Integration of Social Media as a Source of Competitive Intelligence to Build Resilience in Retail Organisations

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted business operations, resulting in agile digital transformation. However, the digital transformation emerged as enabling factors that entrench new operating and management practices that enabled business continuity, operational efficiency, and resilience. Using the competitive intelligence cycle and resilience theory, this study aimed to establish how retail organisations integrate social media as a data source of competitive intelligence to build resilience especially during disruptions. This descriptive and quantitative study was conducted on 344 senior managers in retail organisations in South Africa. Data were collected by a valid and reliable questionnaire, consisting of two sections: demographic information of respondents and questions about using social media as a source of competitive intelligence. The collected dataset was used to generate descriptive statistics using the SPSS software. Our findings highlight that retail organisations build resilience by integrating social media as a data source for CI in times of disruption, through carefully conducting social media intelligence as a project. They do so by having resilience awareness, resilience adaptation, and resilience action. The current study concludes that retail organisations have a resilience creation capacity, i.e. are aware of intelligence needs, can adapt to new sources of data and are able to disseminate actionable intelligence to decision makers during disruption. Retail managers ought to determine intelligence needs to properly plan and direct CI projects when integrating social media data. This could help them to establish a seamless direction, identify and used competent social media platforms, analytic tools, and methods of sorting and storing of social media data, as well as effectively disseminating social media intelligence information during disruption.