The Loop 21: "Sallie Mae is the Devil"

Since we're all fans of Sallie Mae, I've started a long-term project. I am collecting 2,000 tweets about the company.

"'Sallie Mae is the Devil,' What Tweets and a Court Case Say About the Student Loan Company’s Brand" is my latest piece at The Loop21.com - in it, I document 260 tweets about Sallie Mae, and I look forward to sharing more remarks from twitter users in forthcoming posts!

Here's a snippet:

Carry out a search via Twitter for tweets about Sallie Mae and the returns are overwhelming. That is not surprising given the fact that Sallie Mae is a household name and one of the largest student lenders in the country.

Each day, individuals across the country take to their handheld devices or computers and tweet between 50 and 100 comments about the student lending company. When it comes to public image, Sallie Mae via Twitter, does not look so great. For every positive tweet about Sallie Mae - and those are usually produced by advertising bots promoting loans and loan consolidation programs - there are at least 3-5 complaints. A sampling of roughly 260 tweets was collected from July 5 to July 20 last year. The tweets not only expressed derision for the company, but were vicious. Interestingly, some of tweets do not come from individuals who have loans with the lender. Non-borrowers have strong opinions about the company, too.

(Incidentally, the collection of these tweets is for a continued project that will objectively assess the overall opinion by Twitter users about Sallie Mae as a brand and company. Two-thousand tweets will be documented and, for the sake of providing readers with accurate, digital evidence, no typographical or grammatical corrections will be made. The same documentation will be implemented for this article).

To learn what people are tweeting about Sallie Mae and the court case(s) against them, read the entire article here.