USING SOCIAL MEDIA AS A JOB BOARD MISSES THE POINT

Social media is about relationships and the only way to build relationships is to engage in meaningful interaction. Maybe using social media to post jobs is analogous to using a 3rd generation 64GB 4G iPad for nothing more than reading an e-book. In reality, a job board, whether it is on Facebook, a blog, or a wiki space, is no more valuable than a piece of paper with jobs on it yet many career services professionals who start to use social media as part of their career center strategy focus solely on using the powerful medium merely as another job board.  

THE PARADIGM SHIFT THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
I am willing to bet that the reason people do not use social media to its full capacity is because their thought process is still trapped in the old way of thinking. Social media should never be used as a fancy message board; it should engage people and draw them in so that they want to interact. How is this achieved? Create community - an online space for people to learn from one another, share knowledge with each other, and network with each other.  Career services professionals using social media need to start thinking of how they can collaborate with their community to improve service delivery.  How can you get students to help other students?  How can you get alumni to be part of a student's personal learning network to provide mentorship and advice by being part of the online community you help create? If you can figure these things out and use social media for these purposes, you can extend your team by having the community you build contribute to a shared mission - the success of other community members.  Who doesn't want to be a part of that?

THE NEED FOR CONTINUED COMMITMENT

What do you think needs to happen for this paradigm shift to occur in the career services profession so that we can see more career services professionals harnessing social media to develop strategies that help them achieve success?  Career Services Training is part of the equation but so is plain individual commitment.  It takes effort to learn social media and the strategies that allow you to use the tools successfully.  One must first understand the value and then they need to take action.  The challenge is that things move so rapidly in social media which requires true continued commitment but perhaps people aren't up to the challenge?  

What do you think?