Is “Social Media Manager” a good title and job description, as David Thomas, of Cary, NC software giant SAS, suggests here: Why I am right and Chris Brogan is wrong, or is it, as Chris Brogan suggested, ” …a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool.”
I ask this because a tweet came across this morning that got me to thinking more about this. The tweet went like this, “@maniactive Soon, ‘Social Media Consultant’ will sound as quaint as ‘Email Consultant’ or ‘Fax Expert’.” Substitute “Manager” for “Consultant” and you get the idea.
Clearly, this is something a number of people are talking about. A good working definition of Social Media would go a long way towards eliminating these types of discussions I suspect. But what would be the fun of that?
I think what we need to determine is this. Is Social Media a tool? And if so, what is it a tool of? Sales? Communications? Marketing? PR? All of those? Just exactly who owns it within an organizational structure? Or is it that Social Media is something other than a tool? And that Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, YouTube, Flicker and the rest are all tools of Social Media?
Could we say that email and fax machines are communication tools? I’ve never known or heard of an Email Manager or a Fax Manager. And that’s most likely the point Chris Brogan is making. Social Media Manager could very well be headed for the graveyard of job titles.
Or, could Social Media Manager be the description for that person who manages all of the tools of Social Media? I’m leaning towards the latter one. I see both sides but I think that a manager of one of the “tools” of Social Media would be the one considered quaint. I can imagine the cocktail party conversation now. “And just what do you do?” “I’m the Tweet Manager.” “Excuse me, the what?”
What are your thoughts? Have you got a good working definition of Social Media? If so, could there be a Manger of it?
(Image credit: biojobblog.com)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, Gregg. I think “Social Media Manager” as a job title is heading to the graveyard. That’s one of the points I hoped to make. If things progress as they should, marketers and communicators in business will adopt the tools (and more important, the values) of social media, and they won’t need somebody like me helping them understand how they work. I fully expect to have a new title and a new job in a couple of years.
As for a working definition of social media, I have one that I use in internal presentations, just to make sure everybody knows what we’re talking about:
All the different Web-based tools people use to communicate, share and collaborate, including:
blogs
microblogging (Twitter)
social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut)
podcasts
video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv)
photo sharing (Flickr, Picasa)
Wikipedia and Google Knol
Social bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Digg)
Of course, no list of something so fluid will ever be complete.
Hi David,
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts as well as your definition of social media. I thoroughly enjoyed your blog post. We do seem to be in the midst of a great educational cycle regarding social media. I remember reading a post from one of the pundits that right now education in terms of social media tools, practices and values is our biggest challenge. I agree with you that sooner or later the communicators and marketers in business will come to understand the social media tools and your job in terms of helping them to understand those tools may indeed head to the graveyard. Do you have any sense for where this will lead you in a couple of years?
Hi, Gregg. That’s a good question and one I haven’t quite figured out. I came to the Social Media Manager job from a position as a corporate PR representative. I had managed a number of big projects that involved a lot of departments, like our Fortune Best Companies to Work For application, so that gave me a leg up in driving a company-wide social media integration project. As to where I go next, I could end up back on the PR team, using the social media tools I helped promulgate. I can also imagine a role in an expanded social media services organization. Once we have all the communicators using social media tools in their work, we’ll still need somebody getting the tools created, guiding the standards and sharing best practices, doing the measurement and monitoring and looking over the horizon at what’s next.
Who knows. The funny thing is that in this discussion people always reference the fact that companies don’t have Fax Managers or Email Managers. But in fact we do have an email manager, who oversees our email marketing department. Not exactly parallel, but you see what I mean. Whenever something becomes a major focus in a large corporation, there are logistics and policies to work out.