28 alters (SD = 1.22). The regression analysis result revealed that, with the network size
controlled, the small-world tendency has a positive effect on the alters joining the group,
accounting for 2.2% of the additional variances: F (2, 64) = 61.82, p < .001, R
2
= .66,
Adjusted R
2
= .65. In other words, recruitment by an ego was more effective when an
ego-network has a small-world structure (Table 14).

Table 14. Small-world Effect on Network Recruitment (N = 67).

Model Variables


B SE Beta

t
1 (Constant) 1.137 .201

5.665
Network Size*** .023 .002 .800 10.753


F(1,65) = 115.63, p < .001 , R
2
= .64, Adjusted R
2
= .64
2 (Constant) 1.113 .196 5.674
Nework Size*** .020 .002 .715 8.571
Small-World?* .529 .257 .172 2.060
F
change
(1,64) = 4.24, p < .05, R
2
change
= .022
Final F (2, 64) = 61.82, p < .001, R
2
= .66, Adjusted R
2
= .65
Note. *** p < .001, * p < .05


Structural Comparison between the WOM-based Community and the General Social
Networks on Facebook
Finally, structural characteristics are compared to see whether there is any
difference between the strategically formed social networks and the generically
configured networks on Facebook. To do so, I compare the two social networks: the
advocacy group that emerged from this project (N=883) and the network including the
rest of the alters who did not respond to the recommendation (N= 3,087). Three types of
136

structural characteristics are examined: scale-free, small-world, and network
centralization (degree and betweenness).
While it is possible to compare the scale-free structure between the networks of
dissimilar sizes, comparing small-world structure and centralization cannot be directly
performed between the different sizes due to the measurement sensitivity of network size.
Specifically, as seen in the formulas above, the calculation of clustering coefficients and
average path lengths are not independent from the number of edges that exponentially
increases as the network size grows. Also, the maximum difference between two vertices
centrality, which is put as a denominator when computing centralization, is also
influenced by the network size the larger the network size, the bigger the maximum
difference is. Therefore, small-world structure and centralization are tested not by direct
comparison between the two networks but by the following procedures: (1) generating
random expectations of each network, (2) producing the ratios between the real and
random values for each network then, (3) eyeballing how different the ratios are.
1) Scale-free networks: Hypothesis 1 above tested the existence of scale-free
properties in the emergence of the advocacy group. Scaling in a log-log plot found a
negative linear relationship between degrees and their frequencies, supporting that the
degree distribution followed a power-law. The equivalent procedure was performed
based on the degree distribution of the social network composed of unresponsive alters.
The result was strikingly similar to the advocacy network. Furthermore, when the non-
linear term was added to the model of advocacy social network, 6.6 percent variance was
additionally accounted for. This result was also the same for the case of non-actors
network: The same amount of variance, 6.6 percent, was accounted for by adding the
137

squared term. The equivalent results between the advocacy group and non-actor group
suggest that the scale-free network is not a unique structure that emerged as a
consequence of strategic communication. Rather, it is a universal social network structure
on Facebook. Table 15 shows how similar the results are between the two networks
when it comes to the scale-free property.

Table 15. Scale-Free Structure of Strategically Emerged and Generic Social Networks on
Facebook.
a. Advocacy network formed through WOM communication
R R
2
Adj. R
2
SE
Change Statistics
R
2
change


F
change(df1,df2)
Linear .937
a
.877 .873 .51610 .877 228.603
(1,32)
***
Linear +Non-
linear .971
b
.943 .939 .35791 .066 35.536
(1, 31)***




b. Network composed of alters who were not affected by WOM Communication
R R
2
Adj. R
2
SE
Change Statistics
R
2
change
F
change(df1,df2)

Linear .936
a
.877 .876 .47260 .877 733.154
(1,103)
***

Linear +Non-
linear .971
b
.943 .942 .32237 .066 119.376
(1,102)
***

Note. *** p < .001

2) Small-World Networks: Components of the advocacy network (N = 665) and
the network of unresponsive alters (N = 2,087) were created. For a better understanding,
Table 16 compares the results from this study to the four preexisting well-known small-
138

world networks (Kogut & Walker, 2001; Watts & Strogatz, 1998): The film actors
network is a co-participation network of Hollywood actors in films. The power grid
network is the network among generators, transformers, and substations in the western
United States. C. Elegans is the neural network of a worm. Last, the German network is
a network of German firms connected through ownerships.

Table 16. Small-World Network in Facebook: A Comparison
Path Length
Clustering
Coefficient
Actual-to-
Random Ratio
Data
Source Network Actual Random Actual Random L-ratio C-ratio
W&S
Film-actors 3.65 2.99 0.79 0.001 1.22 2,925.9
Power grid 18.7 12.4 0.08 0.005 1.51 16
C.Elegans 2.65 2.25 0.28 0.05 1.18 5.6
K&W German 5.64 3.01 0.84 0.022 1.87 38.18
Facebook
Advocacy 5.57 3.68 0.48 0.01 1.51 46.48
Unresponsive 4.65 3.05 0.5 0.006 1.52 80.93
Note. The references for comparison: W&S - Watts and Strogatz (1998), K&W -
Kogut & Walker (2001); PL - Path length, CC-Clustering Coefficient

As seen in Table 12, both networks reveal similar path lengths to and greater
clustering coefficients than each respective random network, supporting the small-world
structure. In other words, the small-world network, like the scale-free network, is also a
universal structure of Facebook social networks rather than to be induced from the
instrumental communication.
3) Network Centralization: First, degree and betweenness centralization were
measured for the advocacy network and the unresponsive alters network. To compare
the centralization of the real Facebook networks to their respective random expectations,
100 random networks were generated with an equal size and density to each network.
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Then, the degree and betweenness centralization values were calculated for each random
network (Appendix I). Random expectations are derived by averaging the values.
Table 17 shows the values of degree and betweenness centralization. The actual
centralization values were not very discrepant between the advocacy network and the
non-actors network: The values of degree centralization for the two real groups were
0.0419 and 0.0473 respectively, and the betweenness centralizations were 0.0957 and
0.0579. One the other hand, the values derived from random networks showed larger
discrepancies: The random expectation of degree centralization for the advocacy group
was 0.0096 and between centralization was 0.0117, while the random expectation of
degree centralization and betweenness centralization were notably smaller for the non-
group network, 0.0052 and 0.0012 respectively.
Consequently, the ratios of centralization of the advocacy network to its
respective random expectations turned out to be smaller than the ratios of the
unresponsive alters network to its random expectations. Specifically, the degree
centralization ratio for the advocacy network was 4.3649 compared to 9.0961 of the
unresponsive network. The betweenness centralization ratio was even more remarkably
different: For the advocacy network, it was 8.1795, while the ratio was 48.25 for the
unresponsive network.





140

Table 17. Degree and Betweenness Centralization: A Comparison
Degree Betweenness
Actual-to-
Random Ratio
Network Actual Random Actual Random D-ratio B-ratio
Advocacy Network 0.0419 0.0096 0.0957 0.0117 4.3649 8.1795
(Nodes =883, Edges = 4479)
Unresponsive Network 0.0473 0.0052 0.0579 0.0012 9.0961 48.25
(Nodes = 3087, Edges = 49561)
Note. D-ratio: Degree centralization ratio; B-ratio: Betweenness centralization ratio.

7.4. Conclusion and Discussion
This chapter explored structural characteristics of the Facebook social network,
particularly with a focus on the emerged community structure led by WOM-based
strategic communication. Based on the widely known network properties scale-free,
small-world, and network centralization the structure of the advocacy group mobilized
through the cyber-behavioral experiment was examined. The experiment was to motivate
people to join the advocacy group by spreading recommendation messages through
confederates ego-networks.
The first interesting finding is that the structure of the ego-network contributed to
the communication performance. While it is not surprising that the size of the ego-
network would affect the number of alters mobilized from the ego-network, it is a novel
finding that the structural characteristic additionally contributed to the confederates
mobilization performance. Specifically, confederates could draw more alters into the
advocacy group when their ego-networks were characterized as having a small-world
structure.
141

Another finding is that both scale-free and small-world structures were manifested
in the community that emerged. A scale-free model was the most obvious in that this
characteristic explained about 87 percent of the variance of degree distribution. The
small-world network also appeared to be valid, probably playing a role in the remaining
unaccounted variance. These findings suggest that, first, the network was formed by a
handful of leading actors who not only have many social connections but also are able to
exert social influence enough to change others attitudes or behaviors. Second, the
participation motivations are likely to be spread through the coherent friendship networks,
which are not segregated yet are connected through a few of actors bridging multiple
networks. By displaying scale-free and small-world structure, the advocacy network
shows the potential to be an effective communication system characterized as having
leadership (i.e. highly central actors), member coherence (i.e. strong local clustering), and
rapidly distributing general consensus (i.e. by connecting local clusters through small
numbers of message transmitters).
Both characteristics, however, turned out not to be the unique properties
contingent on the strategic efforts for social organizing. In contrast, the comparison of the
advocacy network to the network composed of the unresponsive alters revealed that the
scale-free and small-world are universally observed structures throughout general social
networking processes on Facebook. That is, the analysis of the scale-free network
resulted in a surprisingly similar pattern between the two. Regarding the small-world
structure as well, the examination of the actual-to-random ratios revealed that both the
advocacy and the unresponsive group have small-world tendencies, although the resulting
142

ratio for the clustering coefficient was smaller in the advocacy group than in the
unresponsive group.
The fact that Facebook social networks are generally characterized as both small-
world and scale-free is interpreted as both good and bad news for communication
strategists. The good news is that the structural advantages of Facebook can be easily
adapted regardless of ones expertise in strategic planning. The Facebook social network
can be a convenient communication channel to reach general audiences rapidly as well as
widely. On the other hand, it can be bad news that structural difference is hardly found
between the networks composed of conscious actors and of general audiences. This lack
of difference can raise doubts that special investment in Facebook social-organizing
would necessarily return better performance due to the limitation of forming structurally
better networks (for example, by remarkably reducing the communication pathways, or
by decentralizing the network while keeping cohesiveness).
Meanwhile, the strategic group and the unresponsive group showed differences in
centralization. When compared to random expectations, both degree and betweenness
centralization were revealed to be greater for the unresponsive than the strategically
emerged group. Particularly, the betweenness centralization of the unresponsive group
was far more intense than the advocacy network.
One explanation for the difference is the number of isolates. Considering that
isolates degree and betweenness centrality are zero, a larger number of isolates is
directly associated with a bigger gap between the maximum and the lowest centrality. If
this is the case, one can conclude that the purposively formed network shows higher
connectivity by including fewer numbers of isolates and showing lower network
143

centralization than general social networks on Facebook. High connectivity suggests that
the advocacy network in this study must have been constructed by the spread of social
influence among connected people. In other words, the WOM communication was at
work in the process of constructing the advocacy network. The high connectivity also
implies that the advocacy group has the potential to achieve a higher level of consensus
and better unification than general networks composed of indifferent people.
Another explanation, however, is that the difference of centralization could be
simply due to network size: Isolates are likely to be produced more as network size grows.
Even if each network was compared to its own random expectation, the higher likelihood
to include isolates in the unresponsive group, which includes three times more nodes than
the advocacy group, could affect the results of greater centralization. If this is the case, it
is possible to find no remarkable structural differences between the strategic social
organizing and the ordinary social networking in Facebook and lead to the discussion of
the double-edged sword above.









144


VII. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSIONS
The current dissertation attempted to model social influence occurring in the Web
2.0 environment. Particularly, one of the most popular Web 2.0 services, Facebook, was
examined. While the majority of the preexisting CMC literature looks at the dynamics of
interpersonal and group communication by focusing on individual psychological factors,
this dissertation points out that an individuals online behaviors is not just governed by
intra-individual processing but also by social contextual factors. The influence of social
environments on shaping a persons thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors is conceptualized as
social influence.
Social and interpersonal influence has been a popular topic among
communication scholars. This dissertation adapted the influence literature developed in
offline-based organizational and strategic communication to delve into multifarious
influence mechanisms affecting online users attitudes and behaviors. Theorizing social
influence in the Web 2.0 context is a worthwhile task for applied communication studies
in that social influence is the fundamental process underlying e-WOM communication,
one of the most widely adopted interactive marketing and campaign strategies. Especially
along with the rise of social media, the WOM strategy is convenient not just for
commercial marketers but also for community organizers of social marketing, political
campaigns, activism, or non-profit fundraising.
Two important aspects of social influence have been studied: personal influence
and structural social influence. Personal influence was conceptualized as the influence
exerted by opinion leadership. Chapter 5 explored how individuals Facebook social
145

characteristics are associated with their opinion leadership. Structural social influence is
understood as social network effects. In chapter 6, I measured network structural
properties of each message recipient within the Facebook friendship community and
tested how the network properties contributed to a recipients subsequent behavior.
To theorize and empirically test social influence mechanisms, I conducted a
cyber-field behavioral experiment by having 128 confederates spread advocacy messages
to their Facebook friends. The expected behavior from the message recipients was to
support the advocated issue. The support could be expressed by joining the relevant
Facebook group. Accordingly, the collective consequence of recipients positive
responses to the message is the emergence of social organization that was strategically
formed. The project collected the data through a mixed method combining a conventional
survey, computer-generated personal network data and behavioral observation.
The summary of the findings are as follows: First, Chapter 4 examined the
characteristics of the Facebook influentials. The study found that the Facebook
influentials, at least in this project, were characterized as social connecters rather than
experts. Facebook influentials showed more active online community participation,
larger personal network size, and more heterogeneous personal network structure than
less influential others. The Facebook influentials identified in this project exerted
normative influence rather than informational influence, as seen by the lack of significant
findings associated with the knowledge-based opinion leadership. The study contributed
methodologically to the development of Web 2.0 opinion leadership literature by
comparing two different opinion leadership measures and by applying a social network
analytic technique to measure social attributes, particularly cosmopoliteness.
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The findings in this project, however, are preliminary due to the possibility of bias
induced from the experimental design. To elaborate, the advocated object in this project
was to mobilize collective behaviors for common good rather than to make an adoption
decision for an individuals own sake. The intended behavioral response was also an
easy and straightforward kind, which was simply joining the group. Behavioral
compliance can be a qualitatively different issue from attitudinal change. Given that
opinion leadership is more about influencing thoughts and attitudes, rather than
behavioral change, a stronger presence of normative influence than informational
influence could be due to the issue contextualized in this project. To ensure the external
validity of the results, future research needs to be conducted in other topical contexts.
Chapter 5 examined the structural aspect of Facebook social influence.
Considering SNS-specific context, I devised the typology of structural influence
mechanisms. Classical social influence models developed in organizational studies,
including SIP and the social contagion model, were adapted to categorize sub-
mechanisms. Three different sub-mechanisms were identified: direct recommendation,
social contagion, and network embeddedness. The results found that direct contact by
multiple message senders increased the likelihood of a recipients compliance to the
message by becoming a member of the group. This direct recommendation effect turned
out to be greater among those who are less integrated with others in personal
communities. On the other hand, the social contagion effect was revealed to be even
larger than the direct contact effect. Stated differently, a message recipient was more
likely to join the group if the recipient perceived that his or her friends are also group
members. The visibility of indirectly acquired social information is a distinctive
147

characteristic of SNS in comparison to traditional forms of CMC. The contagion effect
was revealed to be particularly large when a recipient was deeply embedded within the
community. The findings showed that direct contact complemented the social influence
process for those who were superficially embedded, while the contagion effect was
synergized among those who were deeply embedded within Facebook networks.
SNS social networks and structural social influence theory can supplement each
other. Considering that the paucity of literature on structural social influence is partly due
to the rarity of complete structural data, online social network data is relatively easily
accessible from SNS and thus can be effectively utilized by the influence scholars. At the
same time, SNS scholarship examining social influence needs to pay attention to the
structural context where social influence occurs because interpersonal visibility through
social networks is more salient than any other communication modes. Theories of
structural social influence lay the groundwork to explain the influence phenomena
occurring in SNS.
Chapter 7 is not directly related to social influence process occurring on an
individual or interpersonal level. Instead, it implies that the micro-level of social
influence process in SNS can result in organizational behaviors as a collective
consequence. The macro-structures were examined as to whether any systematic
structural pattern is observed in the emergent communication network through Facebook
direct recommendations and social contagion. The test of two well-known network
properties scale-free, and small-world revealed that, while both structures
characterized the emergent communication network, they were not uniquely contingent
on the advocacy community that was formed strategically but universally presented in
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general social networks in Facebook. Centralization analysis, on the other hand, showed
that the community built through the WOM included fewer disconnected nodes (or
isolates) than the generic social network, implying that a strategically emerged
community has the potential to form a cohesive network through which general
consensus is more easily attained than a naturally-occurring community without any
involvement of changing agents. The results are tentative, though, requesting future
studies in different contexts.
Monge (1987) emphasizes that human communication processes are closely
related with the structure of social relationships. Although seeming to be a stable
environment in which communication activities are exchanged, structure is changing
constantly as well. In other words, communication structure evolves (Monge &
Contractor, 2003). Examining the emergent network structure helps assess the
communication process within the community or organization, such as the speed, breadth
and diversity of information flow, quality of group performance and the emergence of
leadership.
Given that the evolution of communication networks from formation to
disbandment (or termination of activities although the space still exists) is prevalently
observed in an expedited way in Web 2.0., structural analysis can benefit communication
practitioners who try to incorporate the online community as a part of communication
strategies. It is a preliminary stage, however, for communication scholars to visualize and
characterize the system-level of network properties. An important question still remains
unanswered: How would each structural property be strategically advantageous in
different kinds of communication context? More empirical investigations need to be
149

made in various situations to build up the theory that foresees the impacts of macro-
structural characteristics of Web 2.0-based community on communication performances.
The project is not free from limitations. By pointing out limitations, I propose
some future research directions. As mentioned above, the first issue is the simplicity of
the intended behavioral outcome. The influence mechanisms become more complex and
dynamic when the issue at hand is more complex and urgent as a personal matter. More
complex real life cases are abundant. For example, a researcher can examine the spread
of health care information. The subsequent questions can be: How does health care
information (e.g. drug information) spread over Facebook social networks? Does the
spread of information affect a users health-related attitude or behavior (e.g. preference
for or adoption of a particular drug product)? If so, whose information provision is more
influential? Which network position is more susceptible to the informational or normative
influence? How does the word-of-mouth process affect the message recipients judgment
whether the information is correct or misleading? Besides health care, prevalent social
organizing practices for emergency response, election campaigns, collective political
action, and charity fundraising might also be examined based on the theories and methods
utilized in this dissertation.
The second important limitation is that the project disregarded the longitudinal
aspect when analyzing social contagion. Personal network exposure (PNE), the parameter
for the contagion effect, is defined as the proportion of alters who have already adopted
before an individual made a decision (Valente, 1995). Accordingly, PNE is supposed to
be measured in consideration of time period. Unfortunately, the current dataset does not
include information about the time of enactment for each individual. Alternatively, PNE
150

is measured by simply counting the proportion of adopters within a personal network by
the time the data collection was finished. This approach can lead to a misunderstanding
of the contagion process because it is possible that the direction of influence give-and-
take is reversed. Instead, a person of interest was influenced by the exposure to his or her
friends behavior, and the persons behavior could have exerted influence on his or her
friends behavior. Consideration of the temporal aspect will increase the validity of the
existence of social contagion effects.
Another limitation can be pointed out in that the study is the consideration of the
dichotomized relational aspect, whether two are linked to each other as a friend in
Facebook or not. As mentioned earlier, our personal community consists of multifarious
relational types, ranging from intimate relationships to those latently tied, to those who
are not even activated yet as relationships. Network scholars term the quality of
relationship as tie strength. As one of the indicators of network cohesion (Burt, 1987;
Meyer, 1994), tie strengths are likely to convey different levels of interpersonal influence.
While this study could not capture the quality aspect of Facebook social interactions,
Easley and Kleinberg (2010) say that one benefit of using online social networks as data
for analysis is the availability of objective information about the amount of social
interactions. Specifically, log-files can be used as a good start to explore the history of
interactions, the level of intimacy, and communication frequencies that an ego has with
alters identified in the egocentric network. Using log-files is also advantageous in that it
not only lessens egos burden to report the interactional natures about each of ego-alter
and alter-alter relationships but also minimize the perceptual error that might arise due
to the egos misperception or incorrect memory.
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Lastly, future studies can take a closer look at the evolutionary process of the
Faccebook group. A preliminary analysis found that the mobilization process follows the
recently highlighted diffusion pattern of the r-shape curve (Barnett, et al., in press;
Danowski, et al., in press). This curve indicates that the critical mass is reached in an
increasingly rapid speed, implying that a great amount of related messages are produced
simultaneously and the adoption behavior occurs with the minimal level of cognitive
learning process. Such a pattern is characteristically observed in many ICT-based
diffusion processes. It will be an interesting topic of inquiry what kind of factors drive
such mobilization or diffusion process. Possible factors are the network exposure level
within interpersonal communication networks, the crowd behavior motivated by
perceiving the increased group popularity, or the organizational credibility checked by
observing quality group activities and social interactions. Also, by longitudinally tracking
relational chains of who was influenced by whom, future studies can integrate the
evolutionary perspective into the exploration of the social influence process on Facebook.
Communication technologies have been aggressively adopted for strategic
communicators. Both commercial and non-commercial sectors can take advantage of
technology-mediated communication to achieve instrumental goals. The online social
network flourishing in Web 2.0 services is being said to have potential to facilitate the
WOM process. It is timely to theorize Web 2.0 interpersonal and social influence
mechanisms to understand the effectiveness of WOM-based communication. While the
current project adopted a structural approach to personal influence and social network
influence, inquiries on the effect of individual attributes, particularly the message
152

recipients and the message valence might also be integrated into the full story of the
Web 2.0 influence.





















153

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177

APPENDIX I. Simulation Results of Centralization for Random Networks
Network Centralization for Generated
Random Networks (Nnodes =885,
Nedges = 4479
Network Centralization for
Generated Random Networks
(Nnodes = 3087, Nedges = 49561)
Between Closeness Degeree Between Closeness Degeree
1 0.0113 0.0302 0.0079 1 0.0012 0.0561 0.0045
2 0.0106 0.0275 0.0090 2 0.0013 0.0636 0.0048
3 0.0099 0.0246 0.0101 3 0.0011 0.0602 0.0052
4 0.0101 0.0286 0.0079 4 0.0012 0.0659 0.0045
5 0.0135 0.0287 0.0090 5 0.0014 0.0622 0.0065
6 0.0152 0.0295 0.0079 6 0.0012 0.0628 0.0048
7 0.0094 0.0358 0.0079 7 0.0014 0.0585 0.0052
8 0.0107 0.0372 0.0113 8 0.0012 0.0536 0.0052
9 0.0114 0.0190 0.0090 9 0.0012 0.0724 0.0048
10 0.0119 0.0367 0.0090 10 0.0014 0.0695 0.0045
11 0.0150 0.0580 0.0090 11 0.0014 0.0612 0.0058
12 0.0100 0.0230 0.0101 12 0.0014 0.0582 0.0052
13 0.0111 0.0461 0.0101 13 0.0013 0.0582 0.0045
14 0.0165 0.0535 0.0101 14 0.0013 0.0652 0.0061
15 0.0126 0.1123 0.0090 15 0.0014 0.0674 0.0048
16 0.0095 0.0225 0.0079 16 0.0011 0.0623 0.0052
17 0.0110 0.0238 0.0101 17 0.0014 0.0581 0.0048
18 0.0133 0.0188 0.0090 18 0.0013 0.0662 0.0052
19 0.0107 0.0448 0.0090 19 0.001 0.0601 0.0052
20 0.0130 0.0495 0.0090 20 0.0012 0.0595 0.0048
21 0.0129 0.0742 0.0101 21 0.0013 0.056 0.0052
22 0.0118 0.0296 0.0079 22 0.0011 0.0593 0.0052
23 0.0115 0.0275 0.0135 23 0.0012 0.0586 0.0052
24 0.0107 0.0274 0.0101 24 0.0014 0.062 0.0058
25 0.0105 0.0340 0.0090 25 0.0012 0.0639 0.0048
26 0.0102 0.0254 0.0113 26 0.0013 0.0601 0.0052
27 0.0105 0.0264 0.0090 27 0.0013 0.0655 0.0055
28 0.0094 0.0355 0.0090 28 0.0016 0.0681 0.0048
29 0.0093 0.0442 0.0124 29 0.0012 0.0665 0.0052
30 0.0119 0.0748 0.0101 30 0.0013 0.0601 0.0061
31 0.0164 0.0311 0.0113 31 0.0011 0.0618 0.0055
32 0.0122 0.0251 0.0090 32 0.0009 0.054 0.0048
33 0.0128 0.0226 0.0101 33 0.0013 0.0564 0.0045
178

34 0.0109 0.0408 0.0124 34 0.0013 0.0583 0.0055
35 0.0098 0.0286 0.0113 35 0.0012 0.0631 0.0055
36 0.0115 0.0274 0.0090 36 0.001 0.0564 0.0048
37 0.0092 0.0362 0.0090 37 0.0012 0.0567 0.0048
38 0.0156 0.0178 0.0135 38 0.0012 0.0624 0.0052
39 0.0107 0.0264 0.0101 39 0.0011 0.0636 0.0048
40 0.0132 0.0726 0.0113 40 0.0011 0.0575 0.0048
41 0.0132 0.0451 0.0101 41 0.0013 0.0616 0.0048
42 0.0095 0.0218 0.0113 42 0.0014 0.0602 0.0055
43 0.0125 0.0240 0.0135 43 0.001 0.0673 0.0048
44 0.0110 0.0235 0.0090 44 0.001 0.0562 0.0048
45 0.0117 0.0406 0.0090 45 0.0012 0.0599 0.0052
46 0.0098 0.0479 0.0079 46 0.0012 0.0571 0.0048
47 0.0208 0.0251 0.0135 47 0.001 0.0559 0.0052
48 0.0097 0.0440 0.0090 48 0.0013 0.0554 0.0052
49 0.0124 0.0428 0.0090 49 0.0012 0.0646 0.0052
50 0.0099 0.0496 0.0079 50 0.0014 0.0623 0.0048
51 0.0118 0.0329 0.0101 51 0.0012 0.0631 0.0052
52 0.0088 0.0488 0.0113 52 0.001 0.0563 0.0042
53 0.0165 0.0183 0.0090 53 0.001 0.0622 0.0058
54 0.0141 0.0237 0.0090 54 0.0011 0.058 0.0058
55 0.0100 0.0232 0.0079 55 0.0013 0.061 0.0052
56 0.0110 0.0343 0.0124 56 0.0012 0.0595 0.0058
57 0.0121 0.0295 0.0090 57 0.0013 0.0594 0.0052
58 0.0122 0.0341 0.0113 58 0.0012 0.0616 0.0055
59 0.0096 0.0371 0.0101 59 0.0015 0.072 0.0058
60 0.0124 0.0442 0.0090 60 0.0012 0.0578 0.0052
61 0.0118 0.0501 0.0090 61 0.0013 0.062 0.0068
62 0.0172 0.0658 0.0090 62 0.0012 0.0669 0.0068
63 0.0096 0.0892 0.0090 63 0.0014 0.0612 0.0058
64 0.0104 0.0132 0.0101 64 0.0012 0.0655 0.0048
65 0.0114 0.0739 0.0090 65 0.0015 0.0623 0.0061
66 0.0130 0.0324 0.0090 66 0.0016 0.0615 0.0061
67 0.0094 0.0282 0.0090 67 0.0012 0.0611 0.0048
68 0.0099 0.0258 0.0090 68 0.0014 0.0595 0.0052
69 0.0155 0.0377 0.0101 69 0.0013 0.0582 0.0048
70 0.0093 0.0616 0.0079 70 0.0013 0.0707 0.0052
71 0.0139 0.0211 0.0113 71 0.0011 0.064 0.0055
72 0.0128 0.0270 0.0090 72 0.0011 0.0595 0.0061
179

73 0.0103 0.0341 0.0090 73 0.0011 0.0558 0.0045
74 0.0102 0.0431 0.0079 74 0.0011 0.0625 0.0058
75 0.0115 0.0503 0.0090 75 0.0011 0.0631 0.0048
76 0.0112 0.0415 0.0090 76 0.0018 0.0562 0.0052
77 0.0092 0.0275 0.0079 77 0.0015 0.0662 0.0055
78 0.0108 0.0393 0.0101 78 0.0011 0.0588 0.0048
79 0.0102 0.0214 0.0090 79 0.0011 0.0674 0.0048
80 0.0120 0.0389 0.0079 80 0.0013 0.0644 0.0065
81 0.0105 0.0375 0.0101 81 0.0013 0.0663 0.0048
82 0.0134 0.0299 0.0079 82 0.0011 0.0652 0.0052
83 0.0125 0.0186 0.0135 83 0.0011 0.0586 0.0052
84 0.0162 0.0429 0.0090 84 0.0015 0.0698 0.0048
85 0.0098 0.0221 0.0113 85 0.0012 0.0592 0.0052
86 0.0123 0.0168 0.0090 86 0.0016 0.0701 0.0048
87 0.0107 0.0217 0.0090 87 0.001 0.0613 0.0052
88 0.0108 0.0815 0.0090 88 0.0012 0.0625 0.0052
89 0.0127 0.0545 0.0090 89 0.0011 0.0555 0.0048
90 0.0099 0.0446 0.0090 90 0.0012 0.0618 0.0052
91 0.0143 0.0295 0.0101 91 0.0012 0.0615 0.0052
92 0.0095 0.0320 0.0101 92 0.0014 0.0635 0.0052
93 0.0096 0.0343 0.0079 93 0.001 0.0584 0.0058
94 0.0110 0.0205 0.0079 94 0.0011 0.0619 0.0052
95 0.0128 0.0399 0.0090 95 0.0015 0.0603 0.0048
96 0.0107 0.0793 0.0113 96 0.0011 0.0615 0.0045
97 0.0123 0.0515 0.0090 97 0.0014 0.0604 0.0055
98 0.0145 0.0393 0.0101 98 0.0014 0.0612 0.0058
99 0.0106 0.0346 0.0079 99 0.0012 0.0577 0.0048
100 0.0102 0.1036 0.0101 100 0.0015 0.0678 0.0055
Avg. 0.0117 0.0382 0.0096 Avg. 0.0012 0.0615 0.0052
Real 0.0957 0.0019 0.0419 Real 0.0579 0.0008 0.0473
Ratio 8.1795 0.0500 4.3646 Ratio 48.2500 0.0130 9.0961