Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
What are the many types of social media services, jobs, or roles?
While the term "Social Media Expert" has taken some flak, this is a role and profession that is happening (In fact, corporations will spend $278,000 per company on staff to manage) (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/12/09/slides-social-business-forecast-2011-the-year-of-integration-leweb-keynote/) It's now time to break out the specific roles and duties in all of these potential jobs. Let's collectively list out how these roles will segment into specific duties on both the brand and agency side
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
9 Answers
Here's my first take, all which are on the brand/buyer side:
1) Social Strategist: Primary decision maker on buyer side that runs the program, responsible for spending, and overall measurement of investment, they are primarily internally focused (see research report here: http://slidesha.re/aSjBTy
2) Community Manager: This role is responsible for external engagement with customers in social channels (community, facebook, twitter)
3) Social Media Analytics: This individual often with a market research or web analytics background is responsible for the measurement of the social deployments.
4) Social media design: Using design skills this individual is responsible for the look and feel of communities, facebook pages, and other brandable content. Also should include usability and site architecture
5) Social media developer: Responsible for the programming to build and assemble the features for social tools like blogs, communities, and integration into traditional websites
6) Content programmer: While social media is often used as a two-way dialog, this individual is responsible for content programming, and generating discussions related to other topics such as company product releases, or making content relevant to the lifestyle of the community.
7) Influencer Relations: Similar to AR/PR and Media relations this person is responsible for relations with bloggers and influencers. In fact these roles exist for Microsoft's MVP program, and Intel Advisors program. (Formerly called Intel Insiders)
Jeremiah,
Great list. I've been thinking quite a bit about this topic in light of the emergence of sites like Focus.com and Quora, and what feels like a waxing popularity of LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers. Should Focus and Quora hockey stick, might another role emerge:
8) Social media trafficker: "Coordinator" level function responsible for identifying questions on- and off-network, routing questions to appropriate subject matter experts, and monitoring response thread. Rout feedback to appropriate departments internally.
Joe Chernov / Eloqua / @jchernov
Jeremiah
I like where you are going with this but in my organization the Community Manager role has several elements to it.
First there is the classic "community manager" for the internal (read Jive, Yammer, SocialCast, SocialText) communities (which ever one you might have). And the external communities like our Forums and Blogs.
Second there is the Social Support Manager - the person who gets the "unhappy" side of the coin with customer complains and questions etc. They are monitoring Radian6 for negative mentions and trolling their HootSuite/TweetDeck for support related tweets. They are on task to respond within minutes (most with in 30 min) and help move the customer from an "adversarial" position with the company to an "advocate" position with the company.
Those are very different people with very different roles at least in my org.
Paul Dunay
@pauldunay
Thanks for the great list! I'd like to add
Social Media Enablement - it's a role focused on internal employee enablement, education, best practices sharing, etc to help employees become more comfortable and successful.
This is a great list! To me, the biggest single role involves driving the development of the social media strategy roadmap. There is no other document more important yet I find many companies fail to develop the roadmap to drive their business.
Mark
Thanks for these insights!
How about a social media outreach worker? Like the community manager, this employee would be responsible for external relations, but not with customers or even current stakeholders; instead, this employee would work with strategists to seek out potential new stakeholders and engage them through meaningful dialogue. This could take the form of commenting on blogs, RTing, providing photos via Flickr, etc. to build up good will.
Great and growing list and discussion. I'm wondering, however, as this has a very social slant, whether there's a role/need for someone to be a bridge between the social and traditional worlds within an organisation? Perhaps something akin to what Petra above refers to as 'Social Media Enablement '.
All of the roles mentioned so far are tactical and I think there is an important piece missing.
As I discussed in my blog post "This is why you will have a career in social media" (http://bit.ly/aAMnRg) the biggest difference between marketing now and 10 years ago is the rate of change. When was the last marketing had an innovation in TV? Cable. When was the last innovation in newspapers? The Sunday insert?
Not only are the social marketing technologies evolving every day, the rules of engagement are shifting too. This has profound implications for marketing organizations and their staffing strategies.
Most companies will not be able to afford dedicated recources to study and recommend adaptations and opportunities based on this rate of change. Economically, it will be more efficient to out-source this one specialized expert service to a central organization that can spread the cost among many clients.
So I see this distinct function being critically important -- perhaps in an ad agency competency, perhaps in a boutique consultancy, maybe both.
How about:
9) Social media coach - Provides ongoing help to execs and new bloggers.
If you take a broader "content marketing" view of things, I wonder where SEO fits into this? Maybe with the analyst but SEO is much more than just measurement.
Question: will companies set up a separate function for all these people of provide support from existing shared services like PR, AR and Web?
Answer This Question