The social media manager is dead. Long live social media

Interesting juxtapositions this morning thanks to LinkedIn and the For immediate Release podcast

(originally via Google+)

Over on LinkedIn, +Dominique Ostyn pointed me to CNN Money’s “The social media manager is dead. Long live social media”: http://ift.tt/16mEVnQ

Apparently the bandwagon effect I blogged about in an early 2010 rant (http://ift.tt/16mEVnR) about the plague of social media experts (in Brussels) seems to be coming to a close, at least in corporate USA:

Social media jobs, once much vaunted, are now frequently regarded with skepticism, even contempt … Once the exclusive domain of digital gurus, Twitter, Facebook (FB), and other tools are gradually becoming everyone’s responsibility

Which is exactly how it should be.

Meanwhile, +Shel Holtz in the latest FIR expressed amazement at an Adobe study called “Digital Distress”: “*Marketers Still Have No Idea What They Are Doing In Digital*” (link below).

This portrays digital marketers as insecure, unconfident, and, frankly, rather whiney about their lack of formal training. I’ve never been trained a day in my life, but never mind - the respondents appear to need to be spoon-fed everything, when more self-training resources than have ever been available to mankind is now one click away.

Apparently “three-quarters of respondents (76%) believe marketing has changed more in the past two years than the previous half-century”.

Probably true. But why does this read like a complaint?

The link between these two stories, for me, is the disconnect between the source and the target of the innovations in the marketing field.

On the one hand, innovations gush forth from technologists: “Big boys like Salesforce.com keep investing in new tools for their social marketing suite … while startups continue to pop up to solve the problem.”

But these innovations are aimed at (generally young) marketers, most of whom, had they been born 20 years earlier, would have shown utter indifference to technology.

But because they’re young they’re supposed to be ‘digital natives’ and so are supposed to cope with it. Instead, Adobe finds, most don’t.

Instead they complain that they “haven’t received any formal training in digital marketing: 82% report learning on the job”. But formal training is probably pointless, given that by the time someone has developed and given a course it is almost certainly out of date.

In any case, before you can set up a training programme you need to have a strategy, which - as digital natives - their managers expected them to figure out.

So Derek Willis’ blogpost unpicking of the term ‘digital native’ is very relevant. He finds major differences “between native users and actual natives“ (The Natives Aren’t Restless Enough http://ift.tt/19lYnh6).

The natives are making the tools for the users, but these users don’t appear to be curious or self-starter enough to figure out for themselves what to do with them, despite the richness of support material out there.

To conclude by returning full circle to CNN Money:

"Even digital natives — younger workers brought up on a steady diet of Facebook and Twitter — need to be trained to use the tools in a business context…. [Using] it to connect with friends and family is not the same thing.”

Yup.