Social Media for Supply Chain Risk Management

With the rapid increase of online social network users worldwide, social media feeds have become a rich and valuable information resource and attract great attention across diversified domains. In social media data, there are abundant contents of two-way and interactive communication about products, demand, customer services and supply. This makes social media a valuable channel for listening to the voices from the market and measuring supply chain risks and new market trends for companies. In this study, we surveyed the potential value of social media in supply chain risk management (SCRM) and examined how they can be applied to SCRM systematically. We found that while such medium is very useful in supply chain risk management, it also brings along a new risk to supply chains, so called social media risk, as supply chain incidents may be rapidly transmitted and magnified through social media platforms worldwide. Accordingly, a new framework is proposed that assists the hiring of social media to serve supply chain risk management tasks.