Clemson University establishes social media listening center with support from Dell, Salesforce Radian6

CLEMSON, SC – February 23, 2012 – Clemson University has built a Social Media Listening Center (SMLC), with support from Dell and Salesforce Radian6.

The center enables students to monitor thousands of onlineconversations about organizations, brands, products and services on aglobal scale in real time. This allows for more sophisticated review,routing and response to social media posts and content.

“We are early, possibly the first, academic adopters of thistechnology and approach,” said Clemson Chief Information Officer JimBottum.

Bottum learned about a social media listening center during a visitto Dell’s headquarters last year. He proposed a partnership that wouldinvolve student engagement, faculty research and an environment to testthe value of the center in helping an IT organization move into a moreproactive service position.

“When I returned to campus and talked to faculty, students and staffabout the Social Media Listening Center, I sensed a very high level ofinterest and excitement — more so about this project than any othertechnology we’ve undertaken at Clemson,” Bottum said. “They were from awide range of disciplines, too, including business, communicationstudies, psychology, marketing, computing and others. The center isinherently interdisciplinary and focuses on an area where all studentsand a growing segment of our population lives: social media.”

Dell officials also were enthusiastic about the proposed partnership.

”The ability to bring what Dell has learned and developed in socialmedia to academia is extremely exciting for us,” said John Mullen, vicepresident and general manager for education, state and local government,Dell. “Clemson University is a leader in the field and their desire toprovide their students and faculty with innovative new technology iscritical. We’re looking forward to seeing what we can continue to buildtogether and, more importantly, finding new ways to really impactstudent life and learning on and off campus through the Social MediaListening Center.”

The SMLC has six large display screens that faculty and studentsmonitor, similar to a small network operations center. SalesforceRadian6 provides the platform to listen, discover, measure and engage inconversations across the Web by capturing more than 150 million sourcesof social media conversations, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,LinkedIn, blogs and other online communities. The Radian6 summarydashboard provides a graphic display of social media content to conveysentiment, share of voice, trend information, geolocation data and muchmore.

Clemson faculty members mentor their students on social media research and issues through Creative Inquiry team projects and in communication and management classes.

Jason Thatcher, associate professor in the management department, isthe center’s academic lead. Barbara Weaver, project manager in theClemson University Cyberinstitute, is the information technology lead.

“My students are learning to listen to the online conversationsaround private, nonprofit and public organizations. By learning how tolisten and what to listen for they can understand how to better engagein the civil discourse around different parts of our society,” Thatchersaid.

Sample projects include student teams listening to:

• the conversation among Millenials about an automobile brand to helpanother student team create an advertising campaign for a specific car;
• conversations about emergency management issues to determinepatterns in conversations that may help law enforcement deliver betterservices to citizens; and
• online conversations around college athletics. They are examiningthe words people use to describe college sports, patterns andconversations about different sports, and why differences exist inconversations around women and men’s college sports.

“This is the future of social media education, a listening centerthat doubles as a way to educate students on how marketing and serviceare changing,” said Marcel LeBrun, Salesforce Radian6 senior vicepresident and general manager. “We’re happy to work withforward-thinking organizations like Clemson and Dell to furtherdemonstrate the social revolution.” 

At the university, the SMLC is a collaborative initiative between Clemson Computing and Information Technology, the Clemson University Cyberinstitute, the College of Business and Behavioral Science and the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities.

Associated Documents

White paper on Social Media Listening Center