The Social Path

How new jobs will make (and keep) customers happy.

I'm about to wrap up my series on the emerging careers of 2009, but I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a little time talking to Mack Collier. A fellow Alabamian, Mack is one of the country's most respected voices when it comes to corporate outreach via blogging and other social media tools.

Here are his two picks:

I'm not sure if these are so much the jobs that I think WILL emerge this year as much as they are the jobs that I'd LIKE to see employers start to fill.

Community Catalyst: In this position, the person would actively seek out a company's existing customer evangelists (their most devoted fans) and create ways to bring them together so that they can connect with each other.

These are people that have a vested interest in seeing the company that they evangelize succeed, so it only makes sense for companies to embrace and empower these customers.

This isn't about reaching out to customers, it's about reaching out to a specific, and very passionate, subset of customers, and giving them the motivation and tools to do what they are already doing, and to connect with each other.

Digital Customer Service Specialist: This would someone who would utilize emerging social and digital tools such as Twitter and texting to provide customer service.

This would especially benefit companies that have younger, tech-savvy customers that are already fluent in using these tools. 

To read a lot more from Mack, check out his blog, The Viral Garden. He recently tackled modern career issues with his post "Is the Community Evangelist making a comeback?"

Today's photo credit: Matt Dickman via Flickr.

Also in this series:
• Will '09 be the year of the strategist?
• How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.
• Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up?
• The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.

Will '09 be the year of the strategist?

Today's predictions on the emerging careers of 2009 come from Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic, a content strategy, information architecture, and Web writing agency based in Minneapolis:

Content strategist: Everyone likes to think that Web content is the "easy part" of building a site. But who among us is asking the scary, important questions about content, such as “What’s the point?”, “Who cares?” or "Who’s overseeing the care and feeding of content once it’s out there, clogging up the tubes and dragging down our search engines?"

Content strategy is a massive field that can encompass almost every kind of media, not just words. Dealing with content is messy. It’s complicated, it’s painful, and it’s expensive. And yet, the web is content. Content is the web. It deserves our time and attention.

Editorial strategist: Part gatekeeper, part shepherd, the editorial strategist defines the guidelines by which all online content is governed: values, voice, tone, legal and regulatory concerns, user-generated content, and so on. This practice also defines an organization’s online editorial calendar, including content life cycles.

Metadata strategist: Yes, the name is daunting. But these days, countless Web sites depend on "metadata," which is the often-invisible coding that helps identify information about a post, video, etc. A quick example: You upload a photo to Flickr. That photo can include a wide range of metadata, from the location where it was shot to the type of camera you were using.

Smart, well-structured metadata helps publishers identify, organize, use, and re-use content in ways that are meaningful to their audiences. Thanks to the bottomless pool of information on the Internet, one metadata strategist can literally do the work of 1,000 traditional content producers.

This post was largely adapted from Kristina's more comprehensive post, "The Discipline of Content Strategy," so be sure to check it out if you want to know more. You can also follow her daily adventures on Twitter.

Also in this series:
• How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.
• Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up?
• The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.

How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.

In today's installment of my series on the emerging careers of '09, we get a little more nerdy tech-oriented with Andrea Hill, a veteran Web developer who is now Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology at Worldways Social Marketing.

I turned to Andrea because she is always looking at social media through the lenses of both technology and human nature. So here's her perspective on where today's hot jobs are headed:

My background is in development, so although I have stepped away from coding, I still tend to think about "how to make it happen."

OpenID, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect: all these technologies hinge on the idea of a unique identifier that we carry across our online experiences. We can't continue to limit our development efforts to our own Web sites. We need to figure out how to share (and limit) data across experiences.

I see there being a need for Social Architects. These individuals would have insights into how different online services and experiences could best be integrated. So rather than Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn allowing third-party developers to duct-tape their applications onto their platform, there would be true (useful) integration. This role would require an understanding of the underlying systems and how they relate.

To support the Social Architects,  we would also likely need to see a rise in Semantic Coders. There has been some discussion on the Semantic Web, and this can still be a bit too "techy" for the layman. Yet if we start to consider the semantics of WHAT we're describing, we can more easily tie together systems. Companies like AdaptiveBlue "understand" when you refer to books or music, and offer relevant supplementary information. The catch is that we need to have a set of standards to code to.

I believe we WILL see a dramatic rise in mobile in 2009. Yes, I know it's been predicted for the past several years, but I do think the time is coming. The challenge is that mobile is, well, hard to visualize. The technology exists; we're just awaiting the tipping point.

We need more Mobile Marketers. I've already seen that mobile analytics are starting to be discussed. Whereas social media is big and they're just now trying to determine how to measure effectiveness, mobile analytics is already being considered. I think this is great integration: people will be implementing mobile campaigns that are trackable from the beginning.

I can also see a need in Personal Branding Consultants. Sure, many of us love social media and naturally establish a name/reputation for ourselves. But there are many people who do not have the passion or time to do so. Just as companies have to learn to monitor their online brand, I believe there will be a need for individuals to start to do this in the future. Just as many folks may turn to resume writing services, we need to look at this advanced means of self-promotion, as well.

You can read more from Andrea at her industry blog, Digital Likeness, or her running blog, Go The Distance. Most importantly, you can see photographic evidence of the day we met on Flickr.

Also in this series:
• Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up?
• The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.

Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up? More predictions on the emerging careers of '09.

Today brings the second installment in my series of guest posts about the emerging careers of 2009. My goal is to help students, job seekers, employers and everyone else make sense of how new jobs are taking shape (or should be) in a rapidly evolving business world.

I met Auburn University Professor Robert French a few months back, and it's safe to say I was blown away by his enthusiasm and foresight with new technologies. (Scroll to the bottom for links to his work.) While officially a professor of public relations, I think Professor French has a lot to teach us all. Here's his take:

These jobs actually do already exist, but they are so new that I believe many people either don't know about them (beyond the online early adopters) or haven't considered them — yet.

• Conversation Auditor - Media tracking has been going on for a long time, but many firms are now devoting staff to solely online conversation mining.  These types of activities range from new clients and exploring their consumer base to investor relations (IR) and following those trends. The emphasis here is that people are being hired to do it solely online. One of my students is finishing up an internship at the White House for the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Her job was to track online conversations about issues of interest to the White House.

• Online Customer Service Rep: Imagine a company that now runs a call center doing customer service for many different corporations.  Now, consider adding to that staff that track conversations about products and services for the sole purpose of contacting the individuals and/or engaging in conversations (comments) in blogs, on Twitter and elsewhere.  Some companies are doing this — Zappos, Dell, for example.  But, I don't know that they have a job title that specifically identifies the employees as such.

Beyond customer service issues like complaints or seeking refunds, consider news and information sites that are becoming respected references.  What options are available to readers?

• Online Ombudsman: Again, ombudsmen have been around for a long time. Think of the sites that are now gaining greater readership than traditional news outlets. ESPN now has Le Anne Schreiber, and the NYTimes has spread their ombudsman activities to the Web, too. Now, consider sites like HuffPost, Digg, TechMeme, Mashable and others that have huge followings but no formalized process for dealing with reader issues. I can see those sites adopting the ombudsman philosophy.

In higher education, we already see faculty and staff (administration) positions focusing on social media, or what I prefer to call emerging digital media.

Recently, a community college issued a job opening for a PR representative to work closely with the president and university relations.  The job description is written with an emphasis on many online activities.  Similarly, emerging digital media faculty positions (tenured and non-tenured) are being posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education more and more.

Auburn Professor Robert French is a 25-year veteran of public relations. He writes about social media on the infOpinions blog and has developed powerful PR resources such as PROpenMic.org, PRProspects.com and PRblogs.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @rdfrench.

Also in this series:

• The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.
• How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.
• WIll '09 be the year of the strategist?

The emerging careers of '09: Advergirl's predictions.

 A year ago, my job title of "social media strategist" didn't exist. Two years ago, the term "social media" hadn't even emerged yet. Now it's one of the fastest-growing fields in marketing.

So what new jobs and responsibilities will emerge in 2009? I've asked five of my favorite forward thinkers to weigh in. Today we start with my good friend Leigh Householder, a brand strategist for Ologie in Columbus and much-acclaimed author of the Advergirl blog. Here's her take:


We've reached the acceleration point for social media. The year ahead will take the opportunities and impact of these new expectations (and associated technologies) deeper into more lives and enterprises. The demand for knowledge and experience will grow exponentially, creating the need for a number of new roles:

• Immersion officers in agencies and marketing organizations. No longer can digital and social be the province of a few. The separate departments and sub-brands will increasingly be banished. "Getting" how to create for all mediums will become tablestakes for creative partners. If it doesn't all work together, it doesn't work. Immersion officers will help print and ad vets quickly ramp up on the changing consumer landscape and become part of an integrated — versus complementary — team.

• Channel chatters in B2B organizations. 2009 will be the year social hits the channel. Not in the form of buzzy applications or silly promotions, but in the form of 1:1 interactions. No longer will communication be pushed blindly into the field. Instead, using white-labeled versions of applications like Facebook and Twitter, it will be posted for a community that can give immediate feedback, elevate its own best ideas and have live conversations with HQ.

• Artifact designers in the creative department: What can you give someone that they will want to share? That they'll want to keep in a file, tack on a board, display proudly? These brand artifacts are fundamentally social. The pieces, words and ideas that people emotionally attach to and take into their own authentic conversations without being asked to are the anecdote to every aggravating contest and gimmick that currently crowds the social scene. Increasingly, creative departments will be looking for these clever conversationalists who can translate campaigns into collectibles.

• Idea miners in product development: There are a finite number of resources in any company. No matter how brilliant the minds, there will always be limits to what they can do, what they solve. Increasingly, we'll see a change in the values built around development. One that moves the MVP from problem solver to solution finder. This shift will create roles for deft connectors who can find and activate unexpected groups of people (across vast geographic and expertise divides) to crash a problem. These idea miners will focus on communicating challenges and sifting through ideas to find the right solutions.
  
  
• Human network coordinators in sales and marketing: LinkedIn will change the nature of the "warm lead." The workforce will quickly become the frontline of connecting enterprises to their next big clients. Coordinators in marketing will be charged with mining employee "friend" and "connection" lists to find opportunities for introductions.

• Social specialists in internal communications: While marketing is making plans for its next big social "campaign," employees throughout the company are having incidental interactions with customers, partners, and potential employees in their own social networks everyday. In many cases, their share of voice dwarfs the company's megaphone. Increasingly, companies will recognize the power that individual employees have in socializing their brands and empower them in big and small ways. Operationally, the front line will get permission to deal 1:1 with customers across mediums. Throughout the enterprise, social specialists will focus internal communications on delivering compelling, relevant content that both aligns the workforce and powers conversation.

To read more from Leigh, be sure to head over to Advergirl and subscribe.

Also in this series:
• How coding and culture will shape the jobs of '09.
• Want to be a Conversation Auditor when you grow up?
• Will '09 be the year of the strategist?