Publisher's Synopsis
Content sharing sites are increasingly becoming a source of vital behavioral and attitudinal
information for many organizations. Corporations are realizing the economic value of the
information stored in such sites (Ghose and Panagiotos, 2010). Blog sites, online journals, wiki
pages and social media sites have tons of information created instantaneously at real time by the
users of these pages to express their varied opinions from the launch of latest tech-loaded
smartphones to political happenings and to soccer league results. On micro-blogging sites such as
Twitter, there are around 330 million monthly active users who create about 500 million tweets
per day (Twitter, 2017). An important aspect of the data residing on these social networks is that
it is completely crowdsourced - the people who are active on these platforms create this data
instantaneously in real time. Since these are tagged to real users and not anonymous, they give a
fair idea about people's opinion and attitudes towards a brand, firm or service. For corporations, it
also gives a way to assess drivers for future sales and business (Dhar and Chang, 2009). Initially,
social media had been associated with teens, but this is not the case anymore and people from
almost every age-group are expressing themselves on social media. About 75% of the internet
users use social media and this number is increasing day by the day (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).
Organizations have increasingly turned to Business Intelligence (BI) in the last decade to derive
useful insights and recommendations in their decision making. The organizational performance is
directly influenced by these systems (Ramakrishnan, Jones and Sidorova, 2012). In most
organizations, the BI systems have already added to businesses, thereby making them more
effective and fostering innovation (Watson and Wixom, 2007) and also helping them to respond
to changes in the business landscape very quickly and effectively (Gessner and Volonio, 2005).
However, these used only post facto data and they addressed only the historical aspects. Adding a
real-time component to these systems would greatly increase their efficiency and capabilities and
this leads to two generalized scenarios in the dynamic business environment
