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Citation for Ranyard Medal 2020

Amir Hassan Zadeh, Anand Jeyaraj

Alignment of business and social media strategies: insights from a text mining analysis

This year’s medal is awarded to Amir Hassan Zadeh and Anand Jeyaraj. both of whom are based in USA. This is a paper that has the potential to be a highly cited paper from the JBA. It uses analytics to solve a problem that is common among businesses, i.e., strategic alignment, and, in particular, the alignment between the overall strategy of the company and its social media strategy. In business life, social media strategy is sometimes an afterthought whose relevance to the business model and strategy of the company is not given sufficient attention. This paper dispels this notion and provides practical help to organisations in identifying drift between the formal stated strategy and the potentially more idiosyncratic view of strategy presented in social media. Crucially, the issue analysed by the paper has not only practical relevance but also has theoretical significance for the study of strategic alignment. In terms of techniques, it uses text analytics in a way that is clever technically but still replicable for other types of firms, sectors, and business applications.

Journal of Business Analytics, Volume 1 (2) 117-134

www.doi.org/10.1080/2573234X.2019.1602002

Left: Anand Jeyaraj, right: Amir Hassan Zadeh