Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to mine competitive intelligence in social media to find the market insight by comparing consumer opinions and sales performance of a business and one of its competitors by analyzing the public social media data. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory test using a multiple case study approach was used to compare two competing smartphone manufacturers. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis are conducted first, followed by further validation of results using statistical analysis. A total of 229,948 tweets mentioning the iPhone6 or the GalaxyS5 have been collected for four months following the release of the iPhone6; these have been analyzed using natural language processing, lexicon-based sentiment analysis, and purchase intention classification. Findings – The analysis showed that social media data contain competitive intelligence. The volume of tweets revealed a significant gap between the market leader and one follower; the purchase intention data also reflected this gap, but to a less pronounced extent. In addition, the authors assessed whether social opinion could explain the sales performance gap between the competitors, and found that the social opinion gap was similar to the shipment gap. Research limitations/implications – This study compared the social media opinion and the shipment gap between two rival smart phones. A business can take the consumers’ opinions toward not only its own product but also toward the product of competitors through social media analytics. Furthermore, the business can predict market sales performance and estimate the gap with competing products. As a result, decision makers can adjust the market strategy rapidly and compensate the weakness contrasting with the rivals as well. Originality/value – This paper’s main contribution is to demonstrat the competitive intelligence via the consumer opinion mining of social media data. Researchers, business analysts, and practitioners can adopt this method of social media analysis to achieve their objectives and to implement practical procedures for data collection, spam elimination, machine learning classification, sentiment analysis, feature categorization, and result visualization.

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Social media have emerged as new communication channels between consumers and companies that generate a large volume of unstructured text data. This social media content, which contains consumers' opinions and interests, is recognized as valuable material from which businesses can mine useful information; consequently, many researchers have reported on opinion-mining frameworks, methods, techniques, and tools for business intelligence over various industries. These studies sometimes focused on how to use opinion mining in business fields or emphasized methods of analyzing content to achieve results that are more accurate. They also considered how to visualize the results to ensure easier understanding. However, we found that such approaches are often technically complex and insufficiently user-friendly to help with business decisions and planning. Therefore, in this study we attempt to formulate a more comprehensive and practical methodology to conduct social media opinion mining and apply our methodology to a case study of the oldest instant noodle product in Korea. We also present graphical tools and visualized outputs that include volume and sentiment graphs, time-series graphs, a topic word cloud, a heat map, and a valence tree map with a classification. Our resources are from public-domain social media content such as blogs, forum messages, and news articles that we analyze with natural language processing, statistics, and graphics packages in the freeware R project environment. We believe our methodology and visualization outputs can provide a practical and reliable guide for immediate use, not just in the food industry but other industries as well.

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As Internet advances, websites with simpel HTML pages are changing to complex web application systems with enormous contents and various services. With this trend, it is noted that situations where Web accessibility of the old and the handicapped is inhibited are growing. To solve this problem, The Disability Discrimination Act has been enacted since April 2013. This act triggers massive website reorganization efforts. However, in order for the huge and sophisticated web applications and web sites to ensure a web accessibility, a framework is required to throughout the web site development.Based on thorough review of website development methodologies, web accessibility compliance standards, and various web accessibility issues related to website characteristics, this study proposes a practice oriented "Web Accessibility Compliance Framework." The current study also examines the usefulness and value of this framework by applying it to the internet banking development project of W bank and receiving a certificate for high quality website complying web accessibility standards.