Start networking professionally before you enter the workforce! Your efforts will pay off if you focus on learning as much as you can about professional networks now. Below is a list of questions you can ask yourself to help start reframing your perceptions about social networks. Unlike informal social networking, your success as a professional will rely on your online personae.
- What is your future profession?
- Do you know anyone connected to that industry?
- Do you know anyone working in that industry?
- Do you have a mentor?
- Who could be your mentor?
- What are the professions of everyone in your family?
- Have you started connecting with the people above people on Facebook?
- Anywhere else?
- Do you currently have a social network?
- What changes will you make to improve it?
- Are you on http://www.linkedin.com/?
- Are you part of any other professional network?
- What will you join?
- Google yourself, what do you find?
- What is your current internet visibility?
- How visible do you want to be?
- Have you talked to your parents/grandparents about life before internet/cell phones?
- What do you know?
- Have you ever been recommended by a friend, friend of a friend, or family member?
- How did it go?
- Do you have a blog?
- How can you use it to your advantage professionally?
- Do you have more than 100 ‘friends’?
- Have you checked your privacy settings?
- Do you have any information about you that can be ‘perceived’ the wrong way?
- Does this information show up in Google searches? On Facebook?
- What can you do to delete/correct it?
- What privacy settings do you want to employ?
- What personae do you want your future employers to see?
- What do you want your future bosses to know?
- What are your resistances to social networking? Be honest.
- How can you improve them?
