Clemson University to offer “exclusive” tool to CBS affiliate's election coverage

Published: November 5, 2012

CLEMSON — With the 2012 presidential election in mind, 7 On Your Side (WSPA-TV) news anchor Amy Wood reached out to Clemson University faculty and students to help enhance the CBS affiliate’s coverage of the races. The university responded with a one-of-a-kind initiative.

Students and faculty in the Clemson University Cyber Institute’s Social Media Listening Center (SMLC) will gather and deliver comments from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs for the live, nine-hour webcast Wood will host.

“I feel what ‘7 On Your Side, WSPA-TV’ will deliver in partnership with the Clemson University Cyber Institute's Social Media Listening Center (SMLC), is a unique two-way conversation about the elections, with expert political analysis complemented by the SMLC’s exclusive ability to drill into comments that pertain to this election,” Wood said. “It is live streaming coverage with insight from Clemson’s SMLC that you won’t find anywhere else.”

Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center is housed in the university’s College of Business and Behavioral Sciences. It opened last February with support from Clemson Computing and Information Technology Division, Dell and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The center offers students from across the university the opportunity to engage in social media listening and analysis.

“The center enables students to monitor thousands of online conversations about organizations, brands, products and services on a global scale in real time,” said SMLC faculty leader Jason Thatcher.

Thatcher said Clemson students will use the social media listening and engagement suite powered by the salesforce.com Marketing Cloud to analyze which candidate, topic or issue that is generating the most mentions across the social web.

Viewers also can expect to see Clemson faculty and students from other disciplines during the live webcast, including experts from the university’s political science and communication studies departments.

“We lined up students and faculty to talk about campaign messaging and how social media worked for or against the candidates,” said professor Joseph Mazer, associate chairman for Clemson’s communication studies.

Communication studies intern Amy Poulous will report live from the SMLC, revealing comments from social media sites.

“Viewers will be able to join us via laptop webcam during the broadcast to share their comments and voting experiences,” Wood said.

WSPA’s live webcast kicks off at 3 p.m., Nov. 6. The link to the live coverage is http://www2.wspa.com/politics/livestream/.

Participants will need to open a free Spreecast account to join the live discussion.

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WSPA TV is a Media General, Inc. company. The station touts being the leader in interactive television news across the country.