No Outstanding Surprises when Using Social Media as Source for Weak Signals? First Attempt to Discuss the Impact of Social Media Sources to Detect Surprising Weak Signals

摘要

Enterprises as well as research institutions are interested to find very early signs for future trends, disruptions or other emerging big changes. Such "weak signals" may also be detected within user-generated social media content. Information technologies support searching, analyzing and interpreting social media data. According to our experiences with an approach called "innovation signals", none of our detected weak signals was an outstanding surprise for our industry partners. Within this paper, we try to validate these experiences with a look into weak signals theory, and whether similar experiences can be found in the extant literature. While we were not able to find conclusive evidence that our conclusions are common (or that they are not), we present a set of possible explanations of this phenomenon. Our paper has to be seen as a first discussion of the topic, which should be a first step to validate researchers' experiences and to initiate a potentially controversial discourse about it.