Category: sales

Happy Halloween!  Since we had Hurricane Sandy last year, and snow the year before, this will be our first true trick or trick in a while!  Be safe!

I was just in a panel with Target Marketing and after the panel got a lot of questions around what are the new job types I should be looking at due to social media dominence. 

Don’t be scared!   There are a few.  Your fear can rest if you start looking at the new frontier today!

What are some of the new job types that the Social Era is producing?

• Community manager – A person responsible for building, maintaining, and activating members in an online location around certain topics.  Key skills required:   Ability to be transparent, drive sharing among members, and listening and shaping conversations.   This role has become so popular that a day honoring its professional was created!

• Social Business Risk Manager – A person who is focused on managing the risk associated with clients controlling brand online.   The role entails building a risk management plan, selecting a listening tool for ensuring risk is assessed, and ensuring groups of people can rally around a recovery.   Key skills required include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, public relations, and grace under fire of a crisis.  

• Reputation manager – a person responsible for building, maintaining and protecting a company’s reputation.   Reputation is what clients and potential clients believe to be true about your company.  Key skills required:   Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, marketing, and the ability to position a brand, company or product in a positive light.   This role has now outpaced the Risk Manager role, showing that the industry has moved to being much more proactive.

• Social Analytics manager – a person who monitors, listens and analyzes the sentiment (or feelings of people online), and turns the massive amounts of data into insight.   This role will become increasingly important as more automated tools are coming into the market.  Key skills required:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques,  business intelligence, and ability to make recommendations on incomplete data.

• Social customer support manager – a person responsible for scouring the blogsphere for customer concerns, insights, and statements.  This person’s role will have to extend through multi channels of input – including social tools like Twitter, Facebook, as well as traditional channels of phone which has now become one of many places where listening and turning data into insight will occur. Key skills for this role include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques,  customer service, and CRM.

• Social Product Innovation manager – a person who can generate ideas, refine ideas, and solicit valid “votes” on the best ideas that customers will actually buy.  With the increase in crowdsourcing or the ability of using crowds in the blogsphere to create and vote on new product concepts, this person becomes crucial to your company’s innovation engine.  Key skills for this role include:  Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, product management, and product development.