Social media can be extremely useful when learning about an industry. You can post questions on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Hopefully, you'll get some good feedback from your network!

However, LinkedIn may be your best social media resource. After all, its main focus is on business professionals. Again, you can post a status update to get information from your network. Each industry is likely to have a number of "groups", which are networks within LinkedIn that share common interests. In an industry-focused group, you should be able to learn some interesting details while also expanding your contacts.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn has over 8,300 groups for Information Technology. So, you will probably need to narrow your search, for example, by using a category such as "Security" or "Virtualization". When selecting a group, you should also look at the members and see if they are the types of professionals you want to network. Once you join a group, you can sign up for daily or...