Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Melissa

Recently I shared a conversation with my colleague Lauren (@laurenpreston) about the positions employers are creating as a result of the social media epidemic going on right now. As you can see the number of social media job opportunities are growing by the second.

Social media gigs are being referred to by a variety of titles: Social Media Coordinator, Social Media Manager, Social Media Specialist, Director of Social Engagement, etc. Basically, if you can talk to people, connected to the right people, have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account, you are qualified. Obviously there is more to each job, but with social media being so new, 5-10 years experience is rarely a requirement.

With that said, who better to go for these positions then students fresh out of school? If I just graduated college I’d be all over Andrew Hudson’s Job List looking for social media gigs because I know employers are demanding them. Who wouldn’t enjoy such a fun and exciting JOB (not to be confused with career) out of college where you get to surf the net and talk to people all day? Sounds ideal to me, but I would make sure I had other skills to bring to the table!

What will happen in a few years when social media knowledge is not looked at as a skill/advantage, but as a requirement for most, if not at all, jobs? What will happen to all those people who spent countless hours in front of the computer networking, promoting, tweeting, Facebooking, blogging about their companies and/or product? I’m confident that all the social media positions being created are going to be terminated.

Hear me out…

We all are well aware that social media isn’t going anywhere, and while there are still a lot of people who just don’t “get it”, we are, as Erik Qualman (@equalman) puts it in his video below, in the midst of a “social media revolution.”

However, there is a fine line between being open to social media and letting it define what you do for a living. We have come a long way, but we have a ways to go before we can put social media in its own career category.

We are starting to see a trend with recent college grads — many of them are applying and landing social media gigs and  some are starting their own social media companies that require them to tweet all day like it was their job (but, oh wait…it is.)

If you fall in this category, be aware that once the “I don’t get it” folks catch on, those of you who are “experts” will merely be another “Joe” who knows how to use the internet and social media. You will no longer be special nor have an advantage over the next Average Joe who knows how to re-tweet, create a fan page, upload a YouTube video, etc.

I am not disqualifying the young social media experts out there, because there are many who are amazing at what they do (@Andrewhyde, @PRSarahevans and @ElaineEllis are some of my favorites) but these big timers have prior experiences and skills to back them up should they want/need to change fields. They’ve also been in the game since the beginning of social media.

So if you are interested in diving head first in a social media position I encourage you to go for it, but be sure you get more out of it than the mere pleasure of 10,000+ followers/fans/friends, because at the end of the day when the Average Joe’s of the world catch up to the rest of us, you’ll still need other skills to set you apart.