Decision Support in the Era of Social Media and User-Generated Content

Social media and the huge amount of user-generated content offer new possibilities for decision-making in companies, as more data can be acquired easily without extra cost. However, a larger database does not automatically lead to better decisions, and volume, variety, and veracity of data from different sources are often overwhelming and challenging. This chapter provides two cases where we used big social data as basis for decision-making. The first case describes the incorporation of extracted information from social media to decision-making models. The second case focuses on the veracity challenges of social media data. By relying on these two cases, we derive guidelines for tackling the veracity of social media data and provide insights how decision-making can be influenced positively and negatively by social media and user-generated content. With the guidelines, it can be determined how much big social data has an influence on quality and rigor in the decision-making process.