THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION OPINION LEADERS AND SEEKERS IN ONLINE BRAND COMMUNITIES: CENTERED ON KOREAN DIGITAL CAMERA BRAND COMMUNITIES By

In extending the theories of opinion leadership and seeking to the online environment, this study sought to explore whether the established theories for the offline environment would also help us understand opinion leadership in the online world. The tests of hypotheses revealed consistent patterns of opinion leadership and seeking behaviors across the online and offline environments. However, these tests resulted in insignificant relationships between online opinion seeking and offline opinion leadership levels. Furthermore, the hypothesized negative relationship between online opinion leadership and offline seeking was not only not supported, but was contradicted. That is, those who had a high level of opinion seeking in the offline environment also displayed high levels of opinion leadership in the online environment. The current study also demonstrated that some psychological characteristics such as consumer expertise, domain-specific innovativeness and media habits, as well as attitudes toward online brand communities, were significant predictors for opinion leadership in the online environment. In addition to opinion leadership, the current study explored traits of opinion seeking, suggesting that people with a high level of opinion seeking may exhibit different characteristics and behaviors from what opinion leaders exhibit.