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Her one rule: “I try not to make my blogs boring if I can possibly help it,” she said.
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Viterbo University senior Chelsea Immel is one of 6 students that contribute to the “Talk About Viterbo” blog.
PETER THOMSON photo
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Click onto Viterbo’s admissions Web site and you’ll find not only Immel’s friendly mug, but those of five other Viterbo University bloggers.
Since August, Western Technical College’s home page highlights “Brenda’s blog,” featuring a second-year student’s take on everything from midterm exams to presidential candidate visits to La Crosse.
The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse also has had bloggers on and off for the past several years, said Cary Heyer, director of university relations.
“That peer-to-peer communication is effective in keeping people plugged into the campus scene,” Heyer said.
Bloggers give current and future students an inside look at campus life from a student’s point of view.
“I think it is a nice, more modern approach to communicating with prospective students,” Immel said.
Viterbo pays Immel $2 for each post and $1 for every picture she puts on her blog, she said. Western also pays its blogger.
Paying a blogger provides incentive to blog on a regular basis, said Amy Thornton, director of marketing and communications at Western. The same commitment is not typical with volunteer bloggers, she said.
“We want our blog to be timely and something that is consistently available for current and prospective students,” she said.
UW-L does not pay bloggers, Heyer said. He thinks paid bloggers might not be honest in their commentary because they are representing an employer.
“The benefit of a blog is that it is not sanitized by professional communicators,” he said.
However, UW-L has had trouble finding volunteers who will blog regularly.
“They found they had other priorities, whether social life, tests ... the concept of thinking about doing a blog and actually doing it were quite a bit different,” Heyer said.
Even with pay, Immel says, her blogs are not filtered through anyone at Viterbo.
Immel said that a student blogger would have been useful to her when she was deciding which college to choose. Now, as she searches graduate schools, she’s sure to check out the blogs.
“Who better to get a perspective from than current students,” she said.
