While I’ve been utilizing social media far before Facebook and Twitter to advertise businesses and grow my clients’ profiles, I never imagined that there would be entire jobs dedicated towards using these technologies. When I talk about social media “back in the day” I’m not talking about MySpace or Hi5, I’m talking about IRC and bulletin boards, the OG social networks.
Given that I’m only 26, my “back in the day” is very different than that of most senior level marketing professionals in my industry. But using social media and digital technology in a marketing context is still very foreign to many of them. Enter the next generation — youth who have been using current social networks since they’ve come to university (and many even before that). With this comes a comfort of using these tools similar to those who knew how to type when computers first started becoming popular; it was an added skill that was hugely beneficial at the time.
The problem with this is now everyone who has used social media for personal use can now list “social media savvy” in their resume and get considered for social media strategy and community manager positions. Let me tell you that using social for business in almost any sense is a totally different challenge than updating your friends on what you’re eating at any given moment. While this may seem obvious to some, I’ve heard horror stories from companies who have hired either younger relatives or high school/early year post secondary students to run their social media mistakenly based on the fact they use it every day for personal use.
The issue is getting worse as younger generations are being hired as community managers for more and more corporate accounts. And while they may even prove to be a good community manager, the same distance between being an everyday user and a community manager for a company exists between being a community manger and a digital strategist. This is why I have dropped “digital strategist” from my bio. I know community managers who have never done any strategy that claim to be a full out digital strategist. This cheapens the work we do as strategists immensely as it seems everyone and their mother is a strategist nowadays even though they couldn’t tell the difference between a tactic and a strategic decision if their job depended on it.
I get email on the regulars like this:
As someone with an formal education and background in marketing, this is insulting. My strategy chops don’t come from social media, they come from traditional marketing. All I’ve done is just learned how to use social to achieve the same results. Social has become an important ingredient of the marketing mix, but to say you can become an expert in a day is ridiculous. Until the wannabe “digital/social strategists” start simmering down, I’ll be leaving any such buzz words off my resume and let my work speak for itself.
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