Today I had the privilege of running 3 workshops at Brisbane Boys’ College for their Careers and Counselling department on the topic of “Social Media - the use of electronic social networks to advance your career”.

I found a few things of interest:

• Almost all the students were on Facebook (a guess, 80%)
• A lot of the students were on MySpace (a guess, 60%)
• Only 3 of the students had heard of LinkedIn
• maybe 1/3 of the students knew of twitter, 1 read, but none posted much

This does line up with what I’ve read elsewhere, that is, that the largest demographic using twitter are older than the students at BBC.

Although it seems that this doesn’t account for other twitter clients such as tweetdeck, twhirl, seesmic desktop. (Bonus link: Australian stats for twitter)

I have to say that I did push the view that they should be creating themselves a LinkedIn profile now!

Before they enter the workforce, they should in my view, fill it in with:

• their educational history,
• encourage their lecturers, any part-time employers and members of any sporting clubs they are a part of to also join up to LinkedIn,
• they should then connect with each other via LinkedIn
• then they need to ask for recommendations.

This gives them the opportunity to write their own history online, to actively create the content that google will find when a potential employer checks up on them.

Thanks to both David Ogilvie and Renate Falkenhagen at BBC for inviting me to be a part of the program today and a special mention to Lee Hopkins, because I’ve learnt a lot about social media and communication from him.

My own LinkedIn profile is here: www.linkedin.com/in/benhamilton.

I encourage you to connect with me there, also, you can follow me on twitter at twitter.com/benhamilton.