You're right. Also more and more SM is being included as one leg in a marketing plan so those who have "cross-functional" experience will add compared to the pure SM players (I read a lot of blog post on SM optimization from SEO folks lately).
Also company are catching up fast with SM, and thus average joe will have to become proficient in it. I read in a survey last week that 59% of us corp have SM marketing activities and another 28% have plans for the next 12 months.
Also there was this great SM industry report from Michael Seltzner in which you could read that 72% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media
for only a few months..so it's new but…it's being adopted fast by every marketer.
Laurent