The Generation Y Disconnect on Social Media

(Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a characterization of generations… just something I have noticed around the past few months)

I gave a lecture to a couple of classes at Purdue University last week about Social Media. You know… everything they could possible want to know. It was an introduction to the power of social media marketingfor small business in the present and future. I noticed something that was fairly surprising to me as a Generation Y social media user. The majority (and when I say majority I mean 99%) of the students used nothing but Facebook. I am talking about nothing. No Myspace. No Twitter. No StumbleUpon. No LinkedIN. They all used Facebook.

Many would think that the majority of Generation Y (or millenials) would be using all forms of social media they could get their hands on.. apparently not so. This also applies to my friends. The only platform the majority of my friends use is Facebook. Why is that?

The light finally dawned when I read a post by David Armano explaining the evolution of social media from SOCIAL to NETWORKING. There is a disconnect between college students using other tools because frankly… they THINK they shouldn’t need to. Think again.

There needs to be a huge push in higher education towards social media education. Graduates should be taught how to use LinkedIN and Twitter to job search. They should be told about sites like Brazen Careerist and Careerscribe and NOT about Monster and CareerBuilder.

Education needs to shift HARD to new tools and not to whether your resume should be copy and pasted into the email or saved as an attachtment. Give me a break.

I worry that the new work force is not being taught to utilize the world of social media for networking and link building.