Social business intelligence: Review and research directions

Abstract

Social business intelligence (SBI) is a rather novel discipline, emerged in theacademic and business literature as a result of the convergence of two distinct researchdomains: business intelligence (BI) and social media. Traditional BI scientists and practitioners,after an inevitable initial shock, are currently discovering and acknowledge the potential of usergenerated content (UGD) published in social media as an invaluable and inexhaustible sourceof information capable of supporting a wide range of business activities. The confluence of thesetwo emerging domains is already producing new added value organizational processes andenhanced business capabilities utilized by companies all over the world to effectively harnesssocial media data and analyze them in order to produce added value information such ascustomer profiles and demographics, search habits, and social behaviors. Currently the SBIdomain is largely uncharted, characterized by controversial definitions of terms and concepts,fragmented and isolated research efforts, obstacles created by proprietary data, systems andtechnologies that are not mature yet. This paper aspires to be one of the few -to our knowledge contemporaryefforts to explore the SBI scientific field, clarify definitions and concepts,structure the documented research efforts in the area and finally formulate an agenda of futureresearch based on the identification of current research shortcomings and limitations.