Bringing Representativeness into Social Media Monitoring and Analysis

The opinions, expectations and behavior of citizens are increasingly reflected online – therefore, mining the internet for such data can enhance decision-making in public policy, communications, marketing, finance and other fields. However, to come closer to the representativeness of classic opinion surveys there is a lack of knowledge about the socio-demographic characteristics of those voicing opinions on the internet. This paper proposes to calibrate online opinions aggregated from multiple and heterogeneous data sources with traditional surveys enhanced with rich socio-demographic information to enable insights into which opinions are expressed on the internet by specific segments of society. The goal of this research is to provide professionals in citizen- and consumer-centered domains with more concise near real-time intelligence on online opinions. To become effective, the methodologies presented in this paper must be integrated into a coherent decision support system.