the Sam Jackson College Experience

Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.”

Davis cites polls which have shown teens–namely prospective students–are not very hip to the blogging jive.

I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.

This got me thinking about my own peers, and how many of them were familiar with the blogosphere, how much of them read anything from it, etc. It’s completely true that we as young people are far more concerned with social networking (read: Facebook, MySpace) than with the blogs so highly touted in the 2004 election. I’m not entirely representative of my age group.

It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.

Right you are sir. Then again, it’s certainly easier to find student-collegiate resources on Facebook when one can simply navigate to the “Friends” list, find some senior you knew last year who goes to whichever school you might be looking to find anything out about, and drop them a line. If student blogs were as easy to find and access as that, I’m sure they’d have better market penetration.

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