Machine Learning for Social Media Analytics

The rise of the blogosphere has empowered the average consumer to influence the public perception and profitability of brands. As such, marketing organizations need to be aware of what people are saying in influential blogs, how the expressed opinions could impact their business, and how to extract business insight and value from these blogs. This has given rise to the emerging discipline of Social Media Analytics, which draws from Social Network Analysis, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. The automated analysis of blogs and other social media raises several interesting challenges, which we address below.