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Purpose -The paper's aim is to mine and analyze opinion formation on the basis of consumer dialogs in online forums. Design/methodology/approach -The study identifies opinions, communication relationships, and dialog acts of forum users using different text mining methods. Utilizing this data, social networks can be derived and analyzed to detect influential users and opinion tendencies. The approach is applied to sample online forums discussing the iPhone. Findings -Combining text mining and social network analysis enables the study of opinion formation and yields encouraging results. Out of the four methods employed for text mining, support vector machines performed best.Research limitations/implications -The data set applied here is fairly small. More threads on different products will be considered in future work to improve validation. Practical implications -The approach represents a valuable instrument for online market research. It enables companies to recognize opportunities and risks and to initiate appropriate marketing actions. Originality/value -This work is one of the first studies that combine communication content, relationships and dialog acts for analyzing opinion formation.

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Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

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