Employers are liking — and hiring — social media workers

[IndyColtsFan]

I'm English and Communications, and I've been a business analyst/project manager for the last 6 years at a "large internet retailer" and a cell phone company with particularly girly branding. My revenge on the comp sci and engineering majors who picked on me was to bring home a much bigger paycheck than they do.

Meh, there are people with no degrees that are worth more than most doctors. It's typically about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right strategy for those folks. They're the ones I envy.

 

[AreaCode707]

Meh, there are people with no degrees that are worth more than most doctors. It's typically about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right strategy for those folks. They're the ones I envy.

Totally true. My education doesn't really play into my job, I just happened to have someone mentor me and help me find a niche in the corporate world. That and willingness to work hard did more for me than the college degree ever has.

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

In Sina's Weibo, famous celebrities get paid for subtly posting photos of themselves in situations where they may be in a certain clothing or holding a certain drink, even get paid to speak of a certain topic. Subtle advertisements to its followers. It certainly is a targeted advertising device.

 

[IcePickFreak]

Damn why didn't we think of this sooner, like before the economic collapse. We don't need to build or manufacture anything when we can all be employed to talk about what was built/manufactured in some far away land.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Totally true. My education doesn't really play into my job, I just happened to have someone mentor me and help me find a niche in the corporate world. That and willingness to work hard did more for me than the college degree ever has.

And I bet you're really good with people too, and probably pretty outgoing. That is my biggest problem -- I am an introvert.

 

[Spikesoldier]

not surprising when viral marketing and compensated shills have already taken the internet, infecting a message board, facebook, or consumer advocate site nearest you.

 

[kranky]

Isn't this basically advertising...

It can't be, because people hate advertising. They don't read newspapers, they block web ads, they fast-forward past commercials on their DVR.

People wouldn't be so blind to voluntarily sign up for marketing content and advertising that they profess to hate, just because they are calling it "social media", would they?

Doesn't matter to me and I don't think it's bad, but the dichotomy kind of makes me puzzled.

 

[Gibson486]

This is free, this is easy. The face of advertising is changing. You no longer try to find your target demographic, you have them find you. There are so many brands, so many alternatives that no one wants to bother figuring out the difference. With social media, the people who are interested will seek the products out.

 

[ShawnD1]

And I bet you're really good with people too, and probably pretty outgoing. That is my biggest problem -- I am an introvert.

You could probably get some kind of medication for that. There are drugs for damn near everything these days. I feel your pain because I'm a quiet person too. I love talking to people, but I'm scared of alienating coworkers so I just avoid saying anything. Right now my facebook status is a joke about offering a random person money for sex, so my sense of humor probably wouldn't go over well in the office.


About this thread. My gf is one of them social media whatevers. No they do not make 55k. Try half that. Maybe less. It's a part time job and she's a full time college student. She's responsible for the entire organization's posts on facebook and twitter and some other social media stuff.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You could probably get some kind of medication for that. There are drugs for damn near everything these days. I feel your pain because I'm a quiet person too. I love talking to people, but I'm scared of alienating coworkers so I just avoid saying anything. Right now my facebook status is a joke about offering a random person money for sex, so my sense of humor probably wouldn't go over well in the office.

Meh, it doesn't bother me that much. Some people are quiet and prefer to be alone or with just a few of their friends -- that's me.

About this thread. My gf is one of them social media whatevers. No they do not make 55k. Try half that. Maybe less. It's a part time job and she's a full time college student. She's responsible for the entire organization's posts on facebook and twitter and some other social media stuff.

I don't think we pay our people $55K a year to do this either, but it probably isn't too far off.

 

[Jeff7]

I have a lot of HR people wanting to know of my company's software "integrates with social media" - by which they mean posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They have no concrete plan of how to use this, and half of them don't even wind up turning the functionality on ultimately, but they treat it during the RFP process like it's a MUST HAVE requirement. Wish there were more people out there that knew what they were doing.

I do love the companies that go all-out to announce to everyone, "We're on Twitter now! Follow us for exciting news and cool updates!"

Check their Twitter page...it was used for about 4 days following the announcement - a year ago - and never touched again.


"On Twitter...check!"

 

[IcePickFreak]

This is free, this is easy. The face of advertising is changing. You no longer try to find your target demographic, you have them find you. There are so many brands, so many alternatives that no one wants to bother figuring out the difference. With social media, the people who are interested will seek the products out.

This makes no sense, nobody wants to figure out the differences, but they'll seek out the products... to what, read a marketing tag-line about it? I mean I don't use any of the "social media outlets" but I'm going to guess that there's not much in the way of actual information about the product on them, much like TV commercials.

 

[CRXican]

Not sure what it takes to be an expert. You just have to subtly spam people and make them think they're getting sweet deals and exclusive content.

I'm currently still blogging for a company that laid me off. They want the blog to keep going enough that they pay per blog entry.

But $55,000 salary? I don't think there's much to it to keep a full time person busy, guess I have more to learn.

 

[ShawnD1]

This makes no sense, nobody wants to figure out the differences, but they'll seek out the products... to what, read a marketing tag-line about it? I mean I don't use any of the "social media outlets" but I'm going to guess that there's not much in the way of actual information about the product on them, much like TV commercials.

Social media is useful for short advertisements. Steam's facebook statuses are announcements for which games went on sale.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

Not sure what it takes to be an expert. You just have to subtly spam people and make them think they're getting sweet deals and exclusive content.

I'm currently still blogging for a company that laid me off. They want the blog to keep going enough that they pay per blog entry.

But $55,000 salary? I don't think there's much to it to keep a full time person busy, guess I have more to learn.

If you get enough people to "Like" your page on facebook you can build a good list of people to spam. You use that list to run a CPA campaign for example. Let's say you have 5000 people you can spam an ebook that nets you $25 per lead/customer. Lets say you can get ~3% to click through to your landing page but only half end up purchasing. You'll still net about 75 x $25 = $1875 just for sending out one spam message. Another thing people do is buy up facebook ppc ads to generate leads/traffic. But that's more IMing.

 

[KB]

A buddies company paid 30K a year to a social media specialist who managed their social network pages and those of several other companies. Stupid thing was the buddy and several co-workers were the ones writing the content since the specialist didn't know the company. So his company was paying a fortune pretty much just for the guy to copy and paste the content to facebook. A good gig if you can get it. Goes to show you just how clueless management is on social media.