5 hot new jobs in social media
Somebody has to run the show as social media shapes the way companies deal with customers, operate supply chains, and design products, an IBM exec says.
Not long ago, Sandy Carter met a CEO from a company who had decided not to venture into the world of social media.
The CEO told the IBM executive that social media “is really interesting, but my board and I voted to opt out.”
Carter, who is IBM’s vice president of social business evangelism and sales, didn’t lay hands on the sinner and pray for his soul. Instead, she showed him that people were tweeting about his firm, discussing it online, and posting YouTube videos and Flickr photos about it.
“Because he’d chosen not to participate, he wasn’t in the dialogue,” she says. “He hadn’t actually eliminated his risk; he had increased it.”
Social media has grown beyond just getting people to click thumbs-up icons, as more and more firms are crowdsourcing product development and using social customer service, says Carter, who blogs at Social Media to Social Business.
IBM offers both training and products for social business, and it has held internal “jams” online for the past 10 years to develop products in areas such as its Smarter Planet agenda.
When a field is growing, there are jobs to be had.
Adding social media to the business
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