The Study of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Style of Real Estate Industry in China: Based on the Content Analysis of Microblog

Microblog Study

Content analysis is one of the well-developed empirical research methods which combines qualitative and quantitative analysis. Along with the internet popularization and the explosive increase of network information, the information carriers are gradually expanded from the original platforms, such as newspapers, audios, videos etc., to the network platforms, such as WEB server logs, cookies, blogs and microblogs etc. (Mozzato and Grzybovski, 2011). Golbeck et al. (2010) extract 6000 messages of microblogs (Twitter) of members of U.S. congress and find that members of the congress use microblogs as assistance for election and work through content analysis method. Waters R.D. et al. (2011) analyze the communication within non-profit organization members through the research on the information of 200 non-profit official microblogs. Lomicka and Lord (2011) draw a few skills on how to teach foreign languages through analyzing the microblog information of different languages’ students with content analysis. Although the content analysis research method based on microblogs does not have a long history (since Twitter appears in 2007), there are quite amount of researches on it and it gradually has a solid research foundation (Golbeck et al., 2010).

This study chooses SINA microblog as the information carrier, the number of users of which is over 300 million (Twitter has 500 million users). It is China's largest microblog service provider. Since the study objective in this article are Chinese entrepreneurs in real estate industry, the authors take the SINA microblog as the information carrier, which is different from previous studies which take Twitter as the information carrier. Considering a different language and culture environment, the content analysis based on a local microblog will make the research more clear and effective.