A faculty member and a group of graduate students from UT’s School of Journalism and Electronic Media will be providing real-time election analysis for WVLT tonight.
Viewers will be able to see them at work during the station’s special election coverage from 10 to 11:30 p.m.
The UT team will set up a “war room” in the WVLT studio. They have been trained in the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center in the College of Communication and Information, which uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio software to analyze Twitter messages and trends. They will monitor social media throughout the United States as election returns come in, with the ability to project their Social Studio work so TV viewers are able to see it.
“Part of our analysis will be assessing the social media reaction to the US Senate race in Tennessee, which has attracted widespread national attention since the open seat is vital to both Democrats and Republicans in achieving party control of the Senate,” said Stuart N. Brotman, the Howard Distinguished Endowed Professor of Media Management and Law and the Beaman Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media. “Given Social Studio’s national capabilities . . . it will be especially interesting for us to show how the whole country views the Tennessee candidates and the races for senator and governor.”
Brotman said the broadcast may also feature interviews with various members of the Social Media Political Communication Analytics Team, which includes College of Communication and Information graduate students Timothy Lee, Alexandria Sutherland, and James Zhang. The team’s work may also be featured on WVLT’s Facebook Live broadcast.
Brotman and another team of students provided a similar service for WVLT during the November 2016 presidential election.
The Adam Brown Center was created with a gift from college alumnus Adam Brown, now executive strategist for Salesforce, a San Francisco-based company that pioneered cloud computing and is the world’s number one customer relationship management platform. The center uses the same technology that Fortune 100 companies worldwide use to publish, engage, and analyze their social media marketing activities.
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CONTACT:
Amy Blakely (ablakely@utk.edu, 865-974-5034)