If you’re interested in the mining of data and sentiment in consumer generated media head off to the University of Colorado at the end of this month.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Umbria, two consumer-generated media measurement firms, are co-sponsoring the first annual International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Analysis March 26-28 in Boulder, Colorado. The conference agenda includes dozens of presentations and papers from top academics and industry scientists from around the world. Topics will include social-network analysis, sentiment mining and demographic
analysis, among others.

“Social media is an exploding phenomenon,” said Dr. Nicolas Nicolov, Chief Scientist at Umbria. “Companies that can effectively mine consumergenerated content — in all its messy, ungrammatical, unstructured forms — can transform the way they interact with their customers.” But the exercise isn’t for the faint of heart — it’s no trivial activity, advises Nicolov.

Blog monitoring and social media analysis requires a multitude of disciplines —

• text mining
• pattern recognition
• new graph techniques for social network analysis

It also requires some human input and understanding — it’s not possible to automate all the necessary steps to get a clear picture of who’s talking and what they’re saying. 

Keeping your finger on the pulse of online conversations has become a vital part of public relations today.