Organizational technological opportunism and social media: The deployment of social media analytics to sense and respond to technological discontinuities

Over the last decade, social media has evolved from being an interesting technology used mainly for corporate communication and public relations into a proper business tool. One of the most promising areas in this field is employing social media as a source of information and knowledge to deepen the understanding of technological discontinuities and changes; however, this area remains largely unexplored. Thus, this study addresses this shortcoming by investigating the role of social media analytics in the activities and processes that make sense of social media data to enhance the technological opportunism capability, which is defined as the organizational capability to sense and respond to technological changes. The empirical results are obtained using a mixed-methods approach, supporting the existence of a positive and significant relationship between social media analytics deployment and technological opportunism. Further, they highlight the role of marketing and information technology integration and employee skills as significant antecedents.