Challenges

Public

Discussion:

Hi Karina,

You may find it interesting that a report published by Devry's Career Advisory Board entitled, Career Services Use of Social Media Technologies, showed that Social media technologies were used in career centers as asynchronous communications devices, i.e., principally to transmit information in one direction (from the career center to students or employers or alumni) about events. I personally believe this is likely due to three primary reasons: 1) Unilateral communication is the simplest/most intuitive way to use social media because it's how we use all other traditional communication tools, thus career centers simply use it this way because of familiarity 2) The same survey indicates that lack of training in social media is the 2nd largest barrier to using social media technology effectively thus, lack of know-how to use social media differently might be the other reason career centers predominantly use social media tools to simply broadcast information. 3) Although no data in this same report indicates this, I think you perhaps touch upon a 3rd reason why career centers tend to only use social tools for information broadcasting - it is difficult to use any other way (building/engaging communities for example), and it has high costs (mainly opportunity costs for time invested). At the same time, it is difficult and a labor-intensive process to measure the specific ROI as this tends to be a correlation vs. a direct measurement. When you say there are "high costs," what do you mean? Can you explain what you see those being? Can you elaborate on the difficulty from your perspective? You raise excellent points to consider.

Robert Starks Jr.

Hi Karina, You may find it interesting that a report published by Devry's Career Advisory Board entitled, Career Services Use of Social Media Technologies, showed that Social media technologies were used in career centers as asynchronous communications devices, i.e., principally to transmit information in one direction (from the career center to students or employers or alumni) about events. I personally believe this is likely due to three primary reasons: 1) Unilateral communication is the simplest/most intuitive way to use social media because it's how we use all other traditional communication tools, thus career centers simply use it this way because of familiarity 2) The same survey indicates that lack of training in social media is the 2nd largest barrier to using social media technology effectively thus, lack of know-how to use social media differently might be the other reason career centers predominantly use social media tools to simply broadcast information. 3) Although no data in this same report indicates this, I think you perhaps touch upon a 3rd reason why career centers tend to only use social tools for information broadcasting - it is difficult to use any other way (building/engaging communities for example), and it has high costs (mainly opportunity costs for time invested). At the same time, it is difficult and a labor-intensive process to measure the specific ROI as this tends to be a correlation vs. a direct measurement. When you say there are "high costs," what do you mean? Can you explain what you see those being? Can you elaborate on the difficulty from your perspective? You raise excellent points to consider. Robert Starks Jr.