Reply with a post to this discussion.

Trade websites include both industry websites such as if I work in the plastics industry, I would read the Plastics Today website, (plasticstoday.com). SCM news websites would include Inbound Logistics, (inboundlogistics.com), Supply Chain Brain (supplychainbrain.com), Logistics Management (logisticsmanagment.com), and Supply Chain Management Review (scmr.com). All of these websites discuss advancements in data science and artificial intelligence, automation, technology, issues, trends, and regulations affecting the supply chain. The appeal of this monitoring tool is quick, mostly free access, and comes from multiple sources. While some of these sites are supported via ads or a premium option, others are supported by logistics or SCM related companies, often with access to vast amounts of capital to keep the websites functioning and reliable. As mentioned in in the accompanying textbook with this course, regulations are available on official government websites (Kildow, 2011), which has helped me throughout my business studies. The reliability is usually consistently high with these sources, there are always various forms of bias in articles, but overall a lot of the information is available to be cross-checked. Recently with the upcoming United States election, misinformation, disinformation, and bias has been on full display with politically-weighted articles. The information in trade articles is usually more up-to-date, but sometimes not as complete as data and information available from business research websites.

Business research websites include resources for company information, countries, industries, consumers, international trade, case studies, and news (Seneca College Libraries, 2020). I have spent a lot of time with these database services in previous course work, and these database services hold a lot of data points and information ranging on what some markets are worth and the general make-up of a market such as common trading routes, trading countries, and market shares. Other information can include culture variations which can affect negotiations and business communications, company data, and much more. This information often has effects upon supply chain, both in the past and perhaps in the future. The main problem with this type of service is that it is expensive. Overall the information is adequate and reliable, but it is difficult to decipher when the primary data is inaccurate and was either reported to them incorrectly or the researcher estimated the information. For example, this became readily evident when doing a full research project on a manufacturer in Ontario last year, when looking at number of employees and annual revenue in the database service, versus doing our own primary research. Another complaint is that depending upon the database service, their sources are either not noted or able to be verified without further primary research. While business research websites are often devoid of bias, social media sources are often full of bias.

Social media has been an evolving landscape since its inception, and has a wide ranging impact on business globally. Reliability is often very difficult to determine, but can act as a signal to do further checking with other sources. Often a link to a source or sources may be included, which quickens the checking and expansion of the topic. The appeal of social media is the speed at which it travels throughout society, and its general reach through the developed and some third world countries. Social media generally allows shorter messages, it forces the writer to make the message the most impactful and meaningful that it can be. While a shortened message often precludes many important but longer and more in depth messages, these are often signals to look at longer information pieces such as on official websites, or videos from organizations on YouTube. This strong link often facilities a two-way communication often completely lacking in more traditional and antiquated media such as newspapers and television. The combination of global reach, often inexpensive and less restricted access, highest impact messaging, and 2-way communication has solidified social media as a modern and instantaneous messaging medium which while may have varied low- to high-reliability, is a favourite medium which transverses all classes of society, including the poor, middle class, to the leaders of the world, such as Donald Trump. Not only does this transform communication across classes of society, it also transverses ideologies and special interests, such as religion and LGBTQIA+. The above mentioned notes on social media has been both it's weakness and its strength on almost all platforms, but as a whole it has extreme value in moving society forward as a whole. Therefore, in my opinion, while the reliability of social media is always in question, it forces the reader to question the information, and to absorb a vast amount of information that is very fresh, and can lead to other sources of reliable information, such as trade websites, organization websites, and business research websites.