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Here is my contribution to a recent article on imediaconnection.com, on the quality of the social media workforce and a few other issues related to social media. I know that most of you won’t see it there, so I’m sharing it with you here. You can read the entire post here: Is a social media bubble ready to burst? My portion is on the second page, and here it is in its entirety:
“The quality of the social media workforce is a direct reflection on the hiring managers, who in many cases have no idea what skills are needed for this emerging role,” says Angela Connor, social media manager at Capstrat. “When the role isn’t clearly understood or well-defined, hiring mistakes are unavoidable. There’s a growing list of people with titles like social media strategist who have never developed any kinds of strategies in their entire career. They know enough about social media to talk themselves into a position that has no real objectives or success metrics and three months in, everyone is miserable.”
According to Connor, a big part of what’s driving social media to staff up with a less-than-qualified workforce is the misguided belief that millennials are somehow social media ninjas by birth. The result, Connor says, is that agencies and brands place more responsibility in the hands of their interns than they should.
But Connor isn’t fully convinced that blind faith in millennials means there’s a bubble. Or, at least, she’s not fully convinced that the bubble will burst with devastating effect. According to Connor, the first generation of social media workers (those who began working in the field when nobody was talking about social media) are moving up in the world, and that’s a good thing. “If these individuals stay true to what they know, maintain a high-level view of both social media and its potential, and continue to be students of the craft, they will set the bar high and make a real difference,” Connor says.
What are your thoughts on my take?
8 reasons people rarely login to news sites using Facebook
July 8, 2010 in comments, Journalism | Tags: comments, facebook, Gigya, journalism, news sites, online news, ReadWriteWeb, third-party login | 11 comments
ReadWriteWeb posted fascinating results about the use of third-party logins earlier this week revealing that Facebook dominates all others. What that means is people are opting to login to other websites using their Facebook credentials more so than others. But, when it comes to news sites, Facebook falls way behind.
It seems that when using a third-party login to post on a news site, Twitter is the clear winner, with only 25% using Facebook. Now, keep in mind that this is only the people who use a third-party login. I’m sure a great deal have separate logins for their favorite news sites that are independent of their social networks. That’s important to note.
This news isn’t surprising to me at all, thanks to my behind the scenes view of some of the outrageous comments people post on news sites. I have what I believe are unique insights into why this is occurring, based on my previous position as Managing Editor of User-Generated Content at WRAL.com and my days as Multimedia Editor at the Sun-Sentinel where I was involved with the website Sun-Sentinel.com. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know about my love/hate relationship with comments and some of my crazy experiences related to managing an online community.
(Feel free to read through some of the archives of this blog to learn more about this love/hate relationship in posts like: “Why did you post that comments?” “It’s never too late to start moderating comments” or “Giving up comments is the wrong thing to do” or The Cleveland Plain Dealer finally acknowledges user comments)
Because of my experiences I believe the results presented on ReadWriteWeb via Gigya are absolutely true, but I also have assumptions about the results that I’d like to share:
Here they are:
I could go on and on, but I stopped at 8 because I didn’t want to write a top 10 list. In an effort to allow communities to express their opinions, news organizations often open themselves up to a lot of craziness, and given the topics that make the news, that will always be the case. I personally believe that moderating comments is the answer, but I’ll spare you all that I can say about that.