Role of big data and social media analytics for business to business sustainability: A participatory web context

Highlights

• Big data and social media analytics can facilitate business to business sustainability.

• Web analytics can support the Social, Environmental and Economic agendas of business to business sustainability

• Significance of Sentiment and Social network analysis, Text mining and Topic modelling techniques in business to business sustainability

Abstract

The digital transformation is an accumulation of various digital advancements, such as the transformation of the web phenomenon. The participatory web that allows for active user engagement and gather intelligence has been widely recognised as a value add tool by organisations of all shapes and sizes to improve business productivity and efficiency. However, its ability to facilitate sustainable business-to-business (B2B) activities has lacked focus in the business and management literature to date. This qualitative research is exploratory in nature and fills this gap through findings arising from interviews of managers and by developing taxonomies that highlight the capability of participatory web over passive web to enable different firms to engage in business operations. For this purpose, two important interrelated functions of business i.e. operations and marketing have been mapped against three dimensions of sustainability. Consequently, this research demonstrates the ability of big data and social media analytics within a participatory web environment to enable B2B organisations to become profitable and remain sustainable through strategic operations and marketing related business activities. The research findings will be useful for both academics and managers who are interested in understanding and further developing the business use of participatory web tools to achieve business sustainability. Hence, this may be considered as a distinct way of attaining sustainability.

Introduction

The term ‘Digital transformation’ has broad nuances and is attributed to driving various forms of technological innovation in both industrial and societal domains (Gray & Rumpe, 2017). Digital transformation generally refers to the globally accelerated process of technical adaptation by individuals, organisations, communities and nations resulting from digitalisation (Westerman, Bonnet, & McAfee, 2014). The focus of this study is the digital transformation of the web phenomenon, which has experienced a paradigm shift from a passive information source towards the collaborative and intelligent participatory web, which encourages active user engagement and contribution. The participatory web provides quick access to information and intelligence while also influencing the speed and frequency at which information travels thus presenting significant opportunities for managers to communicate and engage with stakeholders almost instantaneously. The enormous amounts of data generated and gathered from social networking sites (SNS) combined with the limited academic insights into big data and social media analytics, particularly from a business to business (B2B) context makes participatory web a highly relevant point of discussion.

The digitisation of almost every aspect of business and organisational activities has subsequently led to the onset of large datasets for analysing purposes, which through big data and analytical tools can create actionable insights for delivering sustainable value, improving business performance and providing competitive advantage (Wamba et al., 2017). Therefore, sustainability in current times can be considered as a corporate-performance metrics for organisations (Bughin, Chui, & Manyika, 2010), becoming increasingly critical for organisations, given the ability of divergent set of stakeholders to actively monitor the extent to which organisations pursuit and engage with sustainability initiatives. As such, the significant rise in the sustainability efforts of organisations in the recent decades is unsurprising, mainly attributed to the increased demand and expectations placed on organisations by society (Johnson, Redlbacher, & Schaltegger, 2018). Moreover, it is argued that effective stakeholder engagement is the ‘most influential source of competitive advantage’ for corporate sustainability (Rodriguez-Melo and Mansouri, 2011, p. 548). This focus has led to a shift in how organisations engage with their stakeholders for corporate sustainability, with much emphasis placed on stakeholder engagement, which can be positively enhanced by B2B (Youssef, Johnston, AbdelHamid, Dakrory, & Seddick, 2018), particularly given that the way in which an organisation's sustainable practices and operations are managed and articulated has become an integral part of B2B marketing and communications strategy (Kapitan, Kennedy, & Berth, 2019).

Yet, despite the potential of participatory web tools, research into participatory web focuses largely on the consumer in a business-to-consumer (B2C) domain (Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011), emphasised through the fact that the social media and B2C has attracted much academic attention (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011; Trusov, Bucklin, & Pauwels, 2009). As there is a lack of understanding about the role that participatory web plays in a B2B environment, these studies have encouraged the authors to explore whether key features of participatory web coupled with Big Data and Social Media analytics can enable businesses that engage with other firms to identify opportunities of supporting sustainability through their business activities. While there is no universally accepted definition of B2B sustainability, Kapitan et al. (2019, p. 96) refer to it as an approach to influence clients' perceptions of B2B brand sustainability, ‘with the aim of achieving a trusted position sustainable superiority that yields further investment in sustainable products and production processes’. Furthermore, Sheth and Sinha (2015), loosely refer to B2B sustainability as the marketing act of B2B brands who closely link economic, social and environmental initiatives as part of sustainability marketing and thereby brand building.

Against this backdrop, the ability of participatory web to allow interactions and provide intelligence between managers of a firm with other stakeholders for participating in their business functions in the role of a service provider needs to be understood. Our study therefore dwells on the findings of various studies that explain how participatory web helps in the development of a mutual understanding between participants as individuals, creates knowledge and intelligence of their diverse needs and improves efficiency of delivery capabilities of their businesses (Pan & Scarbrough, 1998; Tomkovicz, 2002). More generally, it is reported that organisations are utilising big data analytics for a number of reasons, such as improving transparency, decision-making, as well as to improve collaboration (Waller and Fawcett, 2013, Schoenherr and Cheri, 2015, Hazen et al., 2014, Wang et al., 2016, Kache and Seuring, 2017). There is no denying the increasing role of big data analytics from several domains, Bughin et al. (2010) highlight studies in big data and sustainability for firms in the auto industry. However, given the rise in studies which aim to provide information on the application of big data analytics to improve environmental sustainability (Song et al., 2017; Song, Fisher, Wang, & Cui, 2016; Zhang, Ren, Liu, & Si, 2017) and social sustainability (Liu & Zhang, 2017; Song et al., 2017), it is surprising that majority of these studies lack practical insights (Sivarajah et al., 2017) and merely offer conceptual and anecdotal evidences (Bughin et al., 2010; Dubey et al., 2017; Jeble et al., 2018). Additionally, while studies acknowledge big data analytics and its contributions to sustainability, there remains a lack of practical insights into the types of techniques which can be employed by organisations to leverage sustainability from their use of analytics. Accordingly, this research enquiry raises the questions listed below:

• How can participatory web enable organiations to orient business to business practices towards sustainability?

• What big data and social media analytics techniques can be used by organisations to support their business to business sustainability initiatives?

• What is the impact of intelligence gathered through big data and social media analytics for driving business to business sustainability initiatives?

This research answers the questions raised by reviewing current understanding about the benefits of participatory web for businesses in a B2B context and its ability to convert business practices into sustainability initiatives. Participatory web provides a dynamic virtual space for interaction and intelligence that encourages stakeholders to participate in a very open manner (Forgues & Koskela, 2009). A synthesis of literature on technology specifically social media analytics, sustainability, operations and marketing provides the theoretical basis for this discussion in the form of taxonomies and contribute to academic knowledge about the use of participatory web technologies as a tool for achievement of business sustainability. The taxonomies developed are grounded in the normative literature and then empirically validated through semi-structured interviews with practitioners (Dao, Langella, & Carbo, 2011; Elkington, 2004; Keller & Hüsig, 2009). In doing so, it has led to the proffering of: (a) models associated with business sustainability; (b) ICT enablers for business sustainability; (c) models of business sustainability that leverage new technologies and Participatory web and, (d) the capabilities of big data and social media analytics for business sustainability. These taxonomies identify current boundaries of research in existence about the topic and provide a richer picture and direct researchers towards emerging areas of related interest by linking technology and marketing with operations for sustainability. It must also be noted that while the promise of big data is widely reported, with it being attributed to providing highly useful information, Sivarajah et al. (2017) and Michael and Miller (2013) also refer to the new challenges it brings, in terms of how much data to store, the costs associated with storage, whether the data will be secure, and how long it must be maintained.