How does praise and rumor spread online? Analyzing user relationships on social networks: A case study of Haidilao

With the rise of social media, traditional customers have increasingly associated with a variety of complex online social interactions and formed fully new user characteristics and user relationship patterns. The changes brought traditional customer relationship management a great impact and forced companies to adapt, change and evolve. Relevant studies about the social customer relationship management have just begun in these five years and little researches explore the user relationships generated with enterprise involvement. In this paper, our study seeks insights into analyzing the underlying patterns of online user relationship and discovering how the user relationship network could be fully utilized as a value-adding tool from an enterprise perspective. Based on a real case study of Haidilao, a famous hot-pot restaurant in China, we present two different but similar user relationship networks by tracking two topics of Haidilao on microblogs, one is a praise topic and the other is a rumor topic. Through the comparison between two networks, it reveals that there are three typical patterns of user relationships on social networks. Each pattern has its own characteristics and core users. In the last, we analysis the functions of different patterns of user relationships and propose managerial recommendations for enterprises.