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.