5 New Social Media Jobs You Will Fill In The Next 5 Years
Social media has already changed business profoundly. If yours hasn’t, you are already behind the curve. If you have customers, their expectations regarding how they interact with businesses has likely already shifted dramatically.
So how will you deal with these changes in your business? They will surely impact marketing and legal, perhaps even I.T. But what else is on the horizon?
This is my list of five employees you might hire in the next five years (and whose positions didn’t exist five years ago). Part of this equation depends on how big you are and how ingrained social media becomes in your business. Another aspect is your company’s size – smaller companies may likely combine aspects of these jobs.
That said, it’s likely that someone will need to fill the following positions in some way. How are you preparing?
- International Community Compliance Chief: Facebook and MySpace may be dominant in the U.S., but how much attention are you paying to social networks in other countries? Do you have a presence on Korea’s Cyworld, Orkut (huge in Brazil), Mixi in Japan, Bebo in the UK, or Grono in Poland? Someone in your company needs to claim the company name on all of these sites, oversee even moderate design, set up unique referral links, and ensure that all of these efforts match your company’s over-arching strategy. (Thanks to Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing for these examples, roughly on pages 101-106.)
- Community Manager: People are talking about your brand. If they do it within the auspices of the company, in a sanctioned forum, message board, or internal blog, you will need a community manager. This employee needs to both ensure (through personal interaction) that the community is a valuable assets without spammers or flamers (definition #1) and they need to set up the internal documentation with which you regulate employee interaction. These people are the face of your brand to the outside world and the customer ambassador to internal staff.
- Online Reputation Manager: While the community manager has a public presence and is sanctioned to act, an online reputation manager is wider-reaching in their scope, but largely hidden from public view. This is the person you turn to when you need to know which online influencers are talking about your brand. They need to have a comprehensive view of your competitors’ online reputation. They need to identify openings in the market or current customers’ requests. The online reputation manager is the spy agency (within reason) for your company.
- Blogger Outreach Manager/Blog Cultivation Expert: A lot has been said about the right way to approach bloggers and the wrong way to approach bloggers. Do you have an expert on your staff who already has relationships with bloggers in your industry? Everyone needs good PR or the occasional digg/stumble/sphinn/[insert goofy web 2.0 term of the day]. “[Bloggers] are a potentially significant new constituency for public relations efforts, and they are the engine that drives successful viral marketing promotions” (Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing, again.) Let the blogger outreach manager cultivate like-minded souls online and advise you to the up-and-comers. Allow this individual to build relationships with them now before you need their help.
- Chief Conversation Officer: This is the big kahuna of social media leadership in your company. The Chief Conversation Officer is an amalgamation of many of the roles described above. However, the CCO reports directly to the top and it is a soup-to-nuts position: they are responsible for finding the online conversation, documenting it, sharing it, analyzing it, and ultimately joining in on the conversation (in a non-creepy, non-”marketese” kind of way). Here are more details about the Chief Conversation Officer position.
How are you preparing for the influx of social media into your business? Are you cultivating leaders within your organization to help? Please share your ideas and suggestions in the comments section below.
(Image courtesy of preciouskhyatt via Flickr)
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Tags: Business, careers, Communication, Leadership, Marketing, Online marketing
Ha, I’ve been looking for a list like this for some time. You seem to have hit each area of need within the social media arena. However, where are these jobs going to originate from? Marketing seems logical, but then so does Customer service. Trying to fit these jobs within the current corporate framework will be an interesting challenge.
Not sure I agree with “conversation manager”, but the others ones seem like real jobs.
I use Mixi myself, and it’s a very well-designed and run social networking service. Much better than MySpace or Facebook, in my opinion.
ari
Spot on! I think that the demand to fill these jobs is certainly rising. The hope is that brands will raise the need as well. The smart ones are doing it already!
Good analysis. Most companies will expect one person to do all those things, at least in the short term.
I’ve been doing all these “unofficially” and without knowing the true importance of setting up standards for each role. Thanks for this article! One challenge will be to set these positions up in collaboration with existing roles, such as aligning blogger outreach with PR reps. What media will we be going to first?
There are too many companies out there that think one person is able to handle all of these tasks on their own. As more executives realize the importance of social media, hopefully we’ll see more of these positions popping up. Great post, thanks for breaking it all down!
Community manager is already kind of normal for a lot of companies. Online reputation manager seems to be intriguing managing behind the scenes the brands that you love. Very volatile though.
Very thoughtful post. I bet in about a year or two you’ll be able to point back to this post and tell people like Jeremiah Owyang, “See, told you so.”
And I agree with M. Daehn: in the short term, one person is filling all these roles. Although I do think the CCO is a stretch. But it just depends on how much stress people put on conversation. People always frown upon early adoption until it becomes mainstream. Then they start fragmenting.
Wow, very inspiring post! I´m always on the look for interesting and useful posts that I can send to social sites.I´m a member of all the sites available at Social Marker, but I use about 5 core sites daily. (SU,Mixx,Twitter,Delicious and Reddit).Guess I would be a good “Social communications manager” in a couple of years.
I’d consider adding Social Media Brand Analyst to this list. What are people saying about your brand(s), who are they, where are they, are they popular, can you reach them, do you need to change your brand or reputation, are there unexpected trends emerging, etc. While I have not seen this job title we have numerous people using our tool for these exact functions, usually at agencies but increasingly within companies. An observational research and strategic analysis role.
[...] Then again, OnlineMarketerBlog is convinced that there are at least 5 social media careers that will spring up in the next 5 years. [...]
Yep! Working for a small company, I expect to be one of those who gets to combine all of the above (and then some!) into one job. . .
With the speed that technology is changing, these 5 jobs seem very short-sighted. I don’t think that any of these jobs will stay around long, and if they do, they’ll get scrapped just as fast as they showed themselves. I think that community manager would be a feasable long term position, but the others will be replaced by something more efficient very quickly.
[...] and from the comments on the above post something from onlinemarketerblog.com. [...]
[...] 5 new social media jobs you will fill in the next 5 years [...]
[...] Gerente de Reputação [...]
Open your heart out on this link talking about how you are holding up in this not so promosing job environment
I am working with marketing in Denmark and is searching for inspiration in the digital world. Thanks for inspiration
I like your list. Not sure about Chief Conversation Officer…but I might add “Near One-to-One Customer Relationship Manager” managing closer relationships with customers. CNN, Starbucks and Nike are starting to get that right….when CNN has its own Facebook page….and you follow it on Twitter.
[...] Not only will marketers and advertisers roles change, everyday office jobs will also adapt to incorporate ‘digital account managers’, ’social media assistants’ and the like. For a small company these duties may fall on the director or perhaps be incorporated into the duties of an office administrator or PA. A PA may need to manage their boss’s LinkedIn account or an office adminstrator may need to write online content rather than send out a email newsletter. In other words, creating and maintaining an online presence will become crucial for any business – whether it’s a gym, cafe, estate agent’s or SEO agency. For more on these new kinds of positions see this blog on 5 new social media jobs you will fill in the next five years. [...]