With social media becoming so influential and spreading throughout all the different business functions and applications, companies will require more and more people with deep social media understanding. Or as Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot, said: “if you change your approach, you also need to change your team.”
Kodak is applying a “t-shaped profile”: people need a broad understanding of the traditional marketing background (brand, communication, PR, metrics) and a deep understanding of social media
Brian Halligan (one of the few who created a specific hashtag for his session), is hiring – in accordance with his business model and business objectives – only DARC (Digital Analytical Reach Content Creator) people. No traditional marketing skills and background are required, instead “hire people who speak digital without an accent. Hire people that blog, have twitter followers and are on G+.” Many of the speakers at Dreamforce certainly didn’t fall into this category.
It certainly shows the significance of Klout, Peerindex and other influence or engagement measuring tools. We all know they are not perfect but they are a good starting point and they will become even more influential. In the recruiting process, they certainly enable the hirer to get a good overview of the digital engagement of the candidate. That is not only relevant in the recruitment process but also when choosing agencies. There are so many Heads of Digital Strategy that have a Klout score of 10, which is just a contradiction per se.
It was suggested to me that there might be some roles where it is preferable to have people with a low Klout score or low social engagement. And it’s true, there are roles where it is not as essential as in Marketing yet, but an understanding of social media and therefore participation is important to truly be able to assess social media and its impact on the world. Klout obviously doesn’t measure the engagement on closed social networks such as Chatter, but it will be equally important for hirer and candidate to assess the impact made on these forums as well.
Social media also brings a massive opportunity to job seekers with only little experience: if they participate in social media, it is an advantage, if they blog about their dissertations (Sacha Chua made a case about that on the ERE Social Recruiting conference in 2009) they can create important connections and show their social media engagement. It is doable and beneficial. The world is changing and the talent we need is changing.
Dreamforce and the real life examples certainly made me think and I will certainly alter the way I will look at potential people to work with and how we integrate the social layer into everything we do. Social media is here to stay and we are only at the beginning of the shift it will bring. Depending on where you stand, it’s either beautiful or scary.
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Twitter: garelaos
says
Beautiful. From where im standing anyway. And yes, its really only the beginning, just like it was with the internet all those years ago. Social is different, but lets not go into that here
Interesting stuff and very challenging for some organisations – particularly the notion of hiring without the marketing experience and skills. I’m a supporter of that but then thats just me, i reckon many wouldnt be.
One thing i dont buy into just yet is using Klout et al. Unfortunately, the way we are, particulalry in the UK, recruiters will be all over klout in a faddish way and simply making poor choices. Want to know who’s really influential? Get into the conversation! Dont rely on a product. There are plenty of people with high Klout scores who “speak social with a strong accent”! In other words garbage peddlers who are lousy at interacting.
Influence will, in the big shakedown, be determined not by Klout, or peerindex or any other product, but by the true calibrator – the audience. you and me.
Twitter: FelixWetzel
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Gareth, it’s nice to know that we agree on the underlying premise
Klout (or any other provider) isn’t perfect yet, but it gives an interesting perspective and it will certainly become more important in the future. More and more HRtech providers integrate it into their offering or as Craig Fisher (@fishdogs) put it in his blog about HRTech:
“Everything will be scored. Soon. When we first started thinking about how Klout and other social influence measurements could effect hiring, there was a great deal of skepticism. But Klout is now a major factor in many ways. I think we will see scoring for everything from culture fit to skill set in the near future. ” http://blog.fishdogs.com/2011/10/cool-tools-hr-tech-wrap-up-show-on.html
For me, at the moment, Klout scores (etc) are one perspective, that gives a quick overview but no hiring decision should be purely placed on it.
Twitter: garyr0binson
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Nice three-part series, Felix. This particular installment resonated with me.
It strikes me that this is the next step in a change process that has been going on for the last 15 years or so – since the emergence of the commercial web. Growth of web-based businesses was fueled by people with ideas, not afraid to challenge how things were done and crucially, embrace change.
Social and Mobile are the new challenge. You need to hire people who are afraid of neither. It’s less about their background and more about their approach to moving forward.
I had a longer answer to your post, but I decided to make it a blog post myself – you can check it out here: http://bit.ly/pduz7L
Twitter: FelixWetzel
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Gary, you have written a really nice post. I agree completely with your assessment of the importance of curiosity and the subsequent challenging of the status quo. This post fits perfectly to your post as well: http://hrringleader.com/2011/04/18/the-unskilled-of-today-are-the-skilled-of-tomorrow/
Twitter: CloudNineRec
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Hey Felix – good post – with really telling content.
There’s a few layers in there to tackle – but esentially 2 things stand out.
The Klout thing – For the purposes of recruiting, it’s an indicator of `communication style`, rather than effective Digital marketing or Social Media marketing. A Head of Digital Strategy does NOT need a high Klout score – because their time dictation requires them to be standing in different zones to continual own social media communication. They assess the communication techniques of others, of consumers, and measure analytics.
If I wanted a community manager, or a social media amplifier – then yes, the in built ability to effectively communicate and generate following through engaging content and likability is relevant – and Klout in effect, measures this, primarily.
Much of this is down to role content. Some of the most genuinely influential people in Social/Digital (the industry I recruit in) have modest Klout/PeerIndex rating.
As for hiring the inexperienced for social media roles – YES – absolutely. Again – this is role dependent – but great people with great natural social media communications skills, can be great social media pros – take my colleague JJ, as an example. She’s a Talent Community Manager for me. A recruiter and PR person – never worked in social media – but is a blogger with distinction, and has over 3000 twitter followers as a consequence. She is an excellent social media professional for me.
This is a great learning point, but not one that all businesses care to adopt in a cut throat world of satisfying clients to 100% level, 100% of the time. Sadly.
Twitter: FelixWetzel
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Steve, thanks for your comment and your perspective about the topic here and on your blog. It’s good to get different opinions.
Let me explain a little more about why I take this stance:
In the first post about Dreamforce (http://felixwetzel.com/social-media-is-going-mainstream-but-is-your-company-ready-to-be-a-social-enterprise-1479)
I wrote: “Becoming a social enterprise requires understanding and participation in social media – it was surprising how many people, even speakers at Dreamforce, only had a token account on Twitter. We are at such an early stage that involvement is requisite to understanding.” I still believe this to be true and really important. Klout is one way of assessing this quickly, not the only one and certainly not a perfect one, but one that is integrated into more and more HR Technologies.
In your post, you mention Molly Flatt, she might not have a super high Klout/Peerindex score, but she blogs, tweets, etc, and is therefore actively engaged in Social Media. That is exactly what is required at this early stage of social media, especially at the agency side.
In the last 12 months I have seen several Heads of Digital Strategy from agencies that clearly did not understand Social Media and just saw it as another broadcast channel, that was brand centric, not customer centric. Most of those did not use Social Media actively themselves and defined marketing purely as communications.
I saw the same happen through the early internet years, where people weren’t involved in the internet and therefore lacked understanding of internet marketing and it showed in the planning process and in their creative execution. As today social media, the internet was just seen as another add-on and the underlying changes were not understood, often because it lacked personal experience.
Steve, here’s another post that might be interesting for you, by Gary Robinson, Jobsite’s Head of Marketing, about a similar topic: http://bit.ly/pduz7L