Social Media Headhunter

Social Media Experts Come Under Attack By Social Media Mean Girls

I was going to title this, Attacking Social Media Experts without naming them is bullshit, but I didn't want to be so mean. 

A spiking trend in the social media world is for pundits, authors, speakers, and people whose careers have been elevated by social media to lash out at self-proclaimed "social media gurus" or some other version of the word rockstar, ninja, expert... giving the latest regurgitated hash about social media really being about solving problems/making money/learning to listen. 

It isn't new. Jason Falls writes about the bashing trend way back in 2009.

"While the harsh tone then and now will be interpreted incorrectly by some, I still feel that way. However, my frustration has turned more toward those whining about the 20-something trying to make his or her way in the social media world, hoping to ride the wave like other digital natives and put food on their table. I don’t fault the uninformed for claiming to be something they aren’t. We’ve all spit-shined our resume a bit much at one point in time, I’d bet. I hope brands and companies are smart enough to see through that."

So why is it still happening? It's a form of status elevation every teenage girl would recognize.

You attack a defenseless person with a strawman argument designed to show what you wouldn't do.

 "I may let a boy feel me up, but I don't tell everyone.  Only a slut would do such a thing."

 And then all her friends nod their head and talk about how awful, "those girls" are. Maybe it's my high school reunion coming up and maybe it's watching too many Glee clips on Hulu, but I'm hard pressed to come up with a defense of how bashing someone for what they call themselves isn't high school one-upmanship worthy of a Mean Girls 3 script. 

Trashing your industry, or better yet, trashing a skill set that has boosted your ability to make money is not speaking truth to power.  It doesn't gain you credibility, keep you real, or make your voice authentic. 

Especially when you talk about a problem that doesn't exist. 

One of the hallmarks of Mean Girls is they don't attack others in their social circle.  They don't attack peers, for fear of backlash.  They attack those lower on the social chain.  This is why you don't see social media pundits attacking each other by name.  They attack faceless, "self-proclaimed social media experts," and to prove I'm not a Mean Girl, I'll be specific.

I'm talking to you, Peter Shankman.     

Peter's website announces he's on Bloomberg radio discussing a post he wanted to title, "All Social Media Experts should go die in a fire."

"I was going to call this article “All “Social Media Experts” need to go die in a fire,” but I figured I should be nicer than that.

But my title stands. If you call yourself a “Social Media Expert,” don’t even bother sending me your resume.

No business in the world should want a “Social Media Expert” on their team. They shouldn’t want a guru, rock-star, or savant, either. If you have a “Social Media Expert” on your payroll, you’re wasting your money."

That's a very clever piece of writing, but it's not particularly helpful to anyone, from job candidates who put "social media expert" on their resumes to clients who supposedly are out hiring "social media experts" to their detriment. 

Let me go ahead and ask.  Does Peter Shankman have that many Fortune 1000 clients whose biggest problem in social media is they're so stupid they are tricked by people who put "social media expert" on their resume but actually have no experience?  That's a real question, because Peter felt the need to go out and write a bunch of words describing how stupid you have to be to put social media expert on your resume.  How many resumes is he getting that have this in their title?  Is it really that big a problem?  I get resumes with embellishments on them all the time.  It's fun to make fun of them, but it's not an industry wide trend that deserves some kind of special recognition.  

At the time of this post, Peter's post has been Liked 1000 times on Facebook, Shared almost 1000 times on Twitter, and has attracted 175 comments.  Did Peter write something groundshaking here, or are people piling on, Liking, Sharing, and whooping it up because they want to make sure they're with the cool kid? 

Are there hordes of companies spending millions of dollars wasting money on "social media experts?"  Or was this just an attempt to gain credibility stating the obvious?  And just who in the corporate world has someone with the title "social media expert" working for them?  

They're not of course.  The problem most social media consultants face is they're broke, and trying desperately to find some way to pay the bills.  Most of the people I speak to haven't taken a check for any consulting, and their experience in-house is limited to creating profiles online without any backup from their company.  These are not threats to the social media industry. They are just folks trying to make a living - marketing themselves.   

The problem companies have is the public is taking social media seriously for their own purposes, severely altering the balance of power between seller and buyer.  Companies know they have to do something, but they won't do it without proof it works.  Companies are dipping their toes into the water, but that means they don't have the budget to pay what Peter Shankman charges.  If someone calls themselves a social media expert to get their foot in the door, and that gives them access to a company that knows nothing about social media but wants to, how is that a bad thing?  Companies get what they pay for.   

What's worse is that Peter is on record talking about trying something new in social media as the secret to its success.  Who does he think is going to do that?  I've seen a lot of dumb ideas from small practitioners, but I've seen massive failures from major brands backed by million dollar a year agencies.  Maybe the companies should be spending $1000 for some local social media expert to brainstorm instead of paying $100,000 to a highly-sought after integrated digital and creative corporate marketing consultant, speaker, entrepeneur, and investor, as well as thought-leader, trusted friend, bacon and dog-lover. How is the second title any different than the first? 

You know what Peter calls himself?  A worldwide connector.  What exactly is that?  Is there a degree for that?  A course in the MBA curriculum?  Let me go ahead and say this.  If you're going to put worldwide connector on your resume, go ahead and don't send me a resume.

We know what the word means. It's a semantic device you use to elevate yourself above those nameless, faceless "social media experts" who never had a chance of selling your clients in the first place. 

You know the worst part of this?  Peter is right.  Companies should be asking how they can run campaigns that make them money, and most of the experience out there in social media lacks the ability to run integrated campaigns.  Oops, what I meant to say is that most of the peoplee in social media marketing lack the experience of running a campaign, the heft to drive solutions through a company over the objections of the employees, and the ability to then charge a fair market rate for it.  Maybe we should be doing more to hire and train young people, instead of simply insulting them and suggesting they practice self-immolation. 

Are Social Media Consultants Clowns? Or Heroes?

Gary Vaynerchuck made headlines recently with a statement that 99.5% of social media consultants are clowns.  In an interview with TechCrunch, he made the statement, and then explained it in more detail at his own site, at the link. 

 

I'm with Gary in some respects.  Quite a few people calling themselves social media consultants are clowns - I've oft repeated my personal statistic that 80% of the people I've talked to have never taken a check, and a large percentage of the others are taking piddling checks that amount to a few hundred or thousand dollars to do nothing.

Gary is trying to improve the industry, and he's right that failures and snake-oil salesman are a problem.

And yet, clown is a pretty strong word.  It suggests an unseriousness, when the problem is really a lack of experience in general business, and a lack of experience in how to get things done at the corporate level.  I've actually never met or spoken with anyone that is a snake oil salesman. I've read some pretty shady training bloggers who came from the affiliate world, buy that's as close as I've been.  Most of the unpaid or inexperienced are just naive, and hopeful, that what they've read on other sites will make them rich or famous or just give them a job.

So it's sad, but not clown-sad.  It's not intentional.  They really just don't know that managers and line workers and developers and designers have no clue what they're doing in social business.  And it's not just social business.  

How many web developers, of any language, understand SEO?  We're not talking about the abilty to be crawled by spiders - that's child's play. We're talking about building a site with an SEO strategy in mind to convert traffic to an action.  If you think it's more than 10%, I have a bridge to sell you.

How many copywriters understand what it takes to convince retail salespeople to speak up for a product or program? Would you call 99.5 % of them clowns?

How many VP's of marketing for billion dollar companies know what a hashtag is and have ever used one?  Clowns?  Or differently skilled? 

 

The disconnect between social business results and social consultants is a function of the marketing/PR/SEO/customer service/corporate world, not a problem with the social media folks specifically.  They only know where they came from.  Social media is so much bigger than their niche, is anyone surprised they are lost? 

We all know television advertising is overrated - why does social media come in for such scorn when television advertising is so much worse?  It's just hazing of a new discipline. 

So I applaud Gary for speaking the truth, but wonder how we can actually move forward.  I've got some ideas about how to judge someone.  We'll let you know later this week, no matter if we decide to do it or not.

 

 

 

My Two Cents On Flattr And Their Twitter Micropayments

Flatter is making news announcing a new micropayments initiative for Twitter users.  You can now give small amounts of money to the people you follow on Twitter, in addition to RT them, replying to them, or quoting them. 

It's laid out here at mediabistro, the program expansion that moves from users with a payment button on their blog to any Twitter user. 

If you find great, compelling content that you love online, you can still retweet it, like it, share it around. But now you can also Flattr it easily. As a Flattr-er, you simply enter the creator’s Twitter handle into your Flattr dashboard, and it will store you pending micropayment to that individual until they get their own Flattr account. You can tweet to that person to let them know that you Flattred them, and when they join up the pending payment will go through.

The problem is an old one - people purchasing content don't mind paying for content. If I'm willing to pay $.20 for a song, I'm willing to pay $1.00.  If I like getting the paper each day, I'll Pay $10 a week, and $12 a week won't change that.  If it's online, I have to decide if it's worth it to pay for something I can find elsewhere. 

Micropayments have been talked about for some time, and they assume the problem of the world is price.  The problem of my world is time. I pay for all manners of things that i could do on my own, but who save me time.  My whole business is based on this principle.  

Micropayments don't take into account the time people spend consuming, and try create a market out of the goodwill of others.  But we know what's going to happen.  It's called a TipJar. 

Really, this is what the tipjar on blogs was all about. If you like someone's blog, you give them some money.  The vast majority of people who did so merely pushed money around.  Small amounts between blog communities was moved around, but only a few people profited.  Those were the ones like Andrew Sullivan who launched full scale blegging campaigns, and netted tens of thousands, and sometimes over hundred thousand.  Of course, Andrew was already a writer with an audience.  How many people match his output and had his audience?  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a tipjar, and asks on occasion, but these are both top ten blogs. Glenn makes a little, but not nearly enough to compensate him for his time, and much less than he makes on Amazon affiliates. 

Micropayments to Twitter users is a natural extension for Flattr, but I'd be surprised if they make aas much as any decent Google adwords program or even a jobamatic job board.  It's a nice idea, but if you're good enough to get paid in micropayments, you're good enough to get paid in macropayments. 

Call it my 

A Trial For How Empire Avenue Can Improve Employee Performance

Metrics aren't that hard.  You determine what you're trying to measure, you measure it, then you look at the data.  You run into problems when you can't measure the full impact of something, or when you don't know what to measure, or when you can't gather data. 

In that case, you run trials, just as they do in other complex systems.  I'm a big fan of trials in social media contexts because they are easy to sell, easy to track, and the data speaks for itself.  Take two groups - train one with social, compare the groups. 

Rather than focusing on tasks or individual, unrelated results that can be gained, you focus on outcomes.  

Group 1:  50 Sales people using LinkedIn. 

Group 2:  50 Sales people not using LinkedIn.

You split two groups up based on their average sales. To make sure there is no cheating, you have assign one person with a stake in the matter to split up the groups, and another to pick the group.  This ensures the split is on level ground. 

You run a test, and compare the increase over the baseline, for both groups, but you also look at the individual performance.  The winning group is the one you move forward with.  If the control group wins, but certain individuals excel - you at least have data that helps you determine if the training is bad, or if only certain salespeople can be effective. 

Hard to argue with a test like that. So how would you do this for Empire Avenue?  

I maintain that Empire Avenue is best as an individual training tool for a group.  Sign up your trainees, and let them use the system to track themselves.  Don't focus on stock price for an individual, and make sure they know that stock price and portfolio wealth won't have any effect on their salary or commissions or performance.

In other words, don't use it as a game.  Let the game work in the background, but use the tool to train.  And like the previous examples, set the site up as group trial. 

Click on the image for a full-size pop-up, but what I've drawn is a trial on how to teach social media to a group using Empire Avenue, with an outcome that help you understand the most effective method for your team. 

I see this for people with sales teams, remote retail locations, franchises, dealers, recruiters, customer service departments, PR firms, and for associations looking to help their members.  Any group willing to implement a training system for social media can use Empire Avenue to track the results, in a way that decreases monitoring cost and training personnel costs.

Is it easy?   Of course not.  But I could do it. I've trained dozens of people at the same time, and thousands in shorter sessions.  One of the things that makes Empire Avenue so attractive is how it could have helped me have my clients train themselves. 

Which means small-business consultants can use it now, one-on-one, and see results. 

Thoughts?

Empire Avenue Metrics: Twitter Follower Growth

Just a quick note.  I add about 100 Twitter Followers a month, on a pretty steady basis over six months. Since joining Empire Avenue one month ago, I saw a spike, and in the last month, have added about 200 followers.  I went to a conference mid-month, which spiked me somewhat, but I had already added 72 followers prior to the conference. 

For the first month, it's fair to say I'm adding followers at a rate of 140-150 followers a month, as the rate of adds stabilized to the pre-conference rate within four days. 

 

I pulled this  graph from Twitter Counter to show the difference. It's not statistically significant yet, but I'll keep tracking it to show you the difference.  The other picture here is from my Twitter advisor, Declan, under stats on the Empire Dashboard. 

The stats don't fully add up - as I'm not sure when the week starts, but using the advisor does help you track your personal activity in terms of followers and tweets, on a week by week basis.  of note is that RT's of me have gone up 54%, and total mentions have improved by 34%, in the last week. 

A second advisor, Kesley (these are algorithms you can unlock inside Empire Avenue under the stats board), tells me hashtags, most retweets, most posts retweeted, and the people with whom I've connecting the most.  It's about half and half Empire and other users.  The "engagement" for all groups has gone up significantly since my joining.   

Why is this important?  It brings me instant feedback on my social activity, from a place I'm frequenting multiple times a day.  It allows me to see, to actually look at the difference between  quality and quantity, and as an outside check that both are high.  If I see that I haven't made any posts on Facebook in a week, I can alter my behavior (and it happens, as you get caught up reading). 

More initial passes on the impact of Empire Avenue on social activity to come. Please share your anecdotal thoughts in comments, and let me know if you write it up on your blogs. 

 

LinkedIn Changes Alter The Rules For Recruiters And Candidates

This Thursday, December 16th, I'll be delivering a brand new webinar on LinkedIn Recruiting for 2011.

Recent changes in how we see full profiles and an expanded social media universe have dramatically impacted the way most recruiters use LinkedIn. Pulling on my background as a recruiter, and on my experience in social business, I'll be showcasing new strategies on how to:

1) Find Candidates quicky no matter how many contacts you currently have

2) Messaging and Marketing strategies to generate targeted referrals

3) Information control strategies to improve your learning and response time

This is a 90 minute webinar put on by Experts Connection, a San Francisco company I've partnered with in the last few years for a number of training webinars.  The cost is $100, which includes the live training and a download link to review the entire webinar at your leisure.

My webinars are live video - I've got a microphone in front of me and I walk you through the exact steps you need for each section.  It's a powerful learning tool broken in digestible chapters.

To register, go to Experts Connection for the 2011 LinkedIn For Executive Recruiting registration page.

For more information, check out the blurb with the awful headshot.

 

Twitter, Twitter, Little Stars, SMH In BusinessWeek Article

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.

What Kind Of Social Media Positions Could You Create In Your Company?

Social media as a job function is on the rise - Indeed.com shows over 1000 open positions posted to job boards with the word "social media" in the title, and over 21,000 jobs using the words "social media" somewhere in the job description.  Compare this with an established technical position like "java developer," which rings in at over 48,000 positions.  I'm inundated with people who want to "break" into social media, or who want an entry-level position to learn the ropes. 

But what does it mean to be in social media?  The growth of the sector seems explosive from the outside, but I believe we haven't seen anything yet.  Companies still don't understand how to add social media to their divisions and to their initiatives.  Right now, you have islands inside companies run by one or at best a small group of people who get "it," or you have a national strategy for huge corporations that just scrapes the potential of what could be achieved. 

So what does a guy who doesn't even have any recent blog posts know about this?  Well - I do still speak with social media types on a regular basis during searches, and the blog is dormant because we just came off our busiest year ever.  And while everything I offer is anecdotal and not backed by hard research, the trendlines are all the same.  Social media as a business phenomenon is petering out (seriously - how many of you are landing large dollar accounts with social media projects?  Not many - the growth is all in applications), but social media as a magnifying force inside existing divisions is set to explode.  

Off the top of my head, I can think of amazing, million dollar (in monthly savings) programs in customer care, recruiting, event promotion and planning, television and magazine spend, and direct mail and catalog uses that take social media by the horns and bend it to their will. 

This isn't the community evangelism that so many people were pitching a couple of years ago - this is utilizing existing infrastructure to create value in a way that is authentic, results-based, and easy to measure using the same metrics you apply to your current systems. 

The post has already gone far from where I intended it to.  I was going to address low-level social media jobs that companies could add in the transition from traditional marketing to integrated marketing, but that will be saved for another post. 

What I'm trying to say is that social media as a separate discipline was always a fools errand.  Social media embedded into all of your publishing systems is where we're headed.  If you want to get ahead of the curve, start thinking about how social media can be applied to your job, right now.  Don't seek out a position - seek out a way to use social media to do your job better, and the results will be what you wanted all along - a more interesting position without the inherent risk and low salary of breaking into a new field.

Can We Make 2010 The Year Of Killing Of Social?

Okay - that title isn't my idea, rather a client who is tired of hearing the words"social media."  It's not that he doesn't believe in the power of social, it's that he believes we have reached a point where social is the new normal.

Public Relations, Marketing, Customer Service, Recruiting and Sales should be using social media as part of their skillsets, and not counting on someone to do the work individually.  I agree, which is why in the last year I've done a lot more integrated marketing than social media marketing.

One, it sells better.  Two, it allows me to filter with more ease.  Hiring experience in an industry is always easier than hiring a skillset.  Three, it keeps the salaries high, as they are based on previous salaries, and not some amorphous range that differs at each company.

Of course, I agree with the sentiment because I've always practiced it.  It might be strange for the social media headhunter to say such things, but the terms applies as much to my methods as my placements. 

So this year - let's all agree that we'll say integrated marketing or integrated communications instead of social media.  And remember, "engagement" and "transparency" are right out.  They might be benefits, but no company pays for them anymore.

Guest Post At Standout Jobs

Ben, who has a great company in Standout Jobs suggested I make a guest post over at his blog.  His audience is primarily corporate recruiters, so I wrote about the importance of landing pages for corporate recruiters. 

Stop laughing.  I'm serious - internal recruiters have a harder time building an online profile, but if they incorporate landing pages for specific jobs, they can funnel candidates and still look like heroes. And the corporation benefits.

Head on over there to read it for yourself -and leave some comments!