Linking In to the Business World

As a college student, when I think of social networking the first thing that comes to mind is Facebook. With Facebook we meet people. People with similar interests. People who we go to school with. People who are friends of some of our closest friends. It is the go-to center of communication for your average student to have fun and make friends, but in the real world some of the most important connections one can make are career-oriented. Enter LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an amazing tool for professional networking. It allows you to search for professionals in your field of study who can either provide advice on getting a job or hire you for a position. LinkedIn represents the way in which social media have drastically changed the way people interact with one another. The core of good networking - face to face interaction, persistence in communicating with potential employers- will never, and should never, diminish in the way we approach networking. While Facebook users can get sucked into social awkwardness by avoiding proper social interactions and hiding behind a computer screen, LinkedIn users can effectively use the website to enhance the experiences they have with their actual human interactions in the business world. It's no answer to social networking, but it's a valuable tool for finding that right answer.

LinkedIn has served as a valuable resource for finding industry professionals for me to speak with in assignments for some of my journalism classes. Recently, I wrote an article for a class about an online journalism project called the Chauncey Bailey Project, which investigated and solved the murder a Bay Area investigative journalist. I had to interview key players in the production of the project, and luckily enough for me all staff members were listed on the site. While some of them had links to e-mails, many had links to their LinkedIn profiles. I created a free one for myself after seeing this and was able to gather information about the people I would speak with. For some of them I couldn't even find email information and LinkedIn was the only way I could get in touch with them electronically. While the cost of maintaining a profile kept me from making a full one, it opened my eyes to the role and benefits that professional networking sites provide in business communication.