Crosscultural Online Communication
External communication: controlled information stream, marketer generated content (past) —>
less controlled information stream, consumer generated content (now).
E-WOM: electronic word of mouth.
—> E-WOM is one-to-many, asynchronous (meaning that you can still read it years later; it is
independent of time) communication.
—> The credibility of the source relies on the perceived expertise and the perceived
trustworthiness of the review.
—> For example, laypersons have little expertise but are more trustworthy.
—> A rated expert is both trustworthy and are perceived as having a high level of expertise.
—> E-WOM is more influential than traditional WOM, because of its speed, comfort, its one-to-
many format and its absence of face-to-face pressure.
Different types of E-WOM users:
• Opinion leaders: ‘posters’ or ‘e-fluentials’.
• Opinion followers: ‘lurkers’.
—> The 90-9-1 principle for users: 90% is a lurker, 9% is an intermittent contributor and 1% is a
heavy contributor.
—> The 90-9-1 principle for posts: 90% is a heavy contributor who makes up most of the posts,
10% is an intermittent contributor and 0% is a lurker (because they don’t post at all).
—> Conclusion: only 1% of users contribute heavily and are responsible for 90% of the posts.
Motivations to post reviews:
• Ego-focused motivations: self-presentation (to the outside) & when you have been disadvantaged
and want revenge.
• Socially focused motivations: helping others & desire for social interaction.
Positive movie-related tweets get retweeted 15-20% more often: so this implies that positive
reviews occur more often on the internet.
The effect of the review may depend on the type of product.
—> For example, positive reviews are seen as more valuable for products for which the quality of
information is easy to evaluate before purchase.
—: For example, negative reviews are seen as more valuable for products for which the experience
is more important than product characteristic.
Implications for organizations:
• Online reputation management: monitoring your image/reputation.
• Webcare: reading and active on negative messages.
—> It entails directly responding to negative review and the overall audience, ensuring
complainers to stop complaining and showing that the company responds adequately.
—> Best method to do webcare: mediated immediacy.
—> Mediated immediacy: has to be immediate (through the same channel, so public), as soon as
possible (timely), and personal (signed, first person).
• Automatic sentiment analysis: what is the overall company sentiment?
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,Automatic analysis of reviews (also called opinion mining / sentiment analysis): a computer
evaluates subjective information by scanning positive/negative words, such as ‘very nice’.
—> Limitations: it has difficulty with jargon, emojis, sarcasm, abbreviations, new words, and irony.
—> For example, fake reviews often rely more on superlatives (exaggerated language) to describe
experiences and focus more on external aspects. A computer who has been instructed to pay
attention to these aspects could then, in the future, maybe deduct whether a review is fake or not.
—> This automatic analysis of e-WOM is still in the very early phases.
Lecture 2: Intercultural differences in communication
Model of influence of culture
• Culture can be defined in terms of dimensions, norms, values, ideology, and belief system.
• Individual can be defined in terms of personality, feeling, thinking, attitude, intentions.
• E-WOM communication can be defined in terms of genre, conventions and language use
Hall’s categories:
• Proxemics: people from different cultures perceive space differently.
• Monochronic vs. polychronic: monochronic cultures emphasize order, schedules and
promptness, while polychronic cultures allow multiple things happening at one and they stress
completion of transaction.
• High vs. low context cultures: high-context cultures is about implicit communication which
relies heavily on context, while low-context cultures is about explicit verbal communication (so
they actually say what they mean, unlike high-context cultures).
—> High-context cultures: value harmony, hierarchical values, non-verbal cues; e.g. Japanese.
—> Low-context cultures: value honesty, assertiveness, candidness, direct speech; e.g. US.
Criticism of Halls categories:
• His research mainly uses qualitative methods based on observations (often based on one specific
case), and the method is not documented.
• His concepts are somewhat ambiguous, there is a lack of comparative quantitative data and it has
limited validation.
Hofstede’s models:
• Onion: has values in the middle core of it, being the hardest to find out without being in the
culture, following practices, rituals, heroes and symbols.
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, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (dichotomies, which means it consists of two categories, & indices):
• Individualism vs. collectivism: whether people’s self-image is defined in terms ‘I’ or ‘we’.
• Masculinity vs. femininity
—> Masculinity: preference for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material rewards for
success. Society is more competitive.
—> Femininity: preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak, and quality of life.
• Long term vs. short term normative orientation (LTO)
—> Long: pragmatic approach; encourage thrift and efforts in modern education as a way to
prepare for the future.
—> Short: maintain time-honoured traditions and norms, view societal change with suspicion.
• Indulgence vs. restraint
—> Indulgence: free gratification of basic and natural human drives (enjoying life and having
fun).
—> Restraint: suppression of gratification of needs, regulated by strict rules.
• Power distance index: degree to which the less powerful members of a society accept and expect
that power is distributed unequally.
• Uncertainty avoidance index: degree to which members of a society feel uncomfortable with
uncertainty and ambiguity, e.g. weak UAI has a more relaxed attitude, strong UAI has rigid codes
of belief and behavior.
Criticism of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions:
• Fallacy of cultural attribution: ‘I encounter a difference, therefore this is a cultural difference.’
• Hofstede defined cultures by nations or language, which
• He assumed that national culture is homogeneous.
• He only looked at employees from only one company (namely IBM).
• The data is outdated: culture doesn’t stand still.
• The questionnaire is limited.
• In-built western bias: the dimensions are chosen from a western point of view.
Consequences of this criticism:
• Take the dimensions as hypotheses, not necessarily as explanatory factors.
• Be aware of points of criticism and mention them.
• Express findings in terms of relativity, use relative terms.
• Make many observations instead of only one.
Text 1: Verbal Communication Styles - Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey
Children are learning values and norms through language.
—> They learn what and who is important (e.g. being polite, certain roles, guilt, correctness…),
how this importance is emphasized and where this importance is emphasized.
—> ‘Verbal interaction styles reflect and embody the affective, moral and aesthetic patterns of a
culture.’ —> This contextualizes how messages should be interpreted.
—> Stylistic mode: ‘tonal coloring given to spoken performance, their feeling tone’.
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