This paper presents an approach to social media mining based on a pipeline that implements observing, enriching, storing, modeling and presentation techniques. While social media mining solutions have been used for information extraction and sentiment identification about certain topics, applying social media for modeling and nowcasting is a promising new research direction. A novel tool TwitterObservatory that allows observing, searching, analyzing and presenting social media is introduced as a part of the research. Illustrative examples of using the proposed pipeline show how the TwitterObservatory implementing the pipeline can support the user in interaction with the social media data.