Filed under: Abraham Harrison, Corporate Intelligence

In my last post, I pointed out how the concept that social media experts may start to die out before they are fully able to bloom.  Not all social media experts, but the field itself may start to expand to many a job category’s job description and therefore condense the specific need for actual “experts”.  Where not there yet, not by a long shot, but the future can sneak up on you really fast.

I go back to a conversation I had wit a colleague al ittle over a year ago.  This guy is a brilliant social media type.  Part marketer, part technology guru.  One of those types that’s on every social network out there.

He interviewed at a local growing and dynamic marketing and public affairs company.  It’s relatively young, but it’s managed to create for itself an image as an awesome place to join.  Actually “hip”.  There aren’t many places in DC that that can be said of.

He was interviewing with the head of the company for what would likely be a newly created position.  Essentially, he’d be creating a social media department for the company.  They already had divisions of advertising, public relations, public affairs, government relations, grassroots organizing, investor relations, crisis management, etc. They should have already had a social media division but, like many companies, they didn’t.

What struck me was a question that the CEO asked him.  “How soon can you make it profitable?”

That’s a horrible question and it showed me that the CEO didn’t know what he was talking about.  Read more…

No Comments » Posted on July 18th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: New Media, Social Meda, Social Media Marketing

I just read a compelling blog post by Louis Gray, who writes that the social media experts of today will be like the webmasters of yesteryear.  The job or a webmaster, once glorious and exciting, has not become all but extinct.  They still exist to and extent, but mostly website creation and maintenance these days are perhaps initially handled by an outside group and  then maintained by a slew of internal folks who now have the knowhow to keep the site living document.  The webmaster role is now partially everyone’s responsibility.

I don’t know if I agree.  Then again, I’m skeptical of many who call themselves social media experts.   The business, non-profit, and governmental sectors have yet to fully embrace social media as a full-fledged communications tool for marketing and for relationship building. Sure, there are plenty of success stories of how this corporation or that organization or this political candidate or that artist has used social media to great success.  But the reality is that for now, social media is pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to yearly budgeting, to executive mindshare, to hiring priority.  It hasn’t caught on enough on a large scale basis to develop that certain panache.

But Louis’ point now converges with what I’m trying to say.  Social media can effect so many likely departments of an organization that it could end up being partially absorbed by many in those same organizations.  Marketing, human resources, sales, customer relationship management.   All can benefit, and therefore, adopt social media principles and strategies.  This means many will have social media skills as part of their job descriptions.

The problem with that is that when everything is done in house, the overall quality is often tied to lowest common denominators.  If an organization has some who choose not to adapt or have no idea on which route to take, then the organization as a whole may suffer.  If the people creating budgets don’t “get it”, then the proper resources won’t go to these internal programs that will help change the enterprise.

This ins’t a new problem  I’ve seen plenty of companies that want to “wing it” when it comes to anything marketing related.   Whether it’s the local sandwich shop or a large business.

So what I’m predicting is that social media marketing will continue to grow, but that growth, career wise, will become more horizontal.  Then, many people will think they understand it (which they won’t) and then implement poorly designed strategies.  And that’s what’s likely going to kill the social media expert.

1 Comment » Posted on July 18th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn


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