Millennials wanted
Here's a sign there might be a bubble. While the economy is still weak and job prospects for recent college grads aren't what they once were, there's a lot of opportunity out there for millennials with social media savvy.
I see this all the time. On a regular basis, I get pitches from PR folks who are just dying to put me in touch with a "young genius" at an agency they represent. Invariably, that "genius," "guru," or "ninja" has taken over that agency's social media division by reinventing the wheel. These gurus are everywhere, even at a time when companies are said to be 100 percent sober when it comes to hiring decisions. In other words, there's a feeling that something irrational is going on in the labor market for social media specialists.
"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.
I've stepped in deeper puddles
In simple terms, a bubble just means that we overvalue something. Sometimes that thing we overvalue has no real value at all, and sometimes it's wonderfully valuable and a victim of too much hype. It's the latter that probably best describes the way we presently view social media relationships, if indeed there's a bubble at all. That is, those relationships do matter, but probably not as much as we think. Or, put another way, we value them with a universally high appraisal while failing to dig deeper and realize that not all social media relationships are 1) the same and 2) worth very much.
"Social media is amazing for starting relationships and sufficient at basic relationships maintenance," says Mario Schulzke, senior director, digital strategy, at WONGDOODY. "The problem is that people only have a finite amount of time. And many people are now investing that time to a) establish a large number of relationships and then b) maintaining those at a pretty shallow level."
While Schulzke's point is easily applied to interpersonal relationships, it has important implications for advertisers as well. For one thing, charting the social graph (something Facebook prides itself on) isn't going to be a very effective tool for leveraging word-of-mouth if those mouths aren't as connected as advertisers hope. But when it comes to valuing a brand's friends, there's only a bubble if the brand (or its agency) makes it so, says Jonathan Richman, director of social media at Bridge Worldwide.
"While social media 'relationships' may not have the same level of connection as real-life relationships, they aren't necessarily less valuable, but rather differently valuable," says Richman, who argues that brands are right to assign an economic value to those relationships so long as they don't overpay.
In other words, there's only a bubble if a brand pays too much for its friends. Which means the question of a bubble depends on ROI.
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