It’s no secret that many students are well-versed in the do’s and don’ts of Facebook.

Do: Make hundreds of Facebook friends and contacts.

Don’t: Post that picture of you, underage, in a bar.

But few students – and few professors for that matter – realize the effect social media is having on education and potential jobs.

Scott Shamp, director of the University’s New Media Institute, said “[professors] know social media is playing an incredibly important role in young people’s lives, and yet a wide majority of college professors consider social media just to be something trivial, just to be fluff.”

Shamp said for that reason social media is affecting education – but not necessarily from the level of the professor.

“I think social media is affecting education from the bottom up,” he said.

This semester, Shamp is trying something new with his Introduction to New Media class. Instead of giving out assignments via listservs or eLearning Commons, students will receive information about quizzes and required readings through a Facebook group.

“I think soon the University of Georgia and all institutions of higher education are going to have to acknowledge that this is the chosen medium for young people, and to not disregard it as something unimportant and to start to embrace it as the new way to reach out to students,” he said.

Shamp said the age gap between students and professors contributes to the social media gap between the two.

“Unfortunately, teachers about my age, we’re older, we don’t understand how this works. In fact, the first Facebook group for any of my classes wasn’t created by me, it was created by one of my students,” he said. “I found out about it later on, about midway through the semester. But I had no idea what was going on and that was because I just didn’t understand how important it was to them.”

Shamp said social media is also affecting the way students are getting jobs these days.

“[Social media] is where a lot of our students are finding out about jobs,” he said. “But there’s another way [social media] is having an even bigger impact for students. People who are thinking about hiring students are more and more referring to their Facebook page. They’re doing investigations on what the students are actually involved in using social media.”

The upside to this process, Shamp said, is students are able to find jobs. But if students publish inappropriate information on the Internet about themselves, it could be damaging once they do begin a career.

But more than that, social media is actually affecting what students will be doing once they do land a job.

“Anybody who gets a job in new media these days will be doing social media,” Shamp said.

Shannon Otto, a University alumna who graduated in May, is an example of just that. Otto now works as the social media specialist of Memberclicks – a membership software company in Buckhead.

“I sort of started the social media endeavor for them. I use Twitter, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the industry blogs to engage with our customers and interact with them,” Otto said. “Basically, I create content for blogs, but have a lot of freedom in what I do.”

Otto said although her job didn’t exist just two years ago, she sees an increasing demand for similar positions.

Kaitlyn Dennihy, a senior public relations major, also has professional experience in working with social media. Dennihy is interning with the World of Coca-Cola as the public relations voice for the company in the social media world. She is the World of Coca-Cola’s first social media intern.

“I never would have thought that there would be so much content and so much going on in social media,” said Dennihy, who is working toward certification within the New Media Institute.

Dennihy said social media is a much more personal approach for companies to sell their products than traditional marketing.

“In traditional marketing, you’re marketing to a person. You’re selling a product or brand, but in social media, everyone can join in on the conversation,” she said.

“There’s not really a distinction between, say me being a marketer of Coca-Cola, and you being a consumer of Coca-Cola,” she said. In the social media world, we’re both on the same level. So if you don’t exist in that space, you’re essentially creating that gap where someone else can take over that conversation for you.”

“I definitely do think that this is the emerging way that media is going. It’s going to be different. Media is not going away, it’s just changing the way that it is presented to people,” Dennihy said.

Although Dennihy does not see herself getting a job as the Twitter person for the World of Coca-Cola, she said she wants to get into the digital side of PR so she can build relationships with consumers.

Dennihy said the downside of social media for companies is the same thing which makes social media so powerful: it’s viral.

“If a thousand people say something on Twitter, it can change the image of a company in a heartbeat. So, it’s really going to make a difference for corporations and companies to stay on top of what their people are saying and listen to their consumers,” she said.

Dennihy pointed out that 20 years ago companies had as much as 24 to 48 hours to control their brand image if a crisis came about.

“If you don’t fix something today within a matter of hours, people are really going to look down on you for it,” she said.

“[Social media] is just too powerful and important to ignore,” Shamp said.