Submitted by Victoria Andrew, Professional Writer, Editor, and Blogger
At its foundation, social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate. IT tools supporting collaboration have existed for decades. Yet, social-media technologies, such as social networking, wikis and blogs, enable collaboration on a much grander scale and support tapping the power of the collective in ways previously unachievable.
Six core principles underlie the value of social-media solutions and serve as defining characteristics setting social media apart from other forms of communication and collaboration. Principles include:
- Participation
- Collective
- Transparency
- Independence
- Persistence
- Emergence
Social media can include text, audio, video, images, podcasts, and other multimedia communications. Ultimately, it can be an effective tool to help with your job search. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn enhance and expedite your hunt for a new job.
For Generation X/Y, social media networking serves as the most potent catalyst to forming the vital partnerships, visibility, and opportunities needed to penetrate the job market for the first time.
Consider the following sample sites and exercises for working your networking muscles:
1) InternshipRatings.com
Thinking about applying for an internship? Wondering what kind of experience you’re going to get out of that internship? Internships are the most important thing students can do to prepare for their career, especially if you choose the ones which will grant you the important transferable skills needed for your future career. InternshipRatings offers you reviews from students that have already been through internships and know how valuable they are.
Activity:
Log on and create a free account with www.internshipratings.com. Complete a quick and easy survey to rate different aspects of your current and previous internships, including the level of “real life” experience, compensation, and networking opportunities you have garnered so far in your education and early career. Then, add a comment to describe a specific experience from your internship in more detail.
Ultimately, this site is a quintessential way to weed out the internships that will be a waste of your time and shall catapult you into the ones that will actually benefit you personally and professionally.
Next post we will go over four more sites and activities for each. So, if I were you, I’d make sure and check out this location in the next few days as we skyrocket the social networking scene all the while propelling your success.
Thanks Victoria, I can’t wait to continue…
dhuffman,
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education career services
career services international
