Manufacturers Mine for Vehicle Defects Online

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Social media comments could help auto manufacturers identify vehicle safety and performance defects, according to Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business’ case study. The large-scale case study points to evidence that social media can greatly assist with vehicle quality management.

“A lot of useful but hidden data on vehicle quality is embedded in social media that is largely untapped by auto manufacturers,” said Alan Abrahams, assistant professor of business information technology, who led the study together with Weiguo Fan, professor of accounting and information systems.

Car buyers look to social media for vehicle surveys, insurance industry statistics, manufacturer websites, complaints on auto brands, and facts on automobile safety and reliability, Abrahams said.

Abrahams and Fan’s research showed that the existence of safety and performance defects is strongly predicted by the incidence of automotive marker words, or “smoke words” such as “skid and “crash,” he said. Therefore, auto manufacturers can scan social media forums for vehicle defects by using an automotive smoke word list along with web crawlers and other tools.

“Vehicle quality management professionals would greatly benefit in terms of productivity by employing a vehicle defect discovery system like ours to sift defects from unrelated postings,” he said.

With their social media strategies, Abrahams said the researchers plan to determine whether new text mining techniques can be developed to enhance the defect detection and sorting process.