A recent article in Online Marketer predicts the future of businesses and social media, detailing the 5 new jobs that will be created specifically to handle a business’ social media needs:

1. International Community Compliance Chief: Facebook and MySpace may be dominant in the U.S., but how much attention are you paying to social networks in other countries? Do you have a presence on Korea’s Cyworld, Orkut (huge in Brazil), Mixi in Japan, Bebo in the UK, or Grono in Poland? Someone in your company needs to claim the company name on all of these sites, oversee even moderate design, set up unique referral links, and ensure that all of these efforts match your company’s over-arching strategy. (Thanks to Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing for these examples, roughly on pages 101-106.)
2. Community Manager: People are talking about your brand. If they do it within the auspices of the company, in a sanctioned forum, message board, or internal blog, you will need a community manager. This employee needs to both ensure (through personal interaction) that the community is a valuable assets without spammers or flamers (definition #1) and they need to set up the internal documentation with which you regulate employee interaction. These people are the face of your brand to the outside world and the customer ambassador to internal staff.
3. Online Reputation Manager: While the community manager has a public presence and is sanctioned to act, an online reputation manager is wider-reaching in their scope, but largely hidden from public view. This is the person you turn to when you need to know which online influencers are talking about your brand. They need to have a comprehensive view of your competitors’ online reputation. They need to identify openings in the market or current customers’ requests. The online reputation manager is the spy agency (within reason) for your company.
4. Blogger Outreach Manager/Blog Cultivation Expert: A lot has been said about the right way to approach bloggers and the wrong way to approach bloggers. Do you have an expert on your staff who already has relationships with bloggers in your industry? Everyone needs good PR or the occasional digg/stumble/sphinn/[insert goofy web 2.0 term of the day]. “[Bloggers] are a potentially significant new constituency for public relations efforts, and they are the engine that drives successful viral marketing promotions” (Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing, again.) Let the blogger outreach manager cultivate like-minded souls online and advise you to the up-and-comers. Allow this individual to build relationships with them now before you need their help.
5. Chief Conversation Officer: This is the big kahuna of social media leadership in your company. The Chief Conversation Officer is an amalgamation of many of the roles described above. However, the CCO reports directly to the top and it is a soup-to-nuts position: they are responsible for finding the online conversation, documenting it, sharing it, analyzing it, and ultimately joining in on the conversation (in a non-creepy, non-”marketese” kind of way). Here are more details about the Chief Conversation Officer position.

I could not agree with this list more, although I doubt, depending on the business’ size, whether one really needs five different positions to coordinate all this work.  It’s an interesting thing to think about, and as a blogger I have certainly seen the rapid increase in outreach initiatives by companies.  Everyday I receive emails from PR firms and agents seeking collaborations to hawk their various products.  Also it seems that every new  company these days has a blog, Twitter feed, or both, and of course many have a presence on Facebook.   The question that remains is how effective is social media to your bottom line? How many people follow a company’s tweets, or become a fan on Facebook, that were not already aware of the company by more traditional marketing initiatives? Also, most media-savvy people are wary of forum posts that are a bit too glowing towards a certain brand or product.

Internal blogs and blogger outreach programs seem an effective means to persuade consumers, but how is this different from traditional endorsements, except that they are electronic instead of in print?  As time continues and major bloggers become more like print publications in their audience scope, language, and function, the line between print and web blurs ever more.  Perhaps we should stop calling it social media, and just call it media.

There is no doubt that businesses need to incorporate social media. Utilizing social media will open your business to marketing and resource opportunities and allow you to remain current with your client’s needs.  Social media will also allow you to protect your reputation in the wild jungle that is the Internet.  Caution though needs to be taken, to avoid falling into the pitfalls of over-enthusiasm and hype.   Spam your users with useless, self-loving information and you will only alienate them.

How do you feel that your business has incorporated social media strategies?

Related posts:

1. Small companies marketing with social media too
2. CIA to monitor social media, though we haven’t talked since high school I hope they friend me = )
3. Enforcing Integrity or Cash Grab: FTC ruling on bloggers

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