Social Networks and Cultural Differences: Adidas's Case on Twitter and Sina Weibo

Social Media and Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was introduced by Tim O´Reilly and defines the business revolution in the computer industry. The change is due to the movement of the internet as a platform and the attempt to understand the rules of success for this platform. The aim is to build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. Internet users are no longer limited to a one-sided communication flow in which companies only inform through websites. Web 2.0 effects online users by how many things they can do, interact, combine, remix, upload and customize for themselves (Shuen, 2018).

The term social media refers to all posts in the form of text, pictures, videos or audio which are created in order to get an interaction. Therefore, social media is connecting technology, content, and creativity to achieve a communicational exchange on a virtual platform (Hettler, 2012). Besides the information exchange, Weinberg, Ladwig and Pahrmann (2012) focus on the fact that social media enables communication without geographical boundaries and at every time. The values of social media sites are their users and the content which users are sharing. This term of information is referred as user-generated content.

Social media platforms can be divided into three groups (Kreutzer, 2018):

• 1.

  Communication: blogs, micro-blogs, private and business social networks, Messenger;

• 2.

  Cooperation between user: wiki, rating portal;

• 3.

  Content-sharing: text-sharing, foto-sharing, video-sharing, audio-sharing.