The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

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7 Responses to “The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media”

Kunal says:

July 28, 2009 at 11:48 pm

For people who choose to tout the size of their follower and fan bases, I think it’s important to ask them:

* What was your motivation for building a large base of fans/followers?

* What tangible benefits has this large base delivered? These could be personal benefits, as long he/she understands how these could translate into the business world.

MRowland says:

July 29, 2009 at 9:07 am

Thanks Kunal,

That’s part of the point, numbers are frequently thrown out but not explained as to why it matters that some one has 2,000 followers on Twitter or 3,000 friends on Facebook. Smaller numbers with larger concentration of who your true audience is, followed up with calls to action by this audience is what we look for in evaluating the success of your social media work. But it must be in terms of business results, not personal…

Mike

Mark Fidelman says:

July 31, 2009 at 6:53 pm

I agree with some of the comments above. Your community building activity needs to align with the business objectives set forth by management.

I actually wrote a job description (which we are asking for candidates now) on this topic here: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=723907&trk=coprofile_jobs

MRowland says:

July 31, 2009 at 10:32 pm

Hi Mark,

Happy to help you recruit..

You should contact us as we have similar circles of experience where we might be able to help each other.

Mike

Allen MacCannell says:

February 1, 2010 at 8:33 am

Are you really saying that you’d hire someone who hasn’t learned the ropes at Twitter and Facebook yet (and not because those who haven’t would be willing to take a lot less money)? How about, “we consider having a decent follower count on a major social medium important but not nearly as important as business skills” (provided you have good metrics for those such as “Applicant needs to show they sold $300,000 in goods or services last year”). Also, since I delete Twitter spam followers regularly, I would consider a quality follower count (easy for an outsider to peruse) to be a great metric on whether the person has “street smarts.” I don’t own a social media consultancy so far be it from me to say that an applicant being Twitter or Facebook proficient might be a minimum requirement for me to hire if I had one. You might feel that a lot of Twitter and Facebook users are slackers with no business skills, which is fair enough to assume, especially if it is your experience in looking at job applicants. But I know I wouldn’t hire a breakfast cook who can’t already make a mean bacon and egg special.

MRowland says:

February 1, 2010 at 9:43 am

Simply put, we don’t consider follower counts to be a metric of value.

While you may be one of the few who delete spam followers, most folks do not. The prevailing thought amongst most people is the more the merrier instead of quality over quantity. That makes going through 1,000+ followers time consuming and not very useful. Many followers get hooked by one or two items by a writer, follow/friend them and then set it on auto-pilot. We would rather our applicants tell us how they use social media and what they are gaining from it instead of simply focusing upon their ‘counts’ of followers or friends. As they do that, we follow up with how that would relate to a business situation. We want to see if a candidate can connect the dots so to speak.

Twitter and/or Facebook proficiency is easy to learn, but also easy to game to drive up your numbers. See our blog entry on Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends for more on our thoughts about this.

And no, we don’t feel that most users of social media are slackers without business skills. We just want them to be able to frame the use of social media in a business oriented way because that is our business. We’ll teach and train the rest of our methodology to our newer employees, but we need to know if you have business skills or at least can demonstrate that at least you understand that these can be business tools as well as social tools.

Because in the end, social media is really social business for our clients.

The Need for a Chief Community Officer (CCO) | Seek Omega says:

June 9, 2010 at 4:58 pm

[...] examination and development of the job description and corporate goals are necessary. According to Impact Interactions; “…you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all [...]