Are you ready to step away from the computer and back into real life? Then get your entourage together and be prepared for CollegeTonight.com, a new social network created exclusively for college students as a way to enhance their social experience.
During his undergraduate years at Emory University, CEO and president of College Tonight Zach Suchin became successful as a nightlife entrepreneur by promoting events that targeted the college audience. Having a familiarity with the entertainment scene and connections to talent agencies and companies such as Twentieth Century Fox helped the Los Angeles native promote college events that would allow them to engage and see high-profile celebrities.
As a promoter, Suchin wanted to find a way to promote social interactivity to not only Emory students but all college students across the nation. Acknowledging the lack of resources available to help college students navigate the night life scene in their towns, Suchin decided to put his networking skills to use.
With the help of established affiliations with other event promoters and business contacts, Suchin and his business partner, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Jason Schutzbank created College Tonight as a way to unite online communities with their connection to offline marketing.
"There has always been a need for something that will actually promote people to go out and meet each other, rather than fostering these quantified online relationships like how many friends can I have," said Suchin. "Our goal is fostering real-life, actual relationships." This site wants to make its way back to the old definition of friendship.
Your entourage on the site consists of the people in your life that you would call up and actually go out of your way to hang out with. Not the other way around, as it has been on the majority of social networks.
The website promotes social activity the way that the creators believe social networking should have evolved into by now. The site is a new way for college students to receive information about social events and activities that are happening on campus and around their area. In addition to events, the website also offers promotions for events exclusively to college students throughout the week. It is a site that is designed for students to check in and check out.
College Tonight serves, as Suchin describes, as an "innovative platform to help people meet each other beyond just 'friend-ing' people, 'poking' people or whatever it is that you would do online, because I think Facebook is fantastic as a rolodex or a photo album, but Facebook isn't where I want to go to find out literally what I'm going to do tonight, what's going on, where are my friends."
Suchin and Schutzbank differentiated College Tonight from the other social networks with their decision to team up with social mobile provider Jangl. By teaming up with Jangl, College Tonight has created a new way to incorporate mobile features that are unlike any other features made available by its competitors.
Have you ever made a drunk dial that you wish you could take back the next day? Now you can by using their drunk dial feature that allows you to leave a complimentary drunk voicemail to a friend with the power to take it back whenever you want. With the "crush calculator" you can receive mobile alerts if you happen to be at the same event or venue as your crush, just maybe giving you the courage to approach him/her and actually socialize with them.
When creating College Tonight, Suchin factored in the number one issue all college students have on their mind when entering a social network: privacy.
"The gate of entry to our community is that you have to have an .edu (email address), and that's never going to change. We will never allow people that don't have a .edu." said Suchin. "The precautions you have to take when you're attempting an unprecedented amount of mobility to get all those features are really conducive to getting off the computer. You have to have unprecedented privacy controls."
In efforts to do this, Suchin has taken an initiative by hiring one of the foremost FBI profilers in the country who is now retired. The FBI profiler they have hired was a consultant for the JonBenet Ramsey case and was the basis for the main character in Silence of the Lambs.
For more information on College Tonight, visit the site at www.collegetonight.com.
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