Career as a Social Media Strategist

I recently had the opportunity to discuss my career path as a Social Media Strategist with the Alimeter Group. They have published a paper called Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist  and Jeremiah covers in detail on his blog today. It’s a good piece of work with a lot of in-depth observations on the life and times of a Social Media Strategist. It errs on the side of a smaller company experience which is different from what we have at Microsoft so for that my perspective probably isn’t a good one. 

A couple of observations about the report;

• Overall I would have liked to see more guidance around how a person becomes a social media strategist. I get asked that question literally everyday. I’m not sure who the audience for this piece is.  If it’s the social strategist they already have their job. If it’s someone trying to get into that field this paper doesn’t give much guidance on how they would do that. If it’s for organizational management teams I could see value to them, I’m just not sure what the action, ‘go do’ for an organization would be after reading this.
• The tone makes the role sound hard, with little reward and gratification. A lot of time is spend focusing on how the role is under resourced with lack of budget and overworked, over stretched and under valued. I would love to have seen more about the rewards; self discovery, problem solving, managing and driving change for the better. All these things can be personally and professionally very gratifying. I get a lot of pleasure out of solving hard problems in a new, unique way.

A couple of areas I take a different perspective on:

Programs are nascent with no long-term direction; I was surprised at this observation. I don’t think that the fact that 81% of programs are less than 3 years old is at all surprising given the networks we are talking about a not much older than that. I would say my experience and the Windows team I ran is about 3 years old and has advanced to long term planning strategies complimented with an ability to build rapid response capabilities and stay agile enough to still be opportunistic when need be. 

Limited budgets: I think it’s difficult to look at an absolute budget number without looking at the all up investments levels. Budgets should be a % of the digital marketing investment. Our social media budget was a healthy % of the overall digital budget which allowed us to compare our investments against more traditional digital efforts. It’s also unclear if this % includes media dollars or that’s a separate budget.  For example, if Company X has $100K budgeted for social efforts but there is above the line spend happening from the media team by way of Facebook and/or Twitter buys then a true reflection of what is spent on social media would be a combination of above the line media spend and digital budget for program management.

The Social Strategist role as we know it today will become obsolete: This I agree with. I have already moved beyond my social media strategist role to a Director of Emerging Media position. I think this happens for two reason; 1. the role should and will become part of a digital strategy plan and won’t need to be called out as a particular team. It will become core to any strategy the way SEO is today. That doesn’t mean the role doesn’t exist, we still have SEO experts, but it means the newness and specialty will be gone. DM and email marketers haven’t worked themselves out of a job, they still exist today – they just aren’t the new, cool kids (although they would probably beg to differ).  2. People who are drawn to social media strategist roles are often early adopters themselves and are drawn to the latest, most emerging technologies and as social evolves into mainstream something else will become the new ‘shiny object’. These types of people will be drawn to investigate and understand the newest trends. My guess is that means Mobile. Mobile social, mobile commerce, mobile coupons, QR Codes, mobile TV (already big in Japan).  I think the guidelines they put forth on hiring for social strategists are good. I would add a few characteristics I look for when interviewing folks; curiosity and creativity. I think both of these traits a person either has or doesn’t and they are very hard to teach. Tools you can teach, but big ideas and a passion for understanding the unknown (curiosity).

The direction my career as gone since being a social media strategist is not highlighted in the ‘what’s next’ section. I moved into a role where we look at the impact of social on our global media spend and look for emerging media opportunities and technologies that allow us to leverage the impact of our social programs and channels into impacting our global media spend. Great example of this is the Windows Phone launch where you can see engagement programs complimenting the TV spots on our Facebook page. I still use my experience in social media but now it’s focused on building stronger, more all inclusive global media programs for all our advertising brands.

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