Ameel's career & MBA exposition (blog)
Professional blog of Ameel Khan. This started off as a blog about my MBA from Melbourne Business School, but now it’s about continuous learning, careers, technology, the internet, and social media.
Ignite Social Media's Jim Tobin is writing a series of posts on 'Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them' on the SMC blog. His first post, of a total of six that he'll eventually write, is about listening.
Tobin will probably give us some really valuable insights over the next few days or weeks so make sure you follow the series.
The Community Manager role is still relatively new and somewhat hard to pin down:
Because of its newness, the confusion surrounding its place in the organizational hierarchy, and the many different ways in which companies are engaging their customers and employees, this role is handled in different ways by different companies.
However, increasingly, the Community Manager role is becoming an entirely separate job position. That is, as social media has increased in usage, importance, relevance, and impact, community management tasks can no longer be simply added-on to a communications person or marketer's job description.
Okay, Now What?
But now that companies are creating these roles, they want to know how much they should pay Community Managers and, more fundamentally, what the job position's ROI is.
The latter question is harder to answer and, even if you work through the numbers, sometimes the best answer is "If you don't have someone dedicated to engaging your customers or employees, you will get left behind." Which is much like the answer to a question that a lot of companies were asking themselves in the 90's: "But why should we have a website?" :)
Of course, all this depends on how strategically important customer interaction is to your company. Theoretically, the more important customer interaction is -- and assuming your customers are increasing their social media usage -- the more you should be investing in a social media manager.
Theories aside, however, Connie Benson recently conducted a social media-based survey on what Community Managers are being paid these days and how companies are arriving at that figure. She wrote that all up in a blog post which concludes that, in the US, Community Managers are paid anything from US$60,000 to $110,000 (about AU$64-117k). Presumably this variation represents the amount of strategic importance placed by companies on customer engagement and the social media usage of customers.
What About Australia?
However, based on the few (and far between) community management-type job openings I've come across over the last few months, I can safely say that the Australian salary range for Community Managers is significantly lower. That's mainly because social media still doesn't figure in most Australia companies' strategies. Oh well.
Hmmm...I wonder how much Telstra's Now We Are Talking site or its competitors' Tell The Truth Telstra site pays its community managers :)
Awesome (but very long) article by CIO magazine's Sue Bushell called Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for?:
Canberra-based knowledge economy and social computing evangelist Stephen Collins heard a quote earlier this year that perfectly describes the Enterprise 2.0 dilemma: "If you want to find out what tools your staff are finding most useful at the moment, just go and see what your IT department is blocking."
Since I've been busy these last few weeks, I've missed writing about a couple of good blog posts that I recently read.
First we have Chris Brogan who wrote an excellent post on what a community manager does:
Depending on the organization, I imagine the role of a community manager would be different, so I’m going to walk through what the role might entail for a media and events company (like mine), and see what comes to mind.
And second we have Tac Anderson who writes about the razor's edge that social media people have to walk every day:
Social media workers walk a dangerous line everyday. Everyday they walk into a battlefield not knowing what fate awaits them. One wrong word, one misinterpreted email, a delayed response to a blog comment; any of these things can start a fire storm that could ruin the reputation of the company or the social media worker.
Both are interesting and I highly recommend you read them.
What happens to all the cognitive surplus that exists in society today? A lot of people spend it on watching television...but a lot of others don't.
Read the transcript of an awesome speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 conference a few days ago.
I would move to Seattle for this job:
I Can Has Cheezburger? is looking to hire a moderator to work in our Seattle office (Lower Queen Anne area)! You too can works for Happycat!
Moderators screen all submissions, moderate comments and help our users with the dangerous world of lolcats. This is a paid part-time (or possibly full-time position). Due to the nature of the site, moderators work non-standard office hours. You will be joining our team of 3 moderators in enjoying all the fun the Web can offer.
We’re looking for someone who lives in Seattle with a great sense of humor, a deep understanding and love of the Internets and a strong work ethic. Cat ownership is not required.
If you’re interested, email us your resume and/or cover letter at lol@icanhascheezburger.com
*sigh*
[Via Yahoo! News, via Digg]Silk Charm (a.k.a. Laurel Papworth) was on 9am with David and Kim on Australia's Channel 9 this morning. She talked social networking and MySpace and made some really good "ah, I get it now"-type analogies. Make sure you take a look.
Great post yesterday by Chris Brogan: What I want a Social Media Expert to Know. Great comments too.
To expand on his post: What a social media expert should also know is that the answers -- if you re-frame Brogan's list as a set of questions -- can be different in different situations, with different companies and industries.
The social media expert might not be able to answer the questions correctly -- and with a high degree of certainty -- in all those situations but at least s/he should know (a) that there will be differences, (b) where to look to find the right answers for that situation, and (c) if there are no right answers, make a pretty educated guess as to what they will be.
I know this to be true, by the way, because I've worked both on external-facing web portals and internal-facing intranet portals and some of the answers to Brogan's questions are vastly different in those two cases.
Still, like he says, social media experts should have answers to all those questions. In fact, I'd expect a good social media job interview to cover most, if not all, of these questions as well.
In the latest Marketing Voices podcast, Jennifer Jones talks to Comrade's Thelton McMillian about How Social Media is Impacting the Corporate Marketing and PR Functions. (It's a quick listen, by the way, and I highly recommend it).
The discussion was based on research that Comrade recently conducted, the results of which are pretty interesting. For example, it indicates that companies that promote social media to a full line item (like PR, advertising, etc.) as opposed to lumping it under some other heading find the most success with their social media endeavours. (It's nice, isn't it, to get some empirical proof for what social media advocates have been saying for a while now?)
It's About Control
Another interesting characteristic of what I would call 'social media ready' organizations is that their control over the company's brand and marketing isn't concentrated in the brand manager's role but is distributed across the organizational structure. This means that, if a company wants to get ready for social media, its executives have to (a) know that they're giving up some control and (b) decide on how much control they're going to give up.
Good examples of companies that have done social media well are EMC, which has ten bloggers, and Google, which has craploads of blogs. Now that's distributing branding and marketing across the organizational structure!
Approaches to Social Media
Another key point that Jones and McMillian made was around how companies should approach social media. In their opinion (and in mine), what companies should do is first find where they are being talked about and then figure out how to approach the people who are doing the talking.
Instead, some companies take the build-it-and-they-will-come approach in which they first spend time and money building a social media infrastructure and then try to get people on to it. Often that's wasteful and it doesn't help their customers trust them any more or any better. To give you an example, read Jeremiah Owyang's analysis on Wal-Mart and Target's Facebook strategies. That's a case in which companies have gotten to the right place (i.e. Facebook and not MySpace) but are still going about things in the wrong way.
The one time an Australian company's own setup could have benefited from a bit of social media, McDonald's Australia didn't add any social media to its Make Up Your Own Mind campaign's website. The site itself is great (and the campaign was fine, too) but if you want people to make up their own mind, you have to let them speak their mind as well. You can't make up your mind if you can't ask questions or make comments. And thus make-up-your-own-mind became let-us-tell-you-our-side, instead.
(Briefly) In the Australian Context
Off the top of my head, I can only think of only a handful of Australian companies that effectively use social media to connect with their customers -- with the most notable ones being web, tech, and media companies. In fact, the companies I would have expected to see blazing the trail for social media in Australia -- the big retailers and telcos -- are nowhere to be seen! Like I've said before, this is both a problem and a massive opportunity. Here's hoping it's more of the latter!
[FYI: If you want to learn anything about any phone company or ISP in Australia you go to the Whirlpool forums.]Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media has a couple of really good models on what it takes to have a successful intranet. Specifically:
You can read more about them in his article Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success. Great stuff -- and very close to home as well because, at MBS, we're in the middle of rolling out our new intranet portal. In fact, the first phase of our project is in the Implementation and Marketing stages of Ward's project methodology model. Exciting times, indeed.
Because I've been busy with exams and assignments for the the last couple of weeks, I haven't had the opportunity to comment on some of the interesting blog posts that I've read. I still don't have that much time so, instead, I'm just going to link to them here.
Interestingly, each of these posts addresses a different stage in a company's social media adoption process:
Excellent posts all of them.
Update: Make that 5 online community articles. I can't believe I forgot Chris Brogan's awesome article Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses. Another must read, that is.
I considered commenting on the recent New York Times' article on blogging but after reading what Mart Andreessen had to say I really don't need to.
Two other noteworthy reactions/comments/replies: Larry Dignan and Bora Zivkovic.
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:
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.]
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.
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia