Knowledge Discovery from Social Media Data: A Case of Public Twitter Data for SMEs

摘要

Making sense of social media data is increasingly becoming a subject of concern to corporate organisations. It is therefore, no coincidence that the subject of Knowledge Identification and Discovery is currently receiving a huge attention within industry and academia. Research has shown that there is an enormous wealth of actionable knowledge to be gained from social media data for organisations' strategic competitive advantage. However, this opportunity is not being harnessed by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) as much as it is by larger enterprises. This is due, in part, to a misconception that social media is not that relevant to SMEs as much as it is to larger corporations. This paper presents a qualitative exploratory study, which attempts to show that social media can be mined for organisational knowledge that is relevant to the strategic competitive advantage of SMEs. A case of a mediumsized enterprise, which is previously without a significant social media presence, is explored with regards to how public Twitter data is exploited to discover actionable knowledge that propels the enterprise's strategic competitive advantage.