PhillyDeals: Data-mining social media for Wall St. protesters chatter

Corporations that mine Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social-media posts to learn what we are thinking on most any topic are also trolling for guidance on the Occupy Wall Street (OSW) protests, which have resulted in hundreds of arrests in New York and are spreading to Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

Here's how it looks to one data miner, a veteran Philadelphia IT guy, who spoke on condition that he not be named because he wasn't authorized to discuss it: "We've been watching it for three weeks. Over the weekend, with the arrests in New York, it is really taking off. The volumes have increased 20 times, 30 times. There are millions of communications."

Who is backing this tea party in reverse?

"I don't know if the Democrats are involved. I have no evidence of that," he told me. "It really looks like labor" is involved. He added that unions in New York and Washington were part of the chatter.

What's the message? "This isn't really aimed at Wall Street so much," he said. "It's aimed at corporations. Politics this year - it's going to be the workers against the rich."

Or not-quite-workers, he added: "It's [also] this generation of people who have been graduating since '08 and don't have jobs. They are having a tough time because the economy has been bad. They don't know what they want to do about it really.

"And then you have these activists who have learned to do social media. And some people mixed in who remember the '60s. And you have a tremendously heated rhetoric."

How rough can this get? "I hope it won't reach the point of calls for shutting down Twitter and Facebook," he said.

That, he added, would be bad for business.

Center City-based Aramark Corp. has agreed to sell its Lexington, Ky., Galls Inc. unit, which makes uniforms and gear for police, fire, ambulance, corrections, and private security workers, to CI Capital Partners L.L.C., of New York, for $163 million.

The deal follows Aramark's Aug. 29 deal to pay $145 million to acquire the Van Houtte Inc. office coffee service (also doing business as FilterFresh Coffee Service Inc.), of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, of Waterbury, Vt.

Aramark is bulking up its multinational cafeteria and food-services arm. CI managing director Thomas Ritchie said his firm planned to use Galls to buy other uniformmakers "as an active industry consolidator."

PNC Financial Service Group's business-credit outfit financed the Galls deal. Investment bank Stephens Inc. and Philadelphia law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P. advised Aramark. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison L.L.P. advised CI Capital.

Lawyer Ken Trujillo, onetime Philadelphia city solicitor and longtime partner in Trujillo, Rodriguez & Richards L.L.C., won't say how much he paid for WHAT-AM (1340) before he reopened it in August as Spanish-language (and online) music format "El Zol," with a crossover format so the beat doesn't hit quite so hard as urban rival Mega-AM (1310) or Rumba-AM (1480).

But Trujillo did tell me that his personal investment firm, Aztec Capital, paid less than the $5 million that Eric Blum's Marconi Broadcasting paid in the station's previous sale, in 2006, near the height of the media price bubble.

Marconi ran 1340 as an oldies station, ending its many years as the African American radio redoubt of Mary Mason and Georgie Woods (the Man with the Goods).

Trujillo, a native of New Mexico, who graduated from Penn Law, has hired Uriel Rendon, formerly of Spanish TV network Telemundo, and a string of disc jockeys. Trujillo says he would like to add civic programming, too, including people lawyer and Ceiba Inc. staffer Will Gonzalez "as a consumer expert."

"We're improving the signal," Trujillo told me, and redirecting it to cover not just the varied immigrant Latin American enclaves of the Northeast and North and South Philadelphia, but also the Latino population in Chester County and south to Delaware.