Identiification of influencers : the case of cooking bloggers

Cooking has been transformed from closed cooking limited to culinary enthusiasts to cooking characterized by socially connected online activity. Today, cooks can share their culinary secrets and achievements and provide advice, with digital technologies creating a new pattern based on individual contribution. Despite all these evolutions, the influence process within virtual cooking communities is still not yet extensively studied by academics. We therefore address the following important research question: who are the influential bloggers in cooking blogosphere? The study aims to better understand contributory behaviors and the role of the community as an explanatory factor in individual actions. We build a model to observe the influence process, from the analysis of blogger's role in his virtual community until his ability to change the beliefs of users on social networks. The main contribution is to reconsider the influence process. We highlight a first level of influence according to the interaction among the blogs, which refers to the number of outgoing and incoming links between blogs. We add a second level by adding a composition variable that individually describes each blog in terms of the types of recipes it contains. Finally, we analyze the last step of influence process by studying their presence on social networks. For this study, we propose a quantitative measure of the influence process using a dataset that includes all cooking blog activity over the course of one year. More precisely, 46 312 posts were collected and classified through a textual analysis. From the quantitative analysis of 952 blogs, we show that blogger's role in his virtual community determines his own activity of publications but also his influence on social networks.