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Looking for a job in online social marketing? It's not what you know. It's the number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and connections on other social network sites that matter, according to Nance Rosen.
Rosen, career coach extraordinaire and CEO of Pegasus Media World, a communications firm focusing on publishing, social media and seminars, told Online Media Daily that brands looking to hire marketing professionals want "influencers," "connectors" and "mavens" -- people that others turn to for information, news and trends.
Take, for example, the recent job ad from Best Buy looking for a senior manager for emerging media marketing. The post requested one year of active blogging experience and preferred job qualifications of a graduate degree and 250+ Twitter followers.
The job post created buzz, but the blog post by Best Buy's CMO Barry Judge announcing the effort to tap the community at bestbuyideax.com for qualifications generated thousands of hits and hundreds of comments.
More companies are asking for followers and friends, Rosen says, but even more want lots of experience in social media. "It's only a matter of seconds, minutes or hours before marketers look at what is a natural phenomenon like viral marketing and seek to institutionalize it," she says. "Once we see signs of brand loyalty and engagement, we try to create that artificially."
Although it's still unusual to find job descriptions asking for Twitter followers, job boards are filled with requests looking for applicants who know how to attract Twitter followers. Plugging in the keywords "Twitter followers" in the job board indeed.com only returns a couple of listings, but "Twitter" returns jobs ranging from developers to managing accounts and tweets.
CareerBuilder has about 270 job posts looking for Twitter experience. Monster has roughly 300, but it seems that job headhunters are using it to get job tips out to people first, Rosen notes.
Similar to PageRank and Quality Scores on Google, search engine marketers should understand the influence among community members that puts prospective job candidates at the top of the human resources employment list.
Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan wrote in a blog post that Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based tracking tools may undercount visits to Twitter. Sullivan ran recent tests to challenge the numbers, and it appears that Twitter sent 500% to 1600% more traffic than log files or hosted stat packages like Google Analytics might show, he writes. And while the post really analyzes the discrepancies in reporting, the underlying message says marketers could find more of a lift from Twitter than first believed.
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I find linkedin to be a better quality indication of a person's level of connection. Although that can be faked also, it is much more difficult.
Regarding leveraging the social networker for their sphere of influence, I know many social networkers whose mantra is to simply friend absolutely everyone they cross paths withs, whether they know them or not. Is that how we measure influence in digital media?
Sounds like there are a lot of misinformed professionals on the who, what, when, where, and how to use social media effectively.
Companies want to sell a product or services, right? Companies need to market or advertise their products or service, right? All other things being equal, would you rather hire a bunch of employees that are unknowns or those that are connected and/or followed by hundred (may thousands) or people? Wouldn’t ‘knowns’ help expand your brand and help sell more product? Quantity does not equal quality, so an assessment of quality of those followers/connections/relationships needs to be part of the equations too.
Perhaps one day it will be common to evaluate the Conversion Rate of posted links, pageviews of blog posts, tweet, etc. as part of the hiring process.
@efeiteira
On the other hand, if you have a creative mind, can intuit and anticipate how people think and will react (beyond your own focus - because you are not the world), and develop creative ways to relate a brand message without turning them off, feel free to send me your resume.
Look me up at www.garrand.com