22 1 / 2012
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Most companies are horrible at social media. Even if they tell you their engagement numbers, show you their PowerPoint presentations, and use every buzzword in the book, the fact is they have no idea what they are doing. And that’s OK. The having-no-idea-what-they-are-doing part. Because no matter who tells you otherwise, no one knows what they are doing when it comes to using social media. Not now. It’s too new.
That’s because the key to being good at using social media to sell stuff is intuition. People in business don’t like to talk about this. They don’t understand intuition, they aren’t good at intuition, and they can’t quantify intuition. I mean, you go into a big meeting with a billion-dollar company in hopes of getting them to give you millions of dollars to manage their social media platforms, and your PowerPoint presentation in which you show them how you will do this consists of one page that says, “INTUITION,” in giant black letters? That is not going to work.
That doesn’t mean it’s not true, though, that the real — and, honestly, only — way your company will do well in the social media sphere is if you hire someone who intuitively gets it. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, but in other ways. For lack of a better way of putting it, I’ve been chasing traffic online for 10 years, and I’ve been working online for longer than that. I am a creative, but I have a keen understanding of marketing, and my years of experience trading in getting people to do things online — click, comment, engage — cannot be illustrated in a pie chart, represented in a graph, captured with statistics.
Of course, most companies can’t buy into that. They hire twenty-something kids who have been on Facebook since they were tweens to manage accounts, but they don’t take into account whether or not the kid has a feel for it, because you can’t put that on a resume. And that’s why so many companies suck at social media. Because they just don’t get it. And they’re too stupid to hire someone who does.
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Permalink 12 notes
31 8 / 2010
Re: My legitimacy in the Social Media Sphere
First, please head over to Edward Boches’ blog, Creativity Unbound, and read his article on Hiring a Social Media Strategist. My thoughts are below…
Great article, Edward. One point that I struggle with is people judging the legitimacy of a candidate by their social media networks. If someone is already working as a Digital Strategist or Community Manager, it’s somewhat unfair to judge their abilities based on their personal accounts. I spend most of my time online representing the clients and communities I work with. When it comes to my personal Twitter account I want to use it as just that- my personal account. I want to tweet about my breakfast and my life and occasionally I will create and share content, but I think the fact that I only have a few hundred followers shouldn’t overshadow the thousands I’ve gained for clients. It would be silly to judge the work of an architect based on their own home, when you need them to design your commercial space. You’d look at what they did for their past clients, not what they do with their personal time.
The reply I received from Edward was supportive, but I also got this from @ariherzog:
Perhaps, but not necessarily. What if the architect designed her own home but makes a living on the speakers circuit and has no portfolio of external work?
My response:
What I am trying to say Ari, is that I see personal branding and professional branding as two different things. How I manage my personal network is not indicative of how I represent a BRAND on Twitter. My personal objectives in social media differ greatly from my professional objectives. My client’s goal is to increase followers and influence, whereas my goal is to engage with my friends and like-minded individuals in my field of work. If I wanted to change companies, why would a HR manager judge my legitimacy as a candidate based on my Klout score when my objectives on my personal accounts may be entirely different than the objective of the previous brands I’ve worked with and the HR manager I am interviewing with. To negate me as a candidate because I only have 300 followers completely discounts the hours I’ve spent everyday building my client’s brand through Twitter and not my own. It’s an inaccurate representation of my skill. Furthermore, no great candidate for any job or speaking opportunity- architect, social media “guru” or otherwise- should be without a portfolio (prior work representative of skill). Why would an architect OR social media “guru” be hired for speaking opportunities without the portfolio to back up their knowledge of the field? What could they possibly have to discuss without experience to prove their legitimacy in the area? An individual’s Klout score does not accurately represent the breadth of their work and the fact that HR managers would support that is only fueling the fire of ignorance in the social media realm and relegating the hiring process to the status of a popularity contest.
This is the sort of ignorance that I’m up against in trying to further my career.
(Comments are always more interesting than my posts. Let me know your thoughts.)
