Graduating from Facebook to LinkedIn

This could be the best week of articles thus far. If there is one thing that any college student reads, it is the article "Networking for students, a step-by-step guide". It gives so many helpful recommendations to the college student about what to say and do to better improve their networking skills. The best part of the article is where it states:

"A final note: it’s not FaceBook...
In some respects, college students are already pros at networking – at least casual, social networking. It’s critical, however, to shift into a professional networking mode when your career is the issue at hand."

Though Facebook can be used for networking, this makes a lot of sense because there are so many things that college students usually do not want their employer to be able to see. While it is easiest to just remove a lot of those things, the program LinkedIn is excellent. Not only does it allow one to view their network/people one is connected to, but it allows him/her/it to find more professional people in the same/related field, and make recommendations. The article "It's Not Just Who You Know"
does a good job of explaining this. Other companies include Jigsaw and Ziggs. Of all the articles that I have seen, LinkedIn seems to be the most mentioned, which is important since it is about who you know and the larger these services are, the chance of making new business contacts is increased.

In the article "Fifteen Uses of Professional Profiles within the Enterprise", the obvious advice is good because it mentions how one should use it to show off work.

These programs/services are also good for finding professors to brown-nose them for an A or to figure out what classes to take.

Especially for me, going into the music/movie industry, the quality of work almost falling behind connections, it appears as if I will have to fall victim that that annoying adage, "it's not what you know but who you know" while I invest in these networking programs heavily.