Regular readers know that I’m an advocate of college students participating in social media. I think introducing social media as part of the classroom experience will bridge the early-adopter crowd and ultimately more influential and arguably more important, the casual user.
In my first month of blogging, which ended right around now, I wrote What College Students Can Get From Blogging and introduced The College Blog Network. Taking time to blog is one of the beginning steps for people looking to be active in social media. Following this step is personal branding and building a network, which is often difficult for college students due to conflicting time commitments. Although college is very much about learning how to manage time, building study habits to retain larger amounts of information and discovering which field you might be passionate enough to launch a career in, a few students are finding ways to move up in the social media sphere.
This past month, two college students (who’ve been successful in building personal brands) used their web presence to land writing gigs at two of the worlds most popularly read blogs. According to Technorati, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are respectively the 9th and 10th most popular blogs in the world. Mashable is the world’s #1 social networking blog. ReadWriteWeb is a popular weblog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis. It is the lead blog in the ReadWriteWeb Network, a growing network of blogs about web technology. Most, if not all, of the writers who work for Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are alumni at some college or univeristy.
Corvida is a 20 year old, third year graphic design major living in Atlanta, GA who writes and maintains her own blog and is a member of Grand Effect. She wrote her first post for ReadWriteWeb on May 9th and has written several great posts since. Alana Taylor, the girl who wrote The Twitter Song, started writing for Mashable a few days ago and published her first post on May 27th. She too is 20 years old and is studying journalism at NYU. Both girls have been involved and interested in online communities for several years. Corvida started writing a personal weblog in 2001, later she started to focus on technology and social media. Alana joined Blogger in 2006 and tried out for Mahalo Daily earlier this year.
I’m not surprised that Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are beginning to tap into Gen Y prospects. A large part of our introduction to the Internet is joining social networks. Last month, Sarah Perez of RRW wrote a post on Why Gen Y Is Going To Change The Web. Sarah did a good job of describing how the Internet and technology are influencing the expectations and capabilities of young people. One way for both blogs to expand their audience is to continue to pick up college writers who interact with a whole new group of people waiting to meet and learn about social media. I’m willing to bet they can find writers who are interested in this space and looking for nothing more than to add experience to their resume, I know I am.
Congratulations Corvida and Alana!
