期刊名称：Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement
印刷版ISSN：1534-6102
出版年度：2018
卷号：22
期号：3
页码：235-236
出版社：University of Georgia
摘要：Given the unprecedented power of social media, more firms are integrating social media into their business strategies. A clear understanding of big data from social media and their linkages to business decisions is critical for today’s business viability, sustainability, and growth. However, small businesses’ lack of financial and human resources has prevented them from adopting social media data analytics, leading to a large knowledge gap. With the increasing sophistication of large corporations’ data analytics capability, this gap is expected to widen, suggesting an acute need for training and research to address the critical social media analytics needs of small businesses. Therefore, an overarching goal of this project is to promote success of small businesses in Alabama by helping them optimize their social media intelligence capacity. To achieve this goal, a collaboration is sought with external constituencies (e.g., chambers of commerce) to identify strategic problems/ opportunities for social media data analytics by small businesses (Phase 1: needs assessment), develop training and implementation intervention program modules to tackle key social media data analytics problems/opportunities identified (Phase 2: development of intervention modules), and evaluate the effectiveness of such modules (Phase 3: implementation and evaluation) with selected small businesses in Alabama. We envision creating significant economic impact in these communities by assisting small businesses. This project will involve undergraduate and graduate students working with faculty and small businesses in developing intervention programs and implementing them with small businesses as a part of service-learning projects in the social media analytics curriculum. A mixed-methods approach combining a survey, interviews, and focus groups with small businesses will be employed to collect data. Success of this project will be evaluated through various quantitative and qualitative metrics.
