1 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 1 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-513-7.ch001 INTRODUCTION Web mining is the use of data mining techniques to extract information from web documents. Although data mining is a well established field, the application of data mining techniques on web data is not an easy convertible task as web data, unlikely the well described and organized data in various databases are usually semi- structured data (Lappas, 2008). With the rapid development of the internet, web mining has now become a very popular research area for many different disciplines. In the age of Web 2.0 as users actively com- municate, interact, and share content on the web, it become a very interesting research field the use of web mining techniques for online social network analysis. (Ting, 2008). Existing online social networks offer now a large variety of dif- ferent types of multimedia data and metadata from textual to complex visual content, from tags to video content and from photos to sound content to name a few. Georgios Lappas Technological Educational Institution of Western Macedonia, Greece Social Multimedia Mining: Trends and Opportunities in Areas of Social and Communication Studies ABSTRACT In recent years there is a vast and rapidly growing amount of multimedia content available online. Web 2.0 and online social networks have dramatically infuenced the growing amount of multimedia content due to the fact that users become more active producers and distributors of such multimedia context. This work conceptualizes and introduces the concept of social multimedia mining as a new emerging research area that combines web mining research, multimedia research and social media research. New challenges in multimedia research, social network analysis research as well as trends and opportunities in research areas of social and communication studies and more specifc in politics, public relations, public administration, marketing and advertising are discussed in this chapter.