LaNia Roberts was sitting in her room, wrapped in a towel, when her roommate cautiously answered a knock at the door.

The stranger bounced in saying that she had seen “LaNia” written on their door outside and “just had to see if it was the real LaNia.” She chattered animatedly over how much she adored Roberts’ weather reports on Snapchat, a popular social media and messaging app, and how excited she was to meet her.

“The only thing I could think was, ‘I’m naked,’” said Roberts, a freshman painting major.

Roberts’ local fame stems from the Snapchat Syracuse Campus Story, a daily 3- to 4-minute selection of pictures and videos featured on the app. Users around the Syracuse University campus can access this feature by turning on their smartphones’ location-based services and submitting their pictures and videos to be featured on the story.

Shannon Kelly, a Snapchat spokesperson, said that from there, a staff of about 20 members in the Snapchat offices in Venice, California and New York City comb through the potential posts to remove posts that are inappropriate or of poor quality. They further trim down the photos and videos to produce a chronological narrative.

The feature was launched at SU around December, but it took a short hiatus before returning in March. Kelly said the campus story was put on hold so the Snapchat team could put more effort into having the Campus Story feature in place at other colleges around the country.

Roberts had already been doing her signature TV reporter-style weather reports on her personal Snapchat since getting an iPhone in November. Her first weather report was a series of two videos. The first was an ecstatic comment made right as she stepped out of her dorm building on what she initially thought to be “one of the most beautiful days outside.”

“And you know how like when it’s cold but you don’t really realize how cold it is until the wind hits you after five minutes while you’re walking? Those were the first cold winds that I think I felt in Syracuse,” Roberts said. “So I get out my phone again, and I’m walking, my hair is blowing, wind is going everywhere, and I was just like, ‘I take it back. F*ck this. I don’t like this no more.’”

This initial weather report got a positive reaction from her friends on Snapchat, so Roberts slowly began to create more weather reports on an almost daily basis.

“It’s so weird because I did not know what I was doing back then,” she said. “I did not know what I was creating.”

So by the time that the Campus Story came back to SU, Roberts had already been at the daily weather reports for four months. As time went on, she found that the Campus Story almost always selected her story each day.

Students have recognized her all across campus, at parties and everywhere in between. And every time she’s on the campus story, Roberts can see the amount of views it has gotten, which she said is usually around 5,500. Roberts can also see the number of people who screenshot her posts, though she can’t see their names.

Once, she was asked if she was the one running the Campus Story or was best friends with the person who was. Her response to them is that she is as clueless as everyone else when it comes to the Campus Story selection process.

“My friends are like, ‘LaNia, you’re famous.’” Roberts said. “But I don’t see it that way at all. I don’t see myself as being famous or anything like that. I just see it as me being able to put a smile on someone’s face.”

Anthony Rotolo, a social media professor, loves Roberts and what she does on Snapchat, despite the fact that he’s never met her.

“She is the type of person who shares content that makes you feel better for just no more than 10 seconds of your day, and I think that shines through,” Rotolo said.

Rotolo said Snapchat’s popularity is a result of peer motivation to be on the same network, despite the daunting user interface. He said the app’s extremely simple design adds a steep initial learning curve for users.

“As a social media professor, I can’t tell you how many times — countless times — people have said to me, ‘I just don’t understand how to use Snapchat. I open it and I don’t know what to do,’” Rotolo said.

Despite this, Rotolo feels that features such as the Campus Story make the app more appealing to a wider audience. It allows users to observe and be a part of the Snapchat community passively, which is how most social networks become popular.

But according to a July 2014 Snapchat presentation for potential marketing partners, the most effective aspect of Snapchat is its likeness to a real-life conversation. It highlights the fact that there is an active and conscious physical engagement via your finger’s touch on the app’s screen. It also places an emphasis on paying attention, since the message content disappears in a matter of seconds.

Snapchat, according to the presentation, psychologically makes you feel like you are physically engaged in a one-way conversation with whoever’s photos or videos you are watching.

“Sometimes we just need that break in order to smile about something, about anything,” Roberts said. “So I think that’s what makes a good campus story — when it’s just full of smiles, full of laughter.”

Published on April 7, 2015 at 10:08 pm

Contact Margaret: mglin@syr.edu