Indicators of opinion leadership in customer networks: self-reports and degree centrality

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Indicators of opinion leadership in customer networks: self-reports and degree centrality Hans Risselada 1 & Peter C. Verhoef 1 & Tammo H. A. Bijmolt 1

# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract In this paper, we assess two alternative indicators of opinion leadership, selfreported opinion leadership and degree centrality, on the same dataset. We also investigate the interaction effect of these two indicators and the social network environment on opinion leadership. We use social network and survey data from the mobile telecom industry to analyze opinion leadership in smartphone adoption. We find that degree centrality indicates opinion leadership, but that self-reported opinion leadership indicates opinion leadership only under the right social circumstances. In case of weak to moderate network ties, the effect of self-reported opinion leadership is not significant. However, self-reported opinion leaders more effectively influence their strong ties. This study sheds light on indicators of opinion leadership and provides insights for managers to improve their social marketing campaigns. Keywords Social network data . Opinion leadership . Adoption

1 Introduction A large body of research supports the impact of social influence, i.e., customers affect the behavior of others in their social network (e.g., Giudicati et al. 2013; Haenlein 2011; Nitzan and Libai 2011). What remains unclear is how to assess opinion leadership or disproportionate social influence (Godes 2011). Its accurate assessment is

* Hans Risselada [email protected] Peter C. Verhoef [email protected] Tammo H. A. Bijmolt [email protected] 1

Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Marketing, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, NL-9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands

Mark Lett

imperative for successful implementation of social network marketing campaigns (e.g., viral campaigns). Previous literature suggests two types of indicators of opinion leadership suitable for large customer networks, namely objective measures based on network characteristics (e.g., degree centrality) and subjective measures based on self-reports (Van den Bulte 2010). Multiple studies have shown that network characteristics are related to opinion leadership (Delre et al. 2010; Katona et al. 2011). There is less evidence for selfreported opinion leadership as an indicator (Eck Van et al. 2011; Kratzer and Lettl 2009). In particular, it is unclear to what extent self-reported opinion leadership is an indicator of opinion leadership over and above the network characteristics. Furthermore, little is known about whether and how these two indicators and the consumer’s position in the network may jointly indicate opinion leadership. In this study, we empirically investigate opinion leadership among customers of a mobile telecom operator. We constructed a dataset consisting of network and survey data enabling us to investigate both network characteristics and self-reported opinion leadership as indicators of opinion le