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The explosion of Online Social Media in the form of user-generated content on blogs, microblogs (Twitter), discussion forums, product reviews and multimedia sharing sites presents many new opportunities and challenges to both producers and consumers of information. For producers, this user-generated content provides a rich source of implicit consumer feedback. Tracking the pulse of the ever-expanding social media outlets, enables companies to discern what consumers are saying about their products, which provides useful insight on how to improve and market products better. For consumers, the plethora of information and opinions from diverse sources helps them tap into the wisdom of crowds, to aid in making more informed decisions. Though there is a vast quantity of information available, the consequent challenge is to be able to analyze the large volumes of user-generated content and the implicit (or explicit) links between users, in order to glean meaningful insights therein.
The analysis of blogs, twitter and other social media raises several interesting questions:
- Given the massive amount of user-generated content on the Web, how can we identify the subset of content (blogs, forums, etc.) that are discussing not only a specific entity, but higher level concepts that are in some way relevant to the product/brand/entity of interest?
- Having identified this subset of relevant content, how do we identify the most authoritative or influential authors in this space?
- How do we detect and characterize specific sentiment expressed about an entity (e.g. product) mentioned in a blog or forum?
- How do we tease apart emerging topics of discussion from the constant chatter in the blogosphere and other social media?
- How do we overcome the information overload and provide a rich and coherent user experience?
- How to deal with unreliable and often conflicting information? What notions of trust are appropriate?
The goal of this workshop is to formalize and address meaningful metrics and predictive tasks, as well as actionable explanatory analysis, corresponding to the above objectives. This workshop will bring together researchers in all related disciplines, from academia, industry and the government, and will create a forum for discussing recent advances in analysis of Social Media. In doing so we aim to better understand the practical requirements of this domain and the limitations of our current methods, and to inspire research on new algorithms and techniques for Social Media Analytics.
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