Publication Date

2013-04-22

Availability

Open access

Embargo Period

2013-04-22

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Public Relations (Communication)

Date of Defense

2013-04-08

First Committee Member

Shannon Campbell

Second Committee Member

Don Stacks

Third Committee Member

Thomas M. Steinfatt

Abstract

Two movies, The Hunger Games and Titanic 3D, received great box office success in the U.S. and China separately, owing to their promotion activities in respective SNSs. Considering these two countries belong to two different cultures, high/low-context cultures and reflect different cultural values, individualism/collectivism, the researcher proposed four hypotheses to test if cultural factors play an important role in SNS use including information seeking and giving behavior, imagery and text use, and the employment of emotional expressiveness. Textual analysis was used to study users posts in Twitter and Sina Weibo, corporate wall posts in Facebook and Renren. Results confirmed that high-context culture, China in the study, engaged more in information seeking and less in information giving than low-context culture, the U.S. Meanwhile, high-context culture took advantage of more imagery and emotional expressiveness. Only the significant difference was not found in text use between two cultures. These findings not only confirmed culture’s crucial impact on the adoption of the SNS, but also shed light on how PR practitioners can utilize these insights to develop their skill and technique of SNS use, and marketing strategy.

Keywords

movie promotions; social network sites; high/low-context context; information giving/seeking; emotional expressiveness; textual analysis

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