Understanding social media user behavior

A computer system, comprising:

• a gathering module adapted to automatically, through an online connection to a social network, discover a plurality of users in the social network and extract contextual information relating to each of the plurality of users, wherein the contextual information comprises user generated language that indicates the user's sentiment towards a subject matter;
• a neural network generator that generates a neural network man with the contextual information, the neural network map including the social network's plurality of users, contextual information associated with the plurality of user's, and associations between the plurality of users;
• a contextual search module adapted to generate a limited view of the network map based on a contextual search for a specified subject matter, the limited view identifying (1) at least one influential user in the neural network map that influences other users on the specified subject matter and (2) at least one interested user that has an interest in the specified subject matter;
• and
• an artificial agent programmed to engage and interact with the at least one influential user and the at least one interested user on the social network, interactions include sending messages to the users in order to gain information indicative of the users' engagement with the specified subject matter.