Social Media in Emerging Economies: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Social media are increasingly popular, worldwide, and when social media technologies extend from the Western markets in which they were developed into the Eastern markets where they are now used, marketing strategies that support technology uses in new cultural contexts must be developed. To inform this process achieve this, social media researchers must learn new ways of thinking about technology in its cultural context. In a comparative study of the Southeast Asian social media markets of Vietnam and Singapore, we induce a grounded theory perspective of social media cultures, comparing across instances of both an emerging market and an advanced market in the hemispheric region. We find the Vietnamese culture of social media use orients around economic productivity, Social Commerce, leveraging social connections to generate consumer-to-consumer commerce largely outside of government notice and taxation. The Singaporean culture of social media revolves around the important and highly implicit notion of Influence Commerce. Singaporeans are experts in their application of social media presence to monetize the process of exerting social influence on networks of information and opinion. The Singaporean media use culture takes place with full knowledge and support of the relevant government Bureaus since most internally produced social media influence is political in nature and friendly to the ruling powers.