Social Media Analytics in Operations and Supply Chain Management: Opportunities, Challenges, and Paradoxes

Industrial and academic communities in the field of operations and supply chain management (OSCM) have been paying increasing attention to social media analytics (SMA). However, the disparity of social media has inspired new ways of thinking about how data are produced, organized, and analyzed. This chapter addresses how OSCM is affected by this disparity and provides an overview of SMA use, applications, and challenges in the domain. A directed content analysis of current application-oriented research is carried out to review SMA in OSCM from a signaling theory perspective. In particular, we shed light on data sources, opportunities, challenges, paradoxes, and current managerial issues and seek to inform research practices and policy in order to advance operations and supply chain management research. The chapter contributes to the understanding of SMA in OSCM by identifying a set of paradoxes and challenges that have not previously been identified in OSCM research. By relating SMA to social media data sources and OSCM activities, it sheds light on preferred sources and application scenarios and discusses the imponderables of social media signal processing in OSCM.