Acceptance and quality perception of social network standard and Non-Standard services in different cultures

Abstract

Language and culture play important roles in social computing and social media research. Due to network effects, on national or regional social network service (SNS) markets there is only one “standard,” which is broadly accepted by the users. Sometimes users additionally check out another SNS (a “non-standard”) but do not or only rarely use it after adoption. For typical evaluation dimensions of perceived quality (ease of use, usefulness, trust, fun) and dimensions of acceptance (adoption, use, impact, diffusion) we analyze the importance of the evaluation dimensions and the correlations between all dimension for both, the standard and a non-standard SNS as well as for two cultures, namely Russia and Germany. In our study, the SNS standards are Facebook in Germany and Vkontakte in Russia, the non-standards are Vkontakte in Germany and Facebook in Russia.