Businessweek has an article out about social media directors and their uses in corporate social media. It's a funny, but accurate opening.
Across the country, companies like Petco are going through a two-step process. First, they scramble to hire social media officers. Second, they figure out what it is, exactly, that social media officers do. Blending departments—promotion and marketing, customer service and support—and requiring the ability to be shameless boosters while maintaining a light, self-aware tone, the job category is experiencing a boomlet as companies try to keep up with the new media world. The chief social media officer may be supplanting the chief branding officer as the zaniest human resource innovation in memory.
At issue is the question of what a social media employee does - where to put them, what to pay them, and how to judge their success. It's a complicated field, because social media touches just about every area of the enterprise. Felix Gillette, the writer, does a good job of discussing the problem but also chronicling what needs to be done about it.
My contribution comes on page 3, where they discuss salaries.
Jim Durbin, the creator of socialmediaheadhunter.com, says experienced social media directors—business strategists capable of identifying a company's needs and solving them using social media tools—can command $120,000 a year and up. Further down the ladder are community managers, who oversee a company's day-to-day social media operations and earn $60,000 to $80,000. Below them are cub Twitter managers, essentially copywriters with little business experience, who typically earn $30,000 to $50,000.
The salaries vary wildly, but they are settling down in the sense that the need for social media has been established, but the experience behind it is still lacking. It's hard to make social media work, because you're essentially a dozen different jobs and skillsets running up against company processes that more often than not will beat you back. Thus the key to a higher salary, is learning how to navigate a company's social and political structure.
Regularly people are asking me if I can get them a job in social media. While I do have a site for that - jobsinsocialmedia.com, the answer is almost always no. No company wants to pay for an unproven employee, and the people I do place have experience in their fields, but have shown some success in social media to complement it.
This a manager, a recruiter, a salesperson, and a marketer can and have been placed by me, but because they spoke the language of business, not of Facebook. Well they spoke the language of Facebook too, but not as well as they speak the language of value.
Of final note is the battle between social media skillset and social media job seems to be over. The skillset won out, but those people are now demanding the job title. That's funny.
