Hello, Social Matchbox Readers. This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing with my friend Bob about social media in the technology sector. My name is Jim Durbin, and I’ve been the SocialMediaHeadhunter since 2008, when I started a retained search firm focused on hiring in the social media space. That’s what I’ll be bringing to the blog – my experiences and thoughts on how social and technology merge.
Today we start with the basics: The History Of Social Media Hiring
When I first started writing about social media and recruiting in the salad days of 2004-2005, the question of social media’s place in the business world was hotly debated. Would it be a new branch of marketing, or would it be a talent like graphic design or web analytics? Would social media report to the Information Technology, Customer Service, Corporate Communications, or directly to the CMO in a new department?
By 2008, social media positions were primarily community managers, copy writers, and marketing strategists. Companies wanted to hire someone to “do social,” which meant writing at social sites, responding to customers, and setting up profiles that would demonstrate that a company was involved in the social space. Experience was hard to come by. While there were plenty of people with community experience in older networks, and plenty of people eager to learn social media to start their career, there just weren’t many people who had worked in a position using social media for anything other than their own online status.
Social created mini-celebrities out of anyone who wrote for six months on a topic and stayed with it. This wasn’t just in business. Mom blogs, pet blogs, sports blogs, news blogs, and every other topic under the sun had their own mini-celebrities. Early adoption of blogs, Twitter, and then Facebook (Facebook wasn’t big in that way until after Twitter was) led to a significant advantage in terms of conference speaking, news mentions, and online buzz. This was great for the burgeoning class of Social Consultants, but it was a bubble. Celebrity inside a digital tribe was fun, but it didn’t make you money, and companies quickly found that early success at branding yourself didn’t translate into successful hiring.
The difficulty in finding someone with social business experience was inevitable. And so was the response. Internal employees, unable to tap into “experts,” started practicing on their own. There were a lot of missteps, but internal employees by and large learned how social would impact their business units. This was more true in some industries and some divisions. Recruiting and Customer Service learned how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, while Marketing dabbled in Facebook and Sales ignored the wave. As executives started to pay more attention, more departments joined in, and budgets started to be applied.
Larger companies started outsourcing their social to their agencies, and smaller ones relied on individuals who seemed to “get it.” Outsourcing became the rule when budgets were cut during the recession, and hiring someone new into a social position was something of a rarity. Companies did it, but they did it slowly. On the high end, certain personalities did very well. Work for a company in the social media initiative and you’d get another job shortly. That drove salaries up, but in each case, the individual had prior experience that created their salary level. Social was a multiplier that made them a hot commodity. It was not the basis of their hiring. In a weird way, social media was the focus of the job description, but not the job. Social became a preference layer where you were hired because of your social experience, but you were paid based on your work history outside of social.
This created a wide disparity between similar job titles. Some community managers make $30,000 a year. Others make $120,000. The difference is not the size or value of the community, but the previous salary of the community manager. This is true for marketing strategists, directors, and specialists, who each track to similar roles in technology, management, and marketing or customer service. It makes sense. Companies look to assign value to a position based on that position’s importance to the company. The salary is a way of measuring the influence, and that influence is based on who you’re trying to influence.
In 2012, we’ve reached a point where social media titles are on the rise, but each job description is written to coincide with a similar position inside the company. Pure social roles, like Twitter specialist, are just an upgrade from customer service representative. Facebook managers are forum community managers. Content creators are copywriters. While there are the occasional social technology roles in mobile or applications, those are not the norm. The norm, is that everyone is expected to know how social media impacts their division. We’ve taken the shiny new toy and commoditized it as a skillset. And that’s a good thing.
Social media isn’t about new behaviors so much as a deeper understanding of what customers and employees want. We have more information, and the pace of change is increasing, but that’s not social media. It’s the culture changing. Moving forward, we need to understand better how to segment and adapt our business processes to a faster world. Social helps us do that. And if you understand how, companies are hiring.
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