Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Chris Winston is the general manager of BigLickU, a Web site aimed at college students in Southwest Virginia. The company has its headquarters at Washington and Otey streets in Blacksburg.

Advertising and sales manager Stefan Babich boxes promotional BigLickU T-shirts for distribution in the basement workroom of BigLickU, a Web site targeting college students in Southwest Virginia.

A Web site built with an eye on college students in the Roanoke-Blacksburg area is cruising for return glances as campus activity ramps up this month.

BigLickU.com, a social networking site from The Roanoke Times, opens its full-fledged launch this month.

"Our perfect world has students from Radford and students from Tech holding hands and singing Kumbaya," said Chris Winston, the general manager -- he uses the title "provost" -- of BigLickU. By his own admission, he's undertaking a risky venture.

BigLickU is the first attempt by a large metropolitan newspaper to reach into the college market, said Bryan Murley, assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University.

"It's going to be an interesting experiment, and the life of the newspaper industry depends on reaching those people," Murley said.

Designed to attract students from seven local colleges and universities, Blacksburg-based BigLickU faces major hurdles as it prepares for the end-of-August influx of students.

Although the site was actually launched in February, Winston considers this month to be its "coming-out party," as he and a staff of four full-time and two part-time employees (plus about a dozen freelancers and interns) will be making a push to introduce the site to students as they return.

BigLickU will be competing with national sites (Facebook and MySpace) for users, competing with local and campus media for advertising, and trying to build its brand recognition within the entire community.

The real challenge is awareness. The site's operator has to let students know it exists, and persuade them to give it their eyes, time and attention.

With only 960 registered users -- about 150 of whom signed up at BigLickU's booth at Blacksburg's Steppin' Out festival Aug. 4 -- Winston is hanging his hopes on the incoming class of freshmen. His "stretch goal" is to have about 10 percent of the college students in the area registered -- about 5,000 people -- by early 2008.

BigLickU apparently is the first social networking site in the U.S. designed specifically for students, and aimed directly at the 50,000 or so who attend Ferrum and Roanoke colleges; Hollins, Radford and Virginia Tech universities; and New River and Virginia Western community colleges. Besides letting students create home pages, it will offer local news and feature stories; reviews of restaurants, bars, bands, and even dorms and apartment complexes -- and free local classified ads.

Social networking sites give people who share a common interest -- college life in the BigLickU case -- an online home.

Social networks offer people an easy way to create a Web page showcasing themselves and their photos and video, along with links to the pages of their friends. Users can send and receive messages, leave comments on their friends' pages, and expand their network of contacts.

"We're operating under the notion that local does matter," Winston said.

The site faces multiple tasks in making its content local, Murley said, and in doing so it poses some threat to colleges' student-run newspapers.

BigLickU will compete for advertisers against traditional campus media, including Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times, a campus newspaper that pays its bills from the ads it sells.

Two major shifts in the traditional newspapers' business model are at work, Murley said.

First, metro dailies that never had much luck persuading students to read their papers have a new opportunity through students' willingness to look online for information.

Second, social networking sites offer those daily newspapers a way to tap into the student market without spending the amounts of capital required for their print editions. Campus media organizations, on the other hand, may lack the manpower to build a social networking site, Murley said.

Jennie Tal, who recently graduated from Virginia Tech with degrees in communication and international studies and a portfolio of freelance articles written for The Roanoke Times, says Winston is right about the value of local content on the site. Tal said she loves "the small-town feel that the site can give, that sites like Facebook and MySpace can't offer."

Alicia Ring, a junior at Radford University, said she likes the site's rating system. "This is a great way to preview local businesses, by hearing from other students," Ring said.

This month will be BigLickU's crucial test. The site needs to build up its user base to a critical mass of about 5,000.

"With any sort of social network, you're not going to get any sort of traction until you get that number of registered users," he said.

To that end, Winston and staff are planning to be at 40 student-activity events on local campuses, setting up tables and letting people check out (and register on) the site. They'll also be handing out goodies that appeal to a college market -- stickers, pens, mugs, pingpong balls.

If BigLickU is going to be successful, it will need to resonate not only with the students, but also with the local businesses that will have to support it through partnerships and advertising.

Even the soft launch of BigLickU has generated some advertising results for Windsor Hills Apartments, where Kerrie McWalters is general manager of its 300 units.

"We've seen some traffic from it, and think we'll see more next year," McWalters said. She said that further success depends on BigLickU's upcoming promotions.

Winston and his staff are coming up with different ways to draw students' attention to their sponsors. For example, using Citizens Mobile Broadband, a service of local television and telecommunications company Citizens, provides wireless Internet access throughout much of the New River Valley and is one of BigLickU's biggest sponsors.

"As an ISP [Internet service provider] you're always trying to find some way to get people to access the Internet," said Robert Weeks, marketing manager for the company. It has outfitted several of BigLickU's computers so they can go online anywhere in the region -- thanks to Citizens' technology, the entire valley is a high-speed wireless hot spot.

Awareness got a boost July 25 when BigLickU broke the news of an upcoming benefit concert at Virginia Tech. The story drew local, regional and national traffic.

Winston said he hopes to turn a profit within the first couple of years, but acknowledges the future is cloudy in his kind of work.

"The Internet's a risky business," he said. "There are no guarantees."