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Loading ...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.
Filed under: New Media, Social Meda, Social Media Marketing
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I do believe that genuine Social Media experts exist. 15 years ago they would have been the collaboration experts working on CSCW. Will they disappear - absolutely! This is the nature of all technology waves. The real savvy experts will have a 5 year track record in knowledge management and will make their money through Enterprise 2.0 adoption. It will like all ‘waves’ eventually hit the beach, and we’ll be off buzzing about something else (SOA last year, Unified Comms this year), and so on…