David Beckham visits the newly opened Royal Children’s Hospital, pictured with chairman Tony Beddison.

Images are available from Getty Images of the Queen’s visit to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Full transcript of Premier Ted Baillieu’s speech welcoming Her Majesty The Queen to Victoria and inviting her to officially open the new Royal Children’s Hospital.

In the past decade the way to find a job has changed more than in the previous 100. And in the past two years it has changed more than the previous ten.

Looking at the exponential rate of change in technology and the internet, especially social media, it looks like the pace of change will only accelerate rather than slow up.

The professional network Linkedin hit 2 million members locally in April 2011 making vie with Twitter and one of the most popular social networking sites in Australia behind Facebook, which now has about 11 million local users, and Youtube with about 10 million.

The thing that you need to build is your personal reputation. There is nothing new about this and before social media came along we’d all do it by writing articles and commenting in the trade and mainstream press (if authorized), attending industry events and conferences and participating to increase their visibility and meet the people you want to impress. Repeatedly if we could.

In those days it became about personal contacts and about people passing recommendations by word of mouth. Now it about online recommendations and the exponential viral effect of retweets and “like” buttons which means recommendations can reach tens or hundreds easily rather than just a handful.

Nowadays you still need to attend industry events and conferences. But you also need to be noticed online and you can magnify word of mouth recommendations through blogs, Youtube channels, Twitter or increasingly Linkedin which now has an active and powerful community of users.

It could be as simple as starting a blog but more so nowadays the action is on Twitter and linkedin. It is all about having conversations about your particular professional area on these sites whether it be on a company Facebook page, Twitter, Linkedin or the new and increasingly interesting Quora, where experts answer specialist questions.

The key is to identify the right people to network with, that is those who are the influencers and work with the influencers of the job. The truth is personal recommendation is more important than a decade ago, it’s just that it has moved to all the social networks.

Although that’s good news for the job seeker, it’s also a double edged sword because bad news also travels fast and can be viral.

This means that in addition to networking and talking business it is essential to ensure that your reputation is impeccable online, whether it be photographs from a sporting trip or Facebook comments about work and colleagues.

I’ve pulled together here 11 tips on how to start job hunting on social media.

1. Be an expert on your work online and talk about it. Ensure you have a two way conversation with people rather than just broadcast your views. You could do this via a blog or a Youtube or Vimeo channel. Or from simply by joining a forum or Twitter. or it could be commenting on blogs.

2. On Linkedin follow companies you are interested in working for and the ones that recruit for them.

3. Join specialist industry forums on Linkedin and participate to in the conversations. The more you do the more you will be noticed when it comes for a member to recruit.

4. Look out for the people in the employers and recruitment groups you follow and engage with them online in conversations before trying to connect.

5. Think strategically how to go about connecting. It is better to try and connect with somebody after you have had a conversation with, for example, Twitter or a Linkedin forum because you will no longer be a stranger. If you do that they are more likely to follow you back or accept your connect request.

6. Be very careful on Facebook as it is seen more as social than business. I would advise not to connect with business colleagues and to tightly control privacy settings on personal profiles to prevent any mishaps that could reflect on your professional reputation. Of course, it is perfectly appropriate to like and follow a company Facebook page.

7. Think about your profile photo. A professional head and shoulders shot will always win over a holiday shot in a bar (even in creative industries).

8. Experts are divided about whether or not to import your Twitter feed into Linked in. It all depends on the nature of your Twitter feed. If it is mostly personal then probably not. If mostly professional then yes.

9. Join Slideshare and upload non confidential presentations. Good ones go viral and get noticed and you can post them to Linkedin.

10. Think about Google Plus, which has some 500,000 Australian users, especially if you work in IT. There is a great post on Mashable about it here.
11. Don’t use social media after drinking alcohol. You wouldn’t go to a job interview drunk would you?

Congratulations to all the winners of the Tony Beddison Cup at Moonee Valley on the weekend:

Veewap
Wingman
Coldens Choice
La Rocket

From the Australian Financial Review Wednesday 19th October 2011.

The Queen visits the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne on Yahoo! here and here.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is escorted by CEO Tony Beddison as she officially opens the new Royal Children’s Hospital, meeting with a small group of ill children, their families and hospital staff, in Melbourne on October 26, 2011. The queen is on a ten-day trip to Australia.

See more on Forbes here.

The monarch couldn’t help smiling when she spotted the co-ordinated line-up that awaited her as she opened the £65million Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Read more in the Daily Mail here.

Queen Elizabeth II was accompanied by Chairman Tony Beddison during a visit at Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. See the full story on Sulekha here.