Housed in the Department of Communication and currently led by RHBSSI Faculty Fellow, Brandon Boatwright, Ph.D., the Clemson University Social Media Center (SMLC) is an interdisciplinary lab that utilizes industry-leading social analytics software to harvest, analyze and engage in social media conversations across thousands of sources of digital data. The SMLC is a cutting-edge laboratory that supplies researchers at Clemson with data for a diverse range of topics and projects.
Sports researchers at Clemson have utilized the SMLC to advance their studies in the behavioral sciences, such as in sports communication and education. Boatwright has partnered with other fellows in the Department of Communication, such as Virginia Harrison, Ph.D., and fellows Sarah Stokowski, Ph.D., and Chris Corr, Ph.D., from Clemson University’s athletic leadership program in the Department of Educational and Organizational Leadership Development on recent studies that have examined social media trends to collect qualitative data.
Published this year in the journal Communication & Sport, a study by Boatwright, Stokowski, Corr and colleague Marry Holly from the University of Florida, titled The Local Perspective: Regional Television Framing of Name, Image, and Likeness, utilized the SMLC “…to examine the manner in which local television media in the United States framed NIL during news broadcasts,” analyzing television broadcast content across the United States during Fall 2024. Helpful for collegiate athletic administrators, the study revealed that a similar number of comments framed NIL positively, for promotion, and negatively, for its disruption.
Prior to this, in 2023, Harrison and colleagues from her department, as well as from The Pennsylvania State University, announced their study, “Save Our Spikes”: Social Media Advocacy and Fan Reaction to the End of Minor League Baseball, published in Communication & Sport. The team utilized the SMLC to collect “…social media data to extract fan emotions during identity threats” on X (formerly known as Twitter) surrounding the decline of Minor League Baseball during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. “…the study found that most discussions of contraction were negative in tone and contained emotions like anger” and, overall, made an important contribution to the field “…by bringing advocacy communication into the discussion of sport fandom” and using social media data to shed light on sport fan emotions during a crisis.
The SMLC serves as one of the premier social media laboratories in the nation with the ability to harvest data, only scratching the surface of social media research and application. To that end, the SMLC provides students and researchers with tools and techniques to analyze and make sense out of datasets. The SMLC can support various methodological approaches from content analysis, sentiment analysis, network analysis and more. Click here to learn more about the SMLC.
