Citizen Kane, meet MySpace

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor


Who’s in your network?

That question is becoming more than an ad slogan as newspapers stake their own social network homesteads across the digital frontier.

The Roanoke (Va.) Times (daily, 88,901; Sunday, 103,374), for example, last month launched BigLickU.com, a social site geared toward the area’s diverse college student population.

BigLickU.com was launched last month by The Roanoke (Va.) Times in an effort to serve the area’s diverse college student population. The site is designed as if it were a faux university, with various college-themed resources.

The site is designed like a faux university, with various college-themed resources such as the dining hall, which contains restaurant reviews and the study lounge; a housing area and class reviews; and a career center, according to Chris Winston, provost/general manager of the site.

“The Times’ circulation area includes numerous colleges and universities with more than 50,000 combined students,” Winston said. “We didn’t feel like advertisers in our area had a strong way to reach this audience, so we decided to build a social networking site to help them market to this crucial demographic.”

In the first week of operation, the site attracted more than 150 users, Winston said. Four full-time writers and five part-time students work on the site.

The site is open to the public, but to keep the site correctly focused, only users who register with a verified .edu e-mail address can participate.

So far, restaurant and class reviews appear to be the most popular, Winston said.

Traditional interests

“Most of student life revolves around these things — class, studying, eating and residential life.”

Winston said BigLickU will let The Times experiment with ad concepts it hasn’t tried on its main roanoke.com Web site. The paper may also use some of the content management tools and ratings software now appearing on the college site and tailor it to The Times’ audience.

Bakotopia, backed by The Bakersfield Californian, first rolled out in 2005. The site features stories, video, photos and other user-generated content.

In the meantime, Winston said BigLickU is working with advertisers to see how it can work with companies interested in targeting the college audience.

“Advertisers have been excited to see where the social site will go from here,” he said.

“We could use the same advertising content on both sites, but we will also look into building new creative ideas for advertisers to focus more on their benefits for college students.”

The Times’ move to create a site geared toward a younger demographic is an attempt to break away from a one-site-fits all mentality, Winston said.

“There are few products out there that have benefits for everyone 8 to 80 years old,” Winston said. “The Internet, with its relatively quick time to market and low barriers to entry, allows you to build more niche products based on location, life stage or areas of interest.”

California streaming

The Bakersfield Californian, meantime, is a social network veteran, through its homegrown Bakomatic social media software, which it rolled out two years ago as part of its Bakotopia.com Web page.

“As readership of daily newspapers declines, it’s essential that we continue to find new ways to connect with our communities,” said Mary Lou Fulton, vice president of audience development for The Californian (daily, 60,975; Sunday, 72,322). “Social media creates ways for people to express themselves and through that activity we can stay in touch with what our community thinks is important. That’s the lifeblood of our business.”

“We came up with that name Bakomatic because we hoped to use the platform to automatically create many sites in Bakersfield,” she said.

So far the app has lived up to its name. The Californian uses the software to power seven other local sites and infuse its features on the flagship site, Bakersfield.com.

“Our platform includes the ability for users to contribute articles, pictures and events; create their own blogs; and social media features including profiles, interest tags and the ability to add friends,” she said.

The Californian began licensing this software to other newspapers at http://participata.com. The (Phoenix) Arizona Republic signed up to use Bakomatic in January.

Power to the people

Fulton said The Californian launched the social site to give its users a way to connect with others who share their interests and to leverage those interests into new business opportunities.

“Our social features are now generating more than 1 million page views a month, or about 25 percent of our traffic across our local network,” she said.

The social sites have also produced unique products specific to the Bakersfield area.

For example, Bakotopia.com just released its first compilation CD, featuring local bands that posted profiles and music on the site.

In addition, Bakersfield.com released a local business guide, described by Fulton as “MySpace meets the Yellow Pages,” which allows people to rate and review area businesses as well as become “an online regular or friend,” she said.

Next up: classifieds social networking, a service the paper is evaluating.