Bodendorf, Freimut, and Carolin Kaiser. "Detecting opinion leaders and trends in online communities." 2010 Fourth International Conference on Digital Society. IEEE, 2010.

This article introduces an innovative approach combining text mining and social network analysis to understand and track opinion formation within online communities. By analyzing Web 2.0 platforms like blogs, wikis, and forums, this method focuses on identifying opinion leaders and trends based on the vast amount of user-generated content. This approach not only retrieves subjects of postings but also considers the relationships among community members to detect influential factors in opinion evolution, offering valuable insights for companies and sales organizations to grasp consumer sentiments and preferences.