Abstract
When the personalized information and search engine such as Google prevail on Internet, the word-of-mouth effect can be undertaken both under and out of marketer’s control. In particular, a currently most popular and attention-getting tool, BLOG, has been extensively applied for sharing individual thoughts by various representations of words, voices, and visual images through cyber world. Even though a lot of marketing related events initiated out of BLOG have been reported by news media, it seems that most of them are not directed by pre-planned marketing decisions. Rather, the random idiosyncrasy out of internet users might be a better explanation on observed influential phenomena associated with BLOG. In order to well manipulate such a potentially powerful tool on Internet information delivery, in this research, the underlying mechanisms of communication process in BLOG will be explored. This study takes Source Credibility Theory and Attribution Theory into account as the exploratory foundation to exam how consumers’, especially those who are so highly motivated and highly capable to search and process information on Internet and BLOG that these consumers can be categorized as in the condition of high involvement, perceptions and evaluations on focal products might be influenced by the information exposed on BLOG. The moderating effects among three variables, message author, message site (location), and message sidedness, will be proposed to explain the favorably persuasive effectiveness on BLOG communication. The experimental design will be conducted on on-line questionnaires with simulated BLOG web sites.