New Job Title: Social Media Slave

Content Creation

We all know how important it is for the social, real time web. No more corporate-ese please. We’ve had just enough of that blank, heartless, double speak for the time being. Press releases and official announcements that don’t tell you anything are as outdated as, well press releases and official announcements. The new client, the new sharer, wants authentic communication. We want bold headlines, crisp, alive copy and we want it to be presented to us married to great design that we can, and WANT to share with whoever we need to.

But what happens when businesses need content creation and aren’t willing to find the people, or pay the right rates, to get it down. This is the reality that I am staring down, and I am not sure where the solutions are. So naturally, I am writing a blog on it!

I’ve recently been contacted by rather large organizations (we’re talking big bucks baby!) that know they need to integrate social media into their rather staid corporate cultures. They don’t want the nitty gritty details; they just want it done. When I tell them that we need to activate people internally who can tell the story of the business, the mood changes.

Clients Don’t Want to Do It Themselves

And until they do want to, there needs to be a stop gap measure. So who is going to do it? And at what cost?

Corporations who are moving forward on social media integration are often doing so with micro-sites or blogs that are primers for their audiences who want more than just the static corporate site. They need to have authentic copy written that uses the casual, colloquial cadences of blogging to tell that brands story. They have to tell the history of the company, why they do what they do, how they do it, who is doing it.

But can that be done by people NOT within the company?

I am not sure, but we are about to find out. Can copywriters who don’t know the ins and outs of a business really tell the story? How much is it going to cost? Is the cost worth it?

Are we about to see a dramatic need for a new kind of job? A social media worker? Someone who can navigate the social media needs of a company from outside? This person will need to do the following:

1. Write authentic, creative copy that communicates the message of the brand
2. Upload, broadcast and monitor that copy, including analytics measurement and dissemination to company
3. Monitor and administer a brands Twitter, Facebook etc.. account with the authority to answer customer questions, relations, deal with problems that arise, share information relevant to the brand as well as promote blog posts, press mentions and other related information

What is the going rate for 2 blog posts and a week’s worth of Twittering?

It may be a sad state of affairs if companies aren’t willing to find and dedicate people to communicating directly with their customers, but it may just be an interregnum. If 3 or 6 months of employing someone else to do this works out, the best thing that can happen is that they’ll realize how important it is to identify the people internally who can best do this kind of thing.

So, in other words, who needs a job?

Image Source: Under the Dancing Feet on Flickr

Tagged as: Building Trust, Social Media for Business