Public administrations are organizations whose mission is to serve the interests of society by providing efficient and sustainable services. Much of the information received from public administrations uses social media due to their versatility and capacity to reach a large number of citizens. Among them, Twitter is the most widely used, especially to disseminate messages with a high social content. This type of messages falls within the discipline of social marketing. However, when public administrations use Twitter for social marketing communication, it is not known which factors are the most decisive to achieve the social objective for which they are issued. This article provides an answer to this question, using the Analytic Network Process Multicriteria method to determine which factors matter and how they are interrelated when issuing social marketing messages through Twitter. The result of this research reveals that from the 22 factors analyzed, the most influential from a social marketing point of view are the average age of population, the existence of a strategic communication plan, the number of tweets and the average number of tweets per day, the number of followers, retweets and mentions, as well as the efficiency of the account.
In the continuous review reorder point, base-stock (s, S) policy, the replenishment order is launched when the inventory position reaches the reorder point, s. It is commonly assumed that the inventory position is exactly equal to the reorder point at the moment the order is launched, when actually it could be lower at that moment. This implies neglecting the possible undershoots at the reorder point, which has a direct impact on the calculation of the expected shortages per replenishment cycle. This article presents a method for an exact calculation of the fill rate (fraction of demand that is immediately satisfied from shelf) which takes explicit account of the existence of undershoots and is applicable to any discrete demand distribution function in a context of lost sales. This method is based on the determination of the stock probability vector at the moment the replenishment order is launched. Furthermore, neglecting the undershoots is shown to lead to an overestimation of the fill rate, particularly when we move farther away from the unitary demand assumption. From a practical point of view, this behaviour involves underestimating the base-stock level, S, when a target fill rate is set for its determination. The method proposed in this paper overcomes these shortcomings.
30 September 2011 in International Journal of Production Economics