For social media, by social media, using social media — and a fabulous resource — we have The New PR wiki:
This wiki is:
- a repository of relevant information about how the PR practice is changing
- a collaboration tool for PR professionals and people interested in the practice of public relations
- an open space where anyone can ask questions, post ideas, or start a project.
According to the McKinsey Quarterly article How Businesses are Using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey:
Asked what might have been done differently to make the previous investments in Internet technologies more effective [forty-two] percent say they would have strengthened their companies’ internal capabilities to make the most of the market opportunity at hand.
That would mean hiring people like web strategists and community managers…w00t!
Also according to this survey, companies in the retail, high tech, and telecommunications industries had the most respondents say that they were planning to increase investment in social media over the next three years.
Oh, and they’re using them as much for internal coordination as they are for customer interaction.
This bodes well, at least in theory. Now to put it into practice and get myself a job…(yes, I’m using blog posts like this as a motivation tool!)
One of the (many) things I’m doing these days is exploring the social media space in a lot more detail.
I’ve actually been a part of numerous Internet-based communities over the years so I know a great about social media already [1]. I also keep up with the latest news, trends, and studies.
Still, if you’re not working on something full-time, you miss out on a lot of stuff — like when you read the news article or blog post about the study instead of the actual study itself. So these days I’m doing some more research.
Among the many cool things I’ve found is this bunch of presentations on social media on Slideshare.net.
There are some that give you an overview and lots of information about social media:
There are some presentations that talk about social media from a marketing and branding perspective:
There are some that give practical advice on using social media:
And then there are some that talk about social communities:
There are many more, of course — just click on one of the tags to see more on that topic — but these are the ones that I found most useful (so far).
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[1] When I sat down to think about it, I realized that I’ve been an active Internet community member for over 13 years! Here are some relevant milestones:
The next milestone is being played out now; that is, I started my first sustained blog in 2007 (after having gotten rid of my first, let’s-see-what-blogging-is-all-about blog about 3 years ago!).
Earlier today, in our Strategic Management of Intellectual Property class at Melbourne Business School, we talked about Rick Frenkel of the Patent Troll Tracker blog fame. We were discussing non-practicing IP-holding entities (or, less politely, patent trolls) in reference to the case we were doing on Rambus (on which our professor Duncan Bucknell maintains an IP scorecard) which is why the issue came up.
CNET’s Anne Broache recently covered the Frenkel story as well, but from the point of view of corporate blogging — which, of course, is also my primary point of view. It’s a good article that talks about corporate blogging policies which, as expected, most companies don’t have (see also Jason Harris’ open thread on Web Worker Daily: Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy?).
I particularly like this bit in the Broache’s article:
Any company that decides to adopt blogging policies should keep them short, clear, and to-the-point, said Howell, the online communications lawyer.
That point is sometimes so obvious that people forget it (which is why I’ve repeated it here).
Corporate Social Media
This discussion on the lack of blogging policies is a good follow up to my earlier post on marketers not ‘getting’ social media. It’s a good follow up because corporations are having an even harder time with social media which is still in its very early adoption stage in the enterprise. That might seem like a generalization but compare the use of social media in the enterprise to the use of electronic communication tools like e-mail and instant messaging, which are now stock standard, and collaboration tools like intranet portals and document management systems, which are still relatively new.
Like marketers, corporations don’t have a good handle on social media — though both understand it’s importance, particularly in the near future. Corporations, for example, know that social media will revolutionize things the way e-mail did so many years ago…they just don’t quite know how (and they’re really hoping it’s not soon!).
The issue for them is of control. E-mails you can run through a corporate server, block, delete, monitor, save, use as legally binding, and, ultimately, make sense of very quickly. Social media is much less controllable, is scarily empowering for employees, and is very hard to get a handle on.
Some of them are trying to get and/or embrace, though, and having a blogging policy — or explicitly not having one — is a good start.
[For completeness' sake: For marketers the issue is partly about control -- they're no longer the only ones talking -- and partly about the inability or the un-preparedness on their part to listen to consumers on the consumers' terms. More on that in a later blog post. For now, though, let me just say that marketers have a much better handle on social media than corporations do. That said, marketers' proficiency with social media is still low when compared to their proficiency in using the other marketing tools in their bag.]
Mark Ritson, who taught us Brand Management at the Melbourne Business School this term, is featured in the latest University of Melbourne Up Close Podcast in which he talks about marketing luxury brands. He touches on what we learnt about luxury brands in the BM course which is really fascinating (well, at least to me) so make sure you take a listen.
Also, I don’t think I wrote about this back then but a few months ago Amanda Sinclair, another one of our MBS professors, was featured in an Up Close Podcast as well. She talks about mindful leadership, which is something we learnt about in her Leadership & Change course last term and now, hopefully, practice! That’s also a really good podcast so check that out as well.
I like this whole podcast business. Of the non-IT elective I’ve taken at MBS, Leadership, Brand Management, and Negotiations were my three favourite (though Consumer Behaviour comes very close) and now, instead of just waxing lyrical about them to everyone I meet, I can give people a slight taste of them as well.
Now that I’m getting more involved in the social media space (and not just from an informed user’s perspective), I’ve found a couple of really interesting articles on this topic on the web.
Marketers Don’t Have a Good Handle on Social Media
The first is one by Michael Bush in Advertising Age in which he reports on a panel discussion on “Making Social Media & Marketing Work” at the Ad Age Digital Marketing Conference.
The article’s title summarizes it very nicely: Marketers Struggle to Get a Firm Grip on Social Media and it makes a good read:
If you just happen to be one of those people who think they have social media and marketing all figured out, don’t tell Eric Plaskonos. He believes they’re “fooling themselves.”
Ad Age also has a primer on the challenges of social media for marketers.
Australian Marketers Lag Further Behind
The second one is by Jenni Beattie in Digital Ministry called Ad:Tech – Brand Marketers Still Looking for Digital Marketing Solutions [via Trevor Cook, via Lee Hopkins].
She writes:
Let’s start with a few figures from the recent Ad Tech Conference in Sydney:
- 68% of delegates in the Digital PR session said they didn’t have a digital pr strategy
- 59% of delegates in the Conversations session said they didn’t have a dialogue with their brand customers.
It is clear from this that many brand marketers in Australia are still yet to dip their toes in the water of online engagement/social media and that they are looking to the industry for leadership.
This is both good and bad news. Bad that there’s a lack of awareness for digital PR and for online engagement with customers in Australia. But also good in the sense that there’s a huge opportunity here for a good social media marketer (PR person, brand manager, community manager, etc.).
In that respect, I disagree with Steve Rubel when he says that “hiring someone just to “manage” social media is a luxury that companies will integrate into broader marketing communication roles.” In Australia, at least, we don’t seem to have reached that stage yet (and Jeremiah Owyang seems to think that this is true in the broader global context as well).
I suspect that Rubel is a little ahead of the curve on this one. Yes, eventually social media interaction will become a standard operating procedure for marketers and, in general, for companies — much like e-mail has, for example — but we still have a long way to go. And judging from Beattie’s article, that’s particularly true for Australia.
I’ve spent the last few months trying to pull together three things in order to get myself a good, fulfilling job:
And the last few days — the Easter break here in Australia — have helped me get a better handle on things. Here’s an overview of where I am right now.
What I Want to Do
Over the last few months, as I’ve learnt more about myself and have acquired industry knowledge, the set of jobs I want to do has changed. Well, technically, my job preference order has changed to:
Originally, my marketing and communications preference was at #3 — with consulting at #1 and management at #2 — so this is a pretty major shift.
What I Can Do
There are two reasons for this shift. First, I am in a reasonably unique position in the job market because I possess technical know-how, business know-how, and marketing know-how and, importantly, I have demonstrable experience and expertise in each. [I don't mean to blow my own horn here by talking about how great or unique I am, but the fact is that there aren't many people with this particular skill set in the market these days. My being where I am now is actually a case of carefully thought-out career moves and a bit of luck.]
Now this skill set is good because, except for the most narrowly-defined project management roles (for example), most senior-ish roles require you to be proficient in each of those three key areas. What this means is that I can quite easily aim beyond the regular business analyst (BA), project manager (PM), or consultant roles that I would have gone for had I, for example, done a MS in computer sciences instead of an MBA.
The second reason for this shift is that, basically, I realized that by looking at BA or regular PM and consulting roles, I was aiming too low. I came to this realization after looking at countless job ads and thinking to myself “sure, I can do that job quite easily…after all, I was doing the same thing two years ago.”
The only jobs that got me really excited were the ones with a bit of challenge: the ones that gave me an opportunity to learn and grow and to fully apply myself. And the thing is, with the exception of a few brilliant consulting/PM/BA roles, most of the jobs I found both fun and challenging came from the marketing and communications side.
Which actually makes a lot of sense.
Where I Want to Be
Loosely put, my medium-term career objective is to be someone in a senior management position who liaises effectively between the business, technology, and marketing sides of a company and strategically carries things forward by effectively leveraging each of those functions and departments. In plain English: I want to be the senior manager guy who speaks and understands tech, business, and marketing and can get the three departments to work together to kick some ass.
Now the thing is: I have experience in technology, business, and marketing but, increasingly, for web-related products or services the key skill for a senior manager to have is that of marketing; particularly marketing that involves social media and community-building.
See, no matter how good a project or service you have (the tech side) or how well thought out your strategy is (the business side) if you don’t get your market positioning, integrated marketing communications, and community-building right (the marketing side) you don’t get very far. And this is particularly true for web-related products and services. This is why forward-thinking companies are looking to hire people in two specific roles: the Social Media Strategist and the Community Manager (as explained by Forrester Reseach’s Jeremiah Owyang). That, for me, is really where the challenge and opportunity lies.
It also helps that, while you can find plenty of people to work on the tech and business side (either that or you outsource development or hire a consultant), the talent pool for social media people is quite small.
But, there’s a problem: the reason for that small talent pool and the reason I specifically said forward-thinking companies is because there aren’t many of those jobs out there, especially ones based in Melbourne.
What Jobs are Available
A handful of social media jobs are, of course, advertised — I mentioned the Community Liaison role at Lonely Planet early on in my job search and there was an ad for an Online Content Manager posted today — but the good ones are few and far between and I presume a lot of them remain in the hidden job market. Also, in most companies, community management and social media strategy tasks are still not seen as separate job positions but as responsibilities assigned to a marketing manager.
Increasingly, then, I’ve found myself looking through the marketing and communications sections of various job sites because that’s where these jobs are listed (often ‘under internal communications’ or ‘marketing communications’). But, again, there just aren’t that many out there.
The Upshot
What does all of this mean for me? Well, now that I’ve narrowed down what it is that I really want to do, two things come to mind:
First, I need to be very watchful for good social media jobs — even more so than I was for regular biz/tech jobs — mainly because (a) they’re not always advertised as social media jobs and (b) most specialist social media job sites don’t cover Australia (not that any Australian companies post jobs on the ones that do). Fortunately, here we have people like Laurel Papworth who blogs about the jobs that she hears of. Let’s hope she keeps doing that and that the other Aussie social media bloggers that I read follow suit!
Second, I need to start talking to Australian social media people about the kinds of jobs that are available here. They, more than anyone else, will know what is happening and where the industry is going. I guess this blog post is a first step in that direction. I also have to keep on top of all Australia-based social media events, networks, and meetings — and there are plenty of those around.
The best part: I’ve finally found an area that greatly interests and excites me, and though I know it won’t be easy to find and get the job I want, I suspect I’m going to have a lot of fun doing it anyway.
As ever, I’ll keep posting updates on this blog.
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FYI: Connie Bensen, the Community Manager for ACDSee, maintains an excellent community / social media resource listing on her blog. If you want to know more about everything I’ve just talked about, take a look at that site. Also be sure to check out Jeremiah Owyang’s web strategist blog.
Following on from his post on how to hire for social computing and his search for a community manager (CM) for Forrester, Jeremiah Owyang has published what he learn about CMs from the 19 resumes he received.
As it happens, I fit the average CM persona quite nicely: I have 7 years of work experience, a technology background, plenty of marketing experience (especially in evangelising the use of technology and the Internet), and I have an MBA (well, I will in seven weeks). Oh, and even though this is a given: I believe in, and am very interested in working in, the social media space.
Unfortunately, I’ve only seen one real CM-type job advertised in the Australian market so far. Here’s hoping I come across a few more over the next few weeks as well.
Briefly, how do you get corporations to adopt social media and what cultural changes do you need to make or encourage?
Jeremiah Owyang asked EMC’s Len Devanna to talk about this and has posted a short video of what Devanna had to say. It’s a great video that gets straight to the heart of the matter. Make sure you watch it.
It’s hard to believe but I have only seven weeks — six study weeks and one exam week — to go before I’m done with my MBA!
I started this term with five courses and two of those — Brand Management with Mark Ritson and Consumer Behaviour with Brian Gibbs — I’m done with. Well, except for the Brand Management take-home final exam which I hope to work on this weekend.
The remaining three — Corporate Strategy with Geoff Lewis, Strategic Management of Intellectual Property with Michael Vitale & Duncan Bucknell, and Business and Sustainable Development with Jeremy Baskin — start next week.
Graduation
Meanwhile, today I received my Graduation Intention form (the paperwork you need to fill out if you want to graduate) and invitations to the Melbourne Business School (MBS) post-graduation lunch and the MBS Valedictory Dinner. Wow…this MBA-ending thing is getting real!
My official graduation ceremony is on 17 May, by the way.
Commendations!
To my surprise, I also received two commendations from the Dean for a couple of courses that I took last term. I got a commendation for “all round excellence, both in terms of academic achievement and classroom participation” for E-Commerce with Pat Auger and “outstanding academic performance” for Negotiations with John Onto. I’d received H1’s in both those courses but I wasn’t expecting this. Needless to say, I am feeling both honoured and, well, a little chuffed :) Pat and John: Thanks!
By the way, last year I received a commendation for class participation in the Managing People for High Performance course with Carol Gill.
Yes…I’m feeling happy today :)
