Mining social media: key players, sentiments, and communities

Social media is the key component of social networks and organizational social applications. The emergence of new systems and services has created a number of novel social and ubiquitous environments for mining information, data, and, finally, knowledge. This connects but also transcends private and business applications featuring a range of different types of networks and organizational contexts. Important structures concern subgroups emerging in those applications as communities (connecting people), roles and key actors in the networks and communities, and opinions, beliefs, and sentiments of the set of actors. Collective intelligence can then be considered as an emerging phenomenon of the different interactions. This focus article considers mining approaches concerning social media in social networks and organizations and the analysis of such data. We first summarize important terms and concepts. Next, we describe and discuss key actor identification and characterization, sentiment mining and analysis, and community mining. In the sequel we consider different application areas and briefly discuss two exemplary ubiquitous and social applications—the social conference guidance system Conferator, and the MyGroup system for supporting working groups. Furthermore, we describe the VIKAMINE system for mining communities and subgroups in social media in the sketched application domains. Finally, we conclude with a discussion and outlook. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.