UPDATE 4-18-07: For information about the Virginia Tech shooting, see this blog post.
UPDATE III: Be sure to read the response from Chris Winston of BigLickU in the comments.
UPDATE IV: Read the comments for more from college media advisers for whom I have a great deal of respect.
College media advisers and editors – especially a certain subset of folks located in close proximity to metro dailies – had better turn a watchful eye toward Roanoke, Va. over the next few months. A new Web site and approach to reaching college audiences might be the biggest challenge yet to campus media dominance and ad revenues.
From the intro screen of BigLickU.com:
Every year, thousands of incoming and returning Southwest Virginia college students confront tough questions that never appear on an exam. How do I find cool stuff to do? Where do I get my hair cut? How can I sell my used TV? Where is the team playing this week? How do I keep from being screwed on a lease? Where do I meet new people? How do I find the best pizza or hamburger?
In February 2007, a new local social networking Web site will launch to help students answer these questions. With a network only open to those with .edu addresses and content for and by college students in the New River and Roanoke valleys, Big Lick U may be the best thing to happen to college students since beer pong.
BigLickU is being put together by the minds behind Roanoke.com, which is the web site of the Roanoke Times. Roanoke is one of the most innovative newspapers in the U.S. – they just won a digital edge award for best overall news site for their circulation category (75,000-250,000).
And the social network is aimed squarely at the students at Virginia Tech, Radford, Roanoke College, Hollins University, Ferrum College, New River Community College and Virginia Western Community College. You have to have a .edu domain e-mail to even sign up. If that sounds familiar, it’s the approach that made Facebook a major success.
From an AdAge article:
An edgier social-networking site will be rolled out by the Roanoke Times over the next few weeks. “Big Lick University” is a MySpace-styled effort designed at delivering the college students in the southwest Virginia daily’s coverage area — and the estimated $180 million they spend annually — to advertisers.
“Big Lick” is a faux campus. A “Dining Hall” section features student restaurant and bar recommendations. A “Residence Hall” lets students leave messages for one another on their room’s “white board.” Students have to register to use most of the site’s features.
“The idea is Facebook meets Citysearch meets Craigslist meets campus paper,” said Dan Wheeler, the Times’ director of digital media. “It seems like a stretch for a newspaper to be doing this, but … bringing people to advertisers … is what we usually do.” (emphasis added)
Notice the reference to the campus paper? Yes. That’s you they’re referring to.
While college media organizations maintain that we face competition from local newspapers for advertising dollars, we have a natural advantage. The college market is our home turf. In print, we have an audience with a natural affinity for the content we produce. We have the brand that’s tied to the college. And college students aren’t known for reading their local city daily (or weekly, for that matter).
Online is another matter. There’s little natural advantage for the campus newspaper online if the big daily comes in and does something disruptive that adds value you can’t offer.
And just in case you don’t believe this should concern you (“It’s only in Roanoke”), Wheeler was talking up BigLickU at the Newspaper Association of America’s marketing convention in Las Vegas this week.
He sat on a panel with newspaper online media gurus and plotted the outlines of the site:
Dan Wheeler of the Roanoke Times spent his time introducing us to a new site his company is going to be launching called BigLickU.com It’s a social site that brings together more than 50,000 college students at seven schools in SW Virginia through entertainment, information and advertising.
Features of the site:
- The “students” are registered users
- “Administration” in keeping with the university theme
- Content – 90% + student generated
- Advertising – not just beer, but the many advertisers that want to reach these students (emphasis added)
Dan explained how they created this site like a university. It will have an “athletic center,” “dining hall”, “residence hall,” “bookstore,” “student life center,” “quad” and a “study lounge.” Each one had a networking/communication feature.
Dan: “We think that local does matter, and we can provide something that students can do virtually with local information and local interactions.â€
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to draw the connections. College students are a sweet advertising market. Local newspapers – hungry for readers – are eyeing that prize. It’s clear they aren’t going to win these students to reading the print (dead tree) version of their products. It’s questionnable whether students would even read the online version. So the best way a local paper can reach that college student market? Build a site for them.
Will it work? Who knows. My suspicion is that Roanoke is not the type of organization that is going to abandon something like this after a couple of months. They are obviously putting some effort into buildling this out, and they have experience being patient (witness TimesCast, their online video experiment).
Rob Curley suggests a rule of thumb: that any innovation experiment needs at least 18 months to grow before judging it a success or a failure. That’s 18 months of BigLickU hitting up local advertisers and students to bring them together on its site.
And if Roanoke is successfully able to leverage its knowledge of local information (there’s that hyperlocal angle again) in a way that is edgy and appealing to a college market …
Newspapers (news media companies) are becoming more attuned to the possibilities of leveraging that local content to cater to niche audiences, and building up the content by social networking. Don’t believe me? Here are a couple of examples:
Bakotopia – “Bakotopia is an online community for the young, hip, and young-and-hip-at-heart of Bakersfield, California.” This site is owned by the Bakersfield Californian, but there’s no BC branding.
Vita.mn – “Vita.mn is your ultimate guide to what’s going on in the Twin Cities.” Entertainment guide for Minneapolis-St. Paul. Run by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Then there’s Lawrence.com, and the assorted sites that serve the University of Kansas student market. None of them is as much of a direct competitor to college media as BigLickU is striving to be.
If Roanoke is able to convert advertisers to their online offering, expect other companies to try to follow suit.
Ultimately, who should be concerned with a BigLickU knock-off coming to their town?
A college media operation that is:
- serving a student population of over 20,000
- almost entirely supported by advertising revenue.
- located in a city or metro region with a medium- to large-circulation daily newspaper with even a modicum of web savvy.
Really, the first qualification is a maybe. You could be a smaller-circulation paper in a metro area and this would still apply. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a handful of operations who are in that position right now.
Obviously, for many college media organizations, the prospects of having a hyperlocal social media site run by the local big daily is not an immediate concern (except in Roanoke).
But it’s something to keep in mind. It’s something that will disrupt the status quo. The best way to meet this challenge? That’s a good question. Certainly, the first thing you can do is ramp up your online presence and build a stronger connection with your students online. I’d rather be preparing for that possibility and developing a strong online presence than be caught flat footed if (when?) such a site drops in your back yard.
Other options? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Update: props to Steve Yelvington, where I first learned about this.
Update 2: changed the title to be more descriptive.
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