Dear Company X looking for a Social Media Coordinator or Social Network Coordinator,
Yes, social media is the new catch phrase. Everyone is talking about social media, social networking, inbound marketing. It’s not a craze. It’s not a fad. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay and yes, you should be paying attention to it (if not all over it). Yes, you should be looking to open a position specifically for tracking, monitoring and interacting in the social network arena.
Here’s the thing though. Don’t take someone who already works there and has a job with duties that already take up 30 or 40 hours a week and hand them the social media baton. Don’t add it as an aside to someones heavy workload. Don’t pull one of your employees aside and say “this will now be your responsibility so you’ll need to learn it.” That’s not how it works. That’s not how to effectively use the medium.
See, social networking isn’t for everyone. Some people don’t understand it and never will because they refuse to. Some people don’t understand it because they just haven’t spent enough time in it. To these people… social media is just MySpace OR Facebook, nothing more…and that’s OK. It’s not for everyone and that’s cool. In fact, that’s one of the best parts about it in my opinion.
To the people who DO get it, to the people who DO embrace it, to these people…social media can be an invaluable tool. A tool to help them get things done, a tool to help meet new people, a tool to help them get to new and exciting places and find things they would otherwise never come across in their daily travels. To the people who really embrace it…doors open all over the place, and the more they use it, the more they continue to find ways to make it work for them. If you have someone at your company that fits, consider yourself lucky, move them into the position–full time–and backfill whatever they were doing.
This is the kind of person you need to be looking to hire. Find someone who is already embracing the medium in their personal lives. Find someone who sees a new site or technology and goes “wow, how can I use this to my advantage?” It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone who’s connected 24/7. The point is, don’t hand someone the task and say “this is now your job.” Find someone who’s already using it and say “how’d you like to get paid to use this for us?”
I see companies all the time try to perform the former. Social media isn’t “new” anymore. Facebook has 175,000,000 users! If you hand the task to someone who’s not using it, they’re going to treat it like a job. They’re going to bucket a certain number of hours a week or a day to “be in the social media arena” and that’s it. It will be a task to them and that’s all. If that is your approach, you will fail…because it just doesn’t work that way, and you’ll probably come away thinking something like “we tried social networking, but it just didn’t work for our company.”
Find someone who breaks company download policy and has Digsby, Twhirl or Tweekdeck open at work all day. Find someone who tweets and sends status updates from their iPhone. Find someone who loves to take photos with their phone and post them to their blog or Flickr. Trust me, that’s the kind of person you want coordinating your social media efforts.
So, how do you go about doing this? How can you weed out the people with experience and the people that just say they have experience? Ask for their Tumblr/FriendFeed/Twitter name and check out their feed. Find out how they use Facebook or MySpace. Ask for their blog URL…and no, they don’t have to have thousands of “friends” or “followers” or “rss readers”…it’s not their popularity you want, after all, your brand is going to be different anyway so it shouldn’t matter if their blog only gets 40 page views a week. Actually, if it does, and they still blog anyway, they might be just the person you’re looking for. Someone who’s in the space just to be in the space. Learning, sharing and interacting. Because that’s what they like to do.
I hope this helps you to get the right person, and save some money in the long run.
Thanks,
Todd
