Social media intelligence in the exploration of national cultural dimensions for online social communities

Companies are increasingly embracing the use of social media in global online communities as an important part of their business strategies. Use of social media enables organizations to extend their reach and engage with customers in a shared community. These provide forums for interacting with customers and collecting information so that companies can better make informed decisions that directly relate to customer needs. However, effective use of social media requires matching both organizational and user requirements with the features of the social media. To support the development of successful social communities, this research uses Hofstede's dimensions to examine the impact of user's national culture on social media feature preference in a global international scuba diving online community. Specifically, this paper focuses on the Hofstede's Individualism and Collectivism (IC) dimension which the study found is a significant determinant of feature preferences.