Opinion Leader

Related terms:
Mobile Device, Social Networks, Intranets, Degree Centrality, Flow Model,
Cognitive Walkthroughs, Diffusion Process, Influence Model

Opinion Leader Detection

P. Parau, ... R. Potolea, in Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks, 2017

2 Problem Definition
Opinion leaders are individuals who exert a significant amount of influence within
their network and who can affect the opinions of connected individuals. Opinion
leaders play an important role within the two-step flow of communication model,
where information is transferred from the mass media to the public in two steps:
first, from the media to opinion leaders and then from opinion leaders to the
larger audience [1]. The two-step flow is therefore relevant to the process of
influencing and changing people’s opinions [2]. According to Katz [1], the following
three factors impact the status of opinion leadership: (1) personification of certain
values, (2) personal competence, and (3) strategic social location. The status of
opinion leadership might change with time and different individuals may be
opinion leaders in different domains.
There are many domains in which information can be disseminated more
effectively when opinion leaders are targeted. For instance, in the medical field,
detecting opinion leaders has been used to raise awareness and promote new and
effective treatments [3], as in HIV prevention or child health promotion [4]. Climate
change awareness campaigns have also relied on opinion leaders to effectively
disseminate information [5]. Two such examples are campaigns led by Al Gore in
the mid-to-late years of the first decade of this century that involved selecting
opinion leaders to give presentations and inform the larger public on climate
change issues. Opinion leader identification is also of interest in advertising,
marketing, and product adoption [3], where companies are interested in attracting
potential clients to their products as effectively as possible. Political campaigns can
also benefit from identifying and targeting opinion leaders, as evidenced by the
2004 US presidential election campaign of George W. Bush, where opinion leaders
were selected to promote the campaign [5]. Knowing who the opinion leaders are
can yield benefits in a variety of domains, which makes their correct and efficient
identification a very important task.
Traditionally, sociological approaches rely on manual or explicit collection of leader
information via questionnaires or interviews [1]. A survey covering 191 articles in
the field of sociology found that the main strategies for leader identification are
distributed as follows: 19% use sociometric methods, 13% use self-selection, 12%
use positional approaches, 11.5% use judges’ ratings methods, and the rest do not
reveal the identification mechanism [6]. Such approaches possess several
drawbacks: On one hand, self-reported information is subjective by nature and
self-claimed influence is likely to be a reflection of self-confidence [3]. Having an
objective assessment of opinion leadership would lead to more reliable methods of
finding leaders. On the other hand, sociological studies are limited in scope by the
resources needed to undertake them; having scalable algorithms that can
accurately identify opinion leaders allows us to take advantage of the ever-growing
quantities of social data generated on the Internet. Thus methods that rely on
network science and data mining techniques to identify opinion leaders have been
developed, and such approaches are the focus of this chapter.

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Using opinion leaders on Twitter to amplify PR and

marketing messages
Sarah H. VanSlette, in The Plugged-In Professor, 2013

Variations on the basic theme

The opinion leaders who students identify on Twitter may also have Facebook
pages and/or a blog. While it may lead to a more difficult evaluation at the end,
students could attempt to engage general followers as well as opinion leaders
using a myriad of social media tools: tweeting about the campaign on Twitter;
posting comments on their Facebook walls and by posting comments on the walls
of opinion leaders; blogging about the campaign while leaving comments on the
opinion leaders’ blogs, etc. This broader approach to the campaign could utilize
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, Flickr, WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, etc. The
students could use as many social media tools as they can manage.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9781843346944500259

Influence: Social
Y. Ito, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2 Personal Influence
The ‘opinion leader’ mentioned above refers not only to professional opinion
makers such as journalists, critics, and university professors but to all men and
women who influence others around them on a daily basis, in some specific area,
such as local politics, fashion, sports, travel, medical care, or even cooking. These
opinion leaders are often asked for advice by people who look up to them. To meet
such expectations, they expose themselves to the mass media more extensively
than their followers. Opinion leaders compare and evaluate opinions and
information that is first presented by the mass media. As a result, the influence of
mass media first takes place among opinion leaders who in turn regurgitate their
latest batch of news to their followers in the form of guidance or advice. Even if a
person's opinion is shaped by the mass media, that opinion may be quickly
replaced by that of an opinion leader because such people's opinions are trusted
more by their followers than are those of the mass media. This process is called the
‘two step flow’ of social influence (Lazarsfeld et al. [1944] 1968).
Another explanation for this ‘personal influence’ is provided by the ‘cognitive
consistency theory.’ According to this theory, people are affected by those whom
they like because the cognition that one likes someone and the cognition that one's
opinion is different from theirs is psychologically inconsistent and therefore
uncomfortable. In such a case, it is predicted that people would change their
opinion of, or attitudes toward, the person in question (Festinger 1957, Heider
1958, Newcomb 1953).

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NGOs' Communication and Youth Engagement in the
Digital Ecosystem
M.C. García-GaleraC. Fernández MuñozJ. Del Olmo Barbero, in Social Network
Analytics, 2019

5.2 The Role of Influencers

In this digital and participatory context, the so-called “influencers” play a decisive
role, either in a call to action offline or online. Resorting to leaders and opinion
makers—YouTubers, bloggers—to inform young audiences in an alternative way
about their campaigns and the problems they pose is very important. Some NGOs
turn to YouTubers and bloggers, but also to famous artists—celebrities—as a
formula for disseminating their campaigns and for getting their message to young
people.
These opinion leaders are people who are trusted by young people, who have
become role models for the prestige acquired in their online activity, which is
endorsed, by thousands of followers registered in their accounts or YouTube
channels. With these influential people, NGOs take advantage of the ability of
these people to reach extensive youth audiences, which otherwise would be
impossible to access through the institutional messages of these organizations:
We use several formulas, and the one that is working for us now is to collaborate
with the so-called ‘influencers’; what we are looking for are YouTubers.
Fundación Garrigou
We work with people who we believe have a special sensitivity; it is not enough for
us to tell you something, but you need to hear it from someone you trust. A
blogger you like, or an Instagrammer you follow.
Greenpeace
They have another way of communicating. Also, these people really do it like that,
and they get five thousand clicks of ‘I like it’ with just a photo of them shaking their
hair around. Yes, really, five thousand clicks on ‘I like it’! Do you know what you
have to do to get five thousand ‘I like it’ clicks? It's like building the El Escorial
Palace complex, one of the Spanish royal sites built during the 16th and 17th
centuries. Our NGO, as an organization, cannot tweet something and have the
same impact on networks. At that level of response, and with those ages, there's no
way!.
Cooperación Internacional
When choosing the protagonists for their campaigns, NGO leaders look for people
with the following characteristics: first, they must be endowed with sensitivity, a
special style, an ability to reach young people in a different way. Second, they need
to be interested in the campaigns promoted by the NGO and be willing to offer
their services without an interest in personal gain:
Zero euros, eh! We haven’t paid even one single euro. They do it for free.
Greenpeace
However, this is not true in all cases. The recruitment by organizations of opinion
leaders for their campaigns is not always possible on a volunteer basis, as some
bloggers and YouTubers demand economic compensation in exchange for their
involvement:
In our case, the bloggers charge us. At least they want to charge us, but we don’t
pay them. That's why we don’t have bloggers. But YouTubers, for example,
collaborate and don’t charge us for their services.
Cooperación Internacional
We try to put ourselves at their level, and also try to understand what is happening:
they don’t watch television or listen to the radio, but they use YouTube. It's a world
where the You Tuber comes to you and asks for three thousand Euros for
mentioning you in a video, and it's like noooo way!.
Unicef
In general, the communication they establish with young, potential participants in
their campaigns is more effective if not only the organization sends the message,
but also people of their generation. This people have a special and unique way of
presenting their message, a narrative that allows for communication and
connection with young people in their own language, with their values, concerns,
problems, lifestyles, and their own way of speaking and acting:
They [the influencers] don’t explain things the way we do; their language is not the
same as ours. They have a way of expressing things, of reaching people. And only
through them can it be done.
Fundación Garrigou
The way influencers communicate the message is nothing like other ways of
presenting the issue. So what they are doing is [establishing special
communication]: ‘Hey, this is my lifestyle. Look how great it is! Adopt my way of
life.
Greenpeace

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Health Interventions: Community-based

J.W. Farquhar, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,
2001

3 Intervention Principles, Methods, and Resources Needed for

Success
3.1 Acceptance
Both relevant organizations and political and opinion leaders must be recruited
into a coalition that sanctions any novel health education project. This coalition
must identify the health problem (needs assessment), provide a resource inventory,
obtain populace support, and plan the intervention.
3.2 Comprehensive
Interventions must go beyond attempting to change knowledge, the usual goal of
an educational system, by providing training in behavior-change skills. They must
also go well beyond the individual, enlisting multiple community organizations in
campaigns for change and seeking changes in the social environment and in
regulations that promote access to the facilities and resources needed for healthful
practices. Multiple communication channels (i.e., both mediated and face-to-face)
are needed to reach different audiences, recognizing their preferences, stage of
knowledge, and readiness for change.
A comprehensive intervention should involve schools, work sites, churches, and
facilities for sport, recreation, and health. These organizations and others can serve
as education conduits, with the community's electronic and print mass media
organizations assisting in message design and delivery. The Internet provides a
new channel, whose community education role is as yet poorly defined. Interactive
computer learning, now becoming common in classrooms, can be designed for
large groups—an emerging variant of mass media.
3.3 Variety
Comprehensiveness requires variety. For example, in tobacco control components
of Stanford's CVD campaigns, local medical clinics, dental offices, pharmacies, and
libraries distributed a low-cost skills-training Quit Kit; a local smoking cessation
class, was shown on television; many newspaper articles and columns appeared; a
local business supported costs of a smoking cessation contest; and all newspapers
and electronic media ‘cross-advertised’ activities designed for mass audiences.
3.4 Integration
Success requires an appropriate mix and sequence of programs delivered through
varied channels. This integration, with goals set in advance and goal changes based
on early results, is analogous to a commercial marketing campaign, hence the term
‘social marketing.’
3.5 Message Design and Audience Segmentation
Social marketing requires message tailoring to fit each subgroup's needs and
preferences, taking into consideration cultural differences, learning styles, and
preferred learning sites. A message sequence should increase awareness, then,
increase knowledge, and last, increase motivation and provide training in the skills
needed for adoption and maintenance of a new behavior (Bandura 1986).
Electronic media can carry out the first two parts of this sequence and stimulate
use of the more information-dense print media of newspapers and booklets, which
are inherently more effective in skills training than are electronic media (Flora et al.
1997).
Messages must be clear, focused, and salient. Salience requires broad reaching
media, arousing interest and awareness—topics must break through passive
indifference engendered by the information overload of many societies and
become ‘on the public agenda.’ Given the large advertising budgets of today's mass
media, health agencies' messages must be of sufficient production quality to
compete for the public's attention.
3.6 The Message Must be Effective
Behavioral research confirms the rather self-evident rule that ‘learning by doing’ is
more effective than ‘learning from observing’ (modeling a behavior), and both are
more effective than an ‘information-only’ approach that changes knowledge alone.
These principles are contained in Bandura's social cognitive theory, which posits
that guided practice in a new behavior can lead to increased self-efficacy and to
greater behavior change (Bandura 1986). Thus, ‘knowledge-only’ campaigns have
been found less effective than those that apply Bandura's recommendations (see
Self-efficacy and Health).
3.7 Intervention Dose
The dose needed depends on many factors: lesser amounts are needed in smaller
communities, at earlier stages in a country's adoption of a ‘health innovation,’ and
when the advocated behavior change is reasonably simple (such as mammography
and hypertension screening and immunization campaigns). Clearly, more complex
changes are needed in individuals and in society's norms to alter eating or exercise
patterns or to control tobacco use. Complexity in respect to nutrition arises from
many sources, including long-standing cultural beliefs and practices; entrenched
methods in agriculture, food production, and retailing; advertising of ‘unhealthful’
foods; and the advent of widespread fast-food chains that are dominated by
commercial interests unresponsive to local demands and needs.
Few projects have measured intervention dose. One excellent method records the
total number and duration of messages distributed over a defined time period,
albeit with a defect due to lack of message quality measures (Farquhar et al. 1990).
However, even this rough method, were it widely adopted, would be of great value
to public health practitioners.
3.8 Role of Activism and Advocacy
Successful community-based health education requires effective leaders,
community activists with the courage and charisma to advocate health innovations.
Waves of advocacy filtering down from international, national, state, or provincial
sources can wash up on the shore of an inert community to provide a local activist
leader with the popular support to ‘fight city hall’ or other entrenched bureaucrats
who defend the status quo. Tobacco control in Australia and the US provide
examples. National and state advocacy groups with access to mass media created a
strong mass movement for change, allowing advocates to enlist popular support
for local tobacco control measures. In both California and Australia's State of
Victoria this popular support led to statewide increases in tobacco taxes, with some
retained for education against tobacco, a measure that had been resisted by state
legislators who had long been influenced by tobacco lobbyists—an example of
community activism filtering up the chain to a higher political level (Catalonia
Declaration 1996).
3.9 Role of Policy, Laws, and Regulations (PLR)
Local actions can affect alcohol and tobacco sales and create environments that
improve nutrition and enhance physical activity. However, national, state, or
provincial actions can magnify local PLR and education efforts on topics such as
tobacco taxation, automobile seat-belt laws, food and drug safety, school nutrition,
school physical activity policies, and (in the United States) laws on firearms. As
described in Section 4.8, widespread popular attitude changes in numerous
communities can also affect the political process at the state or federal level.

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Working with the User Community

David Liebovitz, Carl Christensen, in Practical Guide to Clinical Computing
Systems (Second Edition), 2015

4 Leadership and user engagement

Because of the importance and expense of training and supporting users, it is
useful to identify and engage opinion leaders and early adopters within the clinical
leadership. Typically, these busy clinicians are in great demand. They are needed to
serve on steering committees and workgroups, assist with developing or reviewing
clinical content, describe the current state of the workflow, and communicate
with/to colleagues. It is critical that institutional leaders acknowledge their work
and time, both professionally and financially.
For example, a highly functional committee structure will help ensure that
leadership stays highly engaged in clinical system implementations and operations.
Even more importantly, empowered practicing clinicians are able to efficiently and
effectively evaluate the quality, patient safety, and workflow implications of system
requests and can positively influence the attitudes of their peers and staff towards
the system, provide experience to the clinical information team for continuous
improvement, and may serve in a “super user” capacity. A clinician-led committee
is far more likely to be viewed as peer review than as an administration-imposed or
IT-led committee.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124202177000092

Evolution: Diffusion of Innovations

M. Rogers, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

5 Opinion Leaders
The two-step flow model of mass communication suggests that communication
messages flow from a source, via mass media channels, to opinion leaders, who in
turn pass them on to followers (Rogers 1995). This two-step flow model of mass
communication can be utilized to diffuse an innovation. The model focuses
attention on the inter-media interface between mass media channels and
interpersonal communication channels. Mass media channels are primarily
creators of awareness-knowledge of innovations, while interpersonal networks are
more important in persuading individuals to adopt or reject innovations.
The two-step flow model highlights the importance of opinion leaders in diffusing
innovations, and especially in reaching the critical mass. Opinion leaders
informally influence other individuals' attitudes or overt behavior in a desired way
with relative frequency, so they are critical to the successful diffusion of
innovations.
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Social reading platforms: diagnosis and evaluation

José-Antonio Cordón-García, ... Daniel Linder, in Social Reading, 2013

Amazon Kindle: Read, Review, Remember

The Kindle reading device allows its clients to underline phrases and make
annotations as they read, giving the option of allowing these personal elements to
be seen either publicly or privately. In this way authors, opinion leaders, readers,
teachers, and in general all Kindle users can choose to share their notes with other
readers. If someone has highlighted a passage in a book and has decided to make
this public, any other reader of the network may know who has highlighted it; the
same is true of the notes made in the book by the same reader.

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Communication, Two-step Flow of

G. Weimann, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,
2001

The concept of the ‘two-step flow of communication’ suggests that the flow of
information and influence from the mass media to their audiences involves two
steps: from the media to certain individuals (i.e., the opinion leaders) and from
them to the public. Since the introduction of the two-step flow model and the
opinion leadership concept, numerous studies have sought to advance both the
understanding and applicability of these ideas to various areas from marketing and
consumer behavior, to fashion, politics, and scientific innovations. However, the
concept has been a subject of growing criticism, leading to a decline in the
popularity and attraction of the original concept and almost to its total collapse.
Nevertheless, the paradigm's ‘fight for survival,’ through a dynamic exchange of
arguments, criticism, response, and debate, resulted in several modifications of the
original model.

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Beyond liking
Heather J. Hether, Christopher Calabrese, in Technology and Health, 2020

Case 1: The ice bucket challenge

The Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC) stands as one of the most successful social media
campaigns that inspired an unprecedented amount of UGC. This campaign was
designed to raise awareness and research funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(ALS), also known commonly as “Lou Gehrig's disease.” ALS is a progressive
neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord and
for which there is no cure (ALS Association, 2019).
While there is some discrepancy as to the origins of the IBC, most accounts
suggest that a version of this challenge had existed in the sporting world and had
been used previously with other causes. On July 15, 2014, however, a golfer named
Chris Kennedy was the first person to link the IBC to ALS (Sifferlin, 2014). He
posted a video of himself doing the challenge and then he nominated three others
to complete the challenge—which is to dump a bucket of ice water on their heads
and upload the video of themselves doing so or donate $100 to ALS within
24 hours. From there, the challenge reached a few other opinion leaders and
influencers, including Pat Quinn and, later, Pete Frates. Both Quinn and Frates had
been diagnosed with ALS at young ages (30 and 27, respectively), and they are
typically identified as the cofounders of IBC for their roles in connecting the
movement with their large online networks and facilitating its momentum
(Sifferlin, 2014).
During the summer of 2014, the IBC became a social media phenomenon that was
very successful in engaging people and raising donations. The ALS Association
reported that during an 8-week period in 2014, 17 million Challenge videos were
uploaded to Facebook, which were watched by 440 million people more than 10
billion times (ALS Association, n.d.). Moreover, during this period, $115 million
dollars was donated to the ALS Association, with an additional $13 million donated
to regional branches (Wolf-Mann, 2015).
This campaign's success has been attributed to several integral elements, including
its (1) tailored design specific to social media; (2) positive, lighthearted tone; and (3)
accessibility. Moreover, the campaign relied on opinion leaders and the social
network to diffuse its message. The campaign flowed across social networks in
multiple directions, from opinion leaders to their followers (e.g., celebrities to fans),
horizontally (peer-to-peer), and even reciprocally (e.g., fans to celebrities). The
sharing of these videos facilitated both a user and content interaction, and, in
fact, the campaign encouraged participant engagement on multiple dimensions—
behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively, and socially.
The sharing of these user videos connected people and supported the development
of an online community that facilitated a sense of belonging in a worldwide
movement among those who participated, thus strengthening the online network
(Phing & Yazdanifard, 2014; Sutherland, 2016). This campaign successfully
leveraged the affordances of social media for both interpersonal communication
and the broad diffusion of content. Asynchronous interpersonal communication
was seen through individuals specifically tagging other people in their videos and
personally calling them out to participate. Moreover, the creation of videos that
were circulated for public viewing leveraged qualities that traditionally have been
more characteristic of mass media (Flanagin, 2017).
This campaign's popularity was also attributed to videos that were emotionally
appealing because they were fun to watch and highly shareable (Gualano et al.
2016). Participating in the challenge was easy to do and timely: in the United
States, the campaign ran in the summertime when cold water was more appealing
than at another time of year (Phing & Yazdanifard, 2014).
While the campaign was immensely successful, it had some detractors. Some
critics suggested that it was a form of slacktivism, “a way for people to feel good
without doing much” (Surowiecki, 2016, para. 2). Others suggested many
participants did not mention ALS or donating (Conner, 2014), while some also
criticized it for wasting water during a drought (Stevens, 2014). Perhaps more
importantly, since the campaign required a one time only response, its audience
impacts were short-lived. When the campaign was relaunched the following
summer, it failed to replicate (van der Linden, 2017). Despite these limitations, all
evidence indicates the campaign was a huge success in inspiring UGC around a
health issue and raising donations for research and patient services (Rogers, 2016).

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