Tigers for Tigers

Since 1997, Clemson students have worked to preserve the future of wild tigers. With just under 4000 tigers left in the wild, Tigers for Tigers works to create awareness universities and coordinate tiger preservation efforts across the world.  To do so, they are partnering up with the Global Tiger Initiative.

So how can social media help with that effort? In cooperation with our students, the global tiger initiative, and kids from my neighborhood, we constructed searches for conversations around tiger preservation on the social web.  We drilled into five issues:

1. Tiger facts
2. Locating Tigers
3. Tiger tourism and economic development
4. Preservation
5. Poaching

We are using these searches to surface images of wild tigers in popular society, to visualize the locations advocates for tigers, to identify potential trafficking in tiger parts, and to understand how citizens of 'tiger countries' talk about tiger preservation in their own voices.  

We are leveraging the command center to visualize the location of the conversations, identify influencers, evaluate sentiment, and think about the timing/share of voice of pro vs anti preservation conversations.

I'd just one example of how social media analytics can contribute to advancing not only the social enterprise ... But also the human enterprise of building a better global society!

You won't find us on Facebook ...

Where you won't find my students!

Fall is here, students crowd the sidwalks, and another semester begins ... Football is in the air ... Even though I am a year older, the students stay the same - smart, young, and a bit nervous about the real world.

In chatting with the my students, I learned that Facebook is for their parents, that they stalk each other on Instagram, that Pinterest is still sort of cool, and that they are acutely aware of privacy (but they still don't like Google+) ...


Twitter seems to be evolving as the medium of choice for private conversations ... Change is in the air ... and I suspect that it always will be for businesses that engage in social media....

Oh, and you never ever hear tell of  Flickr ... or Bebo ... or Myspace ... Ping ... or Pair ...

I'm looking forward to a semester of conversations about how the social enterprise can, and is changing, the world ... I suspect that by December, the students will have transformed my view of social and its implications for the world.

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!