Social Media Analysis & Creation (SMAC) Lab
Increasing civic engagement by empowering citizens in the effective and responsible use of social media.
Unparalleled Opportunity
Founded in 2015, the SMAC Lab is the first university-based social media lab of its kind, offering unparalleled research tools to faculty, students, and the community that allow for a better understanding of the creators behind social media content.
Pioneering Research
The SMAC Lab is equipped with cutting-edge technology with the unique capability to instantly track, analyze and research participation, converstaion and sentiment in social media.
The SMAC Lab offers a broad array of listening software, allowing accesss to content form most social media platforms, podcasts, portals, classified and online news sources.
The lab also offers expertise pairing survey swith social media content analysis, allowing researchers to study the people behind the posts, including their income, gender, race, ideology and voting behavior.
The SMAC Lab provides the capability to analyze the social media content in profound ways, which has led to research publications in top-tier scientific and communication journals.
Experiential Learning
The Manship School is committed to training the next generation of mass communicators. The SMAC Lab's distrinctive design provides a hands-on command center where students can learn how to move beyond social media listening to responding anad proactively creating compelling social media content.
The space can be easily utilized for social media workshops offered to LSU faculty and professionals. Socila media coursework taught in the SMAC Lab allows a specialization in social media at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The SMAC Lab provides in-deopth soscial media insights and visualizations of what is happening aroudn the world in social media.
Research Infrastructure
We have created a unique social media panel to study digital participation via social media. Our panel allows us to survey a nationally representative sample of social media users and the content they produce. When combined with our syndicated research services, this panel enables us to know who produces what in social media, a research tool that is unparalleled in the world.
Syndicated Research Services
The SMAC Lab houses a listening center powered by Crimson Hexagon that allows us to instantly track, analyze and research participation, conversation and sentiment in social media. In addition, we offer a revolving suite of other social media monitoring and analytics software as they become available.
Teaching
Since we are training the next generation of mass communicators, we designed the SMAC Lab as not only a listening and analysis center, but also as a collaborative and instructional facility where we teach students how to move beyond listening to responding and proactively creating compelling social media content. We are currently designing interdisciplinary social media certificates at both the undergraduate and graduation levels.
Service
We designed the SMAC space to be easily converted into a social media command center. Furthermore, we constructed the space to be used for social media workshops offered to LSU faculty and professionals. Lastly, the SMAC Lab serves as the social media center of the Manship School, providing social media graphics and visualizations of what is happening both within Manship and around the world in social media. We provide these visualizations both through social media and through screens placed around campus.
Queries about the SMAC Lab may be directed to Dr Porter at lporter@lsu.edu .