Comments on: Social Media Manager?

By: David B. Thomas

David B. Thomas — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:59:19 +0000

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.

By: Gregg

Gregg — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:31:31 +0000

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?

By: David B. Thomas

David B. Thomas — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:01:14 +0000

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.