Clemson University powers academic research and trains the next generation of social media professionals
Clemson University uses Sprinklr Insights to support academic research — and to train future social media professionals, who gain real-world experience conducting research for local organizations.
The Challenge
When Brandon Boatwright had the opportunity to return to Clemson University as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and director of the school’s Social Media Listening Center (SMLC), he jumped at the offer.
Not only was Clemson home to one of the first labs in the U.S. to have a dedicated social media analytics space, but he knew the lab well: He had received both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees at Clemson, had lectured there, and had spent time using the lab’s social media research technology. But by the time Boatwright returned to campus in 2020, the lab’s software had become legacy and was no longer supported. He needed a new platform to power Clemson’s leading edge social media lab.
He was looking for a solution that would:
- Help train the next generation of social media managers, content creators and strategists and prepare them for industry jobs after graduation
- Enable his students to conduct research for local small businesses and non-profits as a means of providing a public service while giving students real-world experience
- Break down interdisciplinary silos and open up new opportunities for collaborative academic research
With the data that we're able to pull from Sprinklr, we can really start to train students and faculty from across the university in these research skills. It's a huge untapped area of research that is interdisciplinary in nature.”
The Solution
Boatwright and his colleagues landed on Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform.
Since 2021, Sprinklr Insights has powered Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center, an interdisciplinary lab that utilizes cutting edge technology to listen to, measure, and engage in online conversations across various digital and social media platforms. As director of the center, Boatwright’s goal is to empower students and faculty to leverage the power of analytics and artificial intelligence to better understand how information spreads, resonates, and performs. He says his five-year strategic plan for building out the center revolves around three key areas.
Boatwright says that students’ access to Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center and to Sprinklr sets them up for success by providing hands-on experience using a best-in-class, AI-powered platform. In class, they work on the platform to learn social media best practices as well as data analytics and interpretation. But students aren’t simply learning to conduct social media research; they are pioneers in a rapidly-evolving field, where they are learning to manipulate a tool that transforms vast amounts of unstructured data, including millions of online conversations from more than 30 digital channels, into actionable insights.
“Having this resource on campus and having students come up to me after they’ve had a year or two of experience working in the real world and telling me they got their first job or their first internship because they had this experience on their resume is an incredible thing for us,” says Boatwright.
The academic world is known for silos because it’s structured around academic disciplines, which can create barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration and communication. But Boatwright says Clemson’s SMLC has begun to chip away at these silos by shifting the narrative — and the methodology — for how research is done in an academic setting.
“We often use Sprinklr for its capacity to pull data from hundreds of millions of different sources, and my colleagues will tell me this saves them hours of time in data collection,” he says. “And that’s because we don’t just pull reams of data. Sprinklr helps us get the right amount of data and the right kind of data that they need for their studies.”
This past year, an assistant professor in Clemson’s communication department used Sprinklr to pull data and analyze conversations around minor league baseball during the pandemic. Virginia Harrison’s research, “Save Our Spikes”: Social Media Advocacy and Fan Reaction to the End of Minor League Baseball, was published in the prestigious Communication & Sport Journal.
“And with Sprinklr, she was able to get that data within a couple minutes versus a few hours or even days coding in Python or R,” says Boatwright. The Department of Communication currently has upwards of ten current projects in various stages of review, he says, and SMLC has received more than 30 requests for data from university faculty for their respective research projects.
Finally, Boatwright and SMLC Associate Director Will Henderson have worked to build out an internship program where undergraduate students provide research and analytics services for organizations internal to the university — as well as for local small businesses and nonprofits.
Following the Clemson University Men of Color National Summit this year, students conducted research to supplement the university’s social media team report on the event. They provided data and insights on relevant social conversations during the week of the summit, including which social users were most influential and which posts generated the most engagement. Interns listened and tracked social data associated with #clemsonmoc, then created a social analytics report to present their findings to stakeholders.
“This type of work is not only important to evaluate the scope of online conversation around the event, but it gives students that real world experience of conducting the research, then packaging it up into a deck and presenting it,” says Boatwright. “That’s invaluable.”
The Outcome
The biggest and best outcome for Boatwright is when graduates of Clemson’s program return to tell him that their time as undergraduates spent working on the Sprinklr platform helped them get their first job. It’s also when older graduates return – as they recently did for Clemson’s first-ever Social Media Week this past year — and are impressed with how the communication program and the SMLC have evolved.
“They came in and they said, ‘So what is this space like? What are you guys doing in here?’ And we said, ‘Well, we've partnered with Sprinklr. It's a software company that allows us to do all these different cool things,’” Boatwright explains. “And every single one of them has come in and said, ‘Man! I wish we had something like this when we were going through school.”
Going forward, Boatwright hopes to establish a multi-disciplinary faculty associates program at Clemson — as well as a computational science certificate program.
“With the data that we're able to pull from Sprinklr, we can really start to train students and faculty from across the university in these research skills,” says Boatwright. “It's a huge untapped area of research that is interdisciplinary in nature.”
