SMLC finds a winner in Eureka!

Eureka! Brings students to campus to work with faculty and graduate students for a month. It's unique in that the student hss not yet enrolled in classes - they are tabula rasa - a smart blank slate having their first Clemson experience!  We wanted to get a fresh set of eyes in the lab to glean a new view on the power of social media listening.

The SMLC landed the smartest student in the Eureka! Program to work on a summer project visualizing social conversations around the congressional elections.



Jim Burleson, Jim Bottum, Jason Thatcher,
Kaci Bennett, Dustin Atkins
The Summer Social Media Listening Team!

Kaci Bennett spent July hanging out around our lab thinking about how to effectively search and visualize around the election.  With some help from Jim Burleson and Dustin Atkins, she drilled into the congressional race in Florida's 22nd Congressional District, found that absent geocoding it is difficult to capture the full conversation about the race, and that while political scientists often say all politics are local, denizens of the social web view local politics through the lens of the national race.
Along the way, we like to think that Kaci learned alot about how social media is transforming society - through learning to use the Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud!

Kaci also used Piktochart to create a really cool infographic based on her listening to the election!

Our team wishes her the best as she moves forward in her Clemson experience!  We also wanted to thank her parents for letting Kaci share time with us - in her final summer before leaving for college!