Brand Data Gathering From Live Social Media Streams

Social media streams, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Sina Weibo, have become essential real-time information resources with a wide range of users and applications. The rapidly increasing amount of live information in social media streams has important societal and marketing values for large corporations and government organizations. There is a strong need for effective techniques for data gathering and content analysis. This problem is particularly challenging due to the short and conversational nature of posts, the huge data volume, and the increasing heterogeneous multimedia content in social media streams. Moreover, as the focus of "conversation" often shifts quickly in social media space, the traditional keywords based approach to gather data with respect to a target brand is grossly inadequate. To address these problems, we propose a multi-faceted brand tracking method that gathers relevant data based on not just evolving keywords, but also social factors (users, relations and locations) as well as visual contents as increasing number of social media posts are in multimedia form. For evaluation, we set up a large scale microblog dataset (Brand-Social-Net) on brand/product information, containing 3 million microblogs with over 1.2 million images for 100 famous brands. Experiments on this dataset have demonstrated that the proposed framework is able to gather a more complete set of relevant brand-related data from live social media streams. We have released this dataset to promote social media research.