The Use of Social Media in the Supply Chain: Survey and Extensions

This paper examines the use of social media to capture the impact on supply chain events and develop a context for those events.

This paper also analyzes the use of social media in the supply chain to build relationships among supply chain participants.

Further, this paper investigates the of use user supplied tags as a basis of evaluating and extending an ontology for supply chains. In addition, using knowledge discovery from social media, a number of concepts related to the supply chain are examined, including supply chain reputation and influence within the supplychain. Prediction markets are analyzed for their potential use in supply chains.

Finally, this paper investigates the integration of traditional knowledge management along with knowledge generated from social media.

Introduction
Recently, the supply chain industry was criticized for lagging behind other industries in their use of social media (TodaysTrucking, 2010). Although some firms are using social media, most of those firms, e.g., Dell and Best Buy, apparently are focusing their primary efforts on the marketing and service uses of social media.

Further, according to one survey (eConsultancy 2010), roughly two-thirds of the companies have “… not done that much” with social media.

In that same survey, eleven objectives were cited for what the firms expected to derive from social media, and none of those objectives related directly to supply chain efforts. In addition, an
analysis of the academic literature related to the relationship between supply chain and social media finds few contributions.

Finally, Gartner’s well-known hype cycle for different social media recently suggested that roughly 75% of social media applications were early in the socalled hype cycle of emerging technologies. Thus, it appears that the use of social media in the supply chain is early in the technology life cycle and the use of social media in the supply chain is still an emerging phenomenon.