Study on communication mechanism and theoretical model of negative word-of-mouth on social media

Because of its open and interactive characters,social media has become an important platform for consumers spreading their word-of-mouth freely. By means of an analysis structure based on the information spreading process and the key nodes of communications,a conclusion has been made that the negative word-of-mouth spreads on social media in three different ranges as the individual range,the group range and the media range. According to social network theory,the six degrees of separation theory,the self-organizing theory and the long tail theory,three models which explore how negative word-of-mouth spreads on social media have been proposed,such as the communication unit model which focus on the individual social network of consumers,the self-organized spreading model which looks social media as an information carrier,as well as the word-of-mouth spreading model which discusses negative word-of-mouth spreading in a cross-media background. Moreover,the communication unit model reveals the importance of the kinds of word-of-mouth suppliers,the manners of presentation and the relationship between the recipients and the suppliers. The self-organized spreading model explains how the negative word-of-mouth spreading manner transforms from disorder to order through network rules and interpersonal rules on social media. The word-of-mouth spreading model reflects the different roles of a user of social media and the coopetition between different media,and it also explains systematically the internal mechanism why the negative word-of-mouth can become more and more destructive on social media.