If you’re in the market for a role like this, keep in mind a few key things as you respond to openings and opportunities.

1. Social media is an asset, but it’s not a shortcut.

Adhere to protocols that have been established for submitting your qualifications, application, or interest. Most of us have them not just to be a pain in the butt, but because we have processes and approvals of our own that we need to adhere to internally. A heads up that you’re applying is fine, LinkedIn connections are good too or a Twitter follow. But be mindful of the line between making and introduction and presuming a level of familiarity that’s not yet there.

Like most things, the more established your relationship in advance, the more likely that connection is to work to your advantage during a job search (hint: build your networks before you need them). But if you’re not familiar with the person in the hiring role, the social network connection does not suddenly imply an inside track. Work on establishing that connection in a professional and friendly manner online, but while respecting the processes that have been laid out by the company that’s hiring.

The resume may have a different role than it once did, but it’s not quite dead. It’s still the first glimpse many employers will have at your experience and skill set. Supplement that with online content or recommendations as you like, but make sure you’ve still got stuff on paper or PDF that’s polished and professional.

2. Read the job description carefully.

Be sure you have the requisite skills, and be upfront about the qualifications you might not meet. Be mindful of instructions contained therein about submission of qualifications, or supplemental materials you’ll need to be prepared to provide. And most of all, be honest with yourself about whether you really want a social media job.

Job descriptions, when done well, really are written for a reason and with an emphasis on both skills and personality attributes that are needed to suit not only the role, but the company culture and appropriate level of responsibility and authority. They’re usually written to the ideal, meaning some of them are flexible and open to compromise, but the more you can help hiring managers evaluate the potential fit and where your strengths are, the more smooth the evaluation process can go.

Social media jobs might be all the rage, but many still carry with them a level of professional experience (even if it’s transferrable rather than direct) and qualifications that go beyond having a few active online profiles. Being really honest about whether you’re a good fit for the role at hand is better for you in the long run, and sets you up for a great deal more success.

3. Social media moves fast, but the hiring process doesn’t.

In all but the smallest and most nimble of companies, the hiring process is a considered one with many steps and points of communication both internally and externally. There can be multiple candidates, multiple stages of interviews, and approvals and all sorts of things that have to happen within the walls of a company.

Most companies will only contact qualified candidates for interviews, so if you aren’t contacted within a few weeks, a follow up note is great, but don’t keep hammering the company on every social channel (especially in public) seeking a response. If you’ve sat for an interview or two it’s perfectly fine to ask for a status update on that process, but do so in private channels (email works best) and only with the people who have been involved in your interviews.

It’s hard to be patient when you’re eager, but HR processes can move slowly and too much follow up can actually smack of desperation. If you’re a top candidate for a role, it’s a pretty sure bet that the interested company will make sure that you’re in the loop and be in touch. Like it or not, you’ll have to adapt to their timelines, not the other way around. Don’t feel like you’re being well communicated with? That’s something to consider when deciding whether that company is the right fit for you.

4. If you’re on the market, be on your best behavior.

It’s surprising that this still needs to be said aloud, but if you’re a job seeker in the social media realm, your potential employers are going to look at more than the resume you send them. They’re going to check out your blog, your Twitter page, your LinkedIn profile. If you’re currently representing a company online in some capacity, they’ll likely have a look at that too.

Oh, and if you currently have a job? Take care with posting your interest in new roles online lest your current employers be listening. It’s amazing, but it happens. And it doesn’t make anyone look very good at all.

Have a good look at your avatar, bios, the tone and tenor of your posts and content. There’s no question that personal and professional collide online, but that can be good or bad. How would you feel about what you see there if you were the one deciding whether or not to interview you?

5. Culture fit is everything.

You can learn skills or technologies. You can get an education around processes or best practices. But you can’t really teach personality, work ethic, or values if they aren’t already there.

The job seeking process – and the recruiting process – is as much about finding an alignment of ideals and mindset as anything else (at least it is for us). Sure you’ve got to be qualified, but finding a company that suits your personality and attitude is really key, and companies want to find people that feel like they fit. That doesn’t mean hiring clones, but instead finding people with similar values that can grow and adapt with the organization and the people within it.

You can be the most qualified person on the roster but be a disconnected fit from a culture standpoint, and that’s okay. Social media can help both employers and job seekers in that regard; you can take a peek at the companies you’re looking at to see how you feel about their online representation, interaction, and presence. They in turn can get a feel for whether your personal and professional online personalities mesh well with what they’re all about, enough to want to bring you in the door for a closer look.

On that note, social media is a great door opener, but it’ll never replace the in-person interview entirely. There’s plenty we get through non-verbal communication and interactions that just can’t be diagnosed through a computer screen. Keep that in mind as you’re out there looking.

What Would You Add?

If you’re looking for a social media gig, what’s new about the process from how it used to be? What’s the same? What are you finding the most challenging, interesting, or helpful? What would you tell employers about improving their processes?

And if you’re hiring, what are the challenges and opportunities you’re finding as a result of social media? Is it helping, hindering, or both? What advice would you have for those on the job market?

Look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

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A post from Brass Tack Thinking
5 Reminders For Social Media Job Candidates

Working on Twitter all day. Getting paid to blog. Being a brand advocate, creating cool promotions, engaging with your customers all over the web. Getting a few moments in the weird limelight that is the microburst of internet fame. Speaking at conferences, hobnobbing at events.

But here’s what you don’t always think about before you lust after that gig.

You’re now a representative of that brand, publicly. The lines start to blur between what’s personal and what’s professional, and all the disclaimers in the world won’t always mean that you can or should post whatever’s on your mind. The personal and professional profiles you keep might be and feel physically separate, but Google doesn’t know the difference, and sometimes, neither do your customers.

You need to make conscious choices online about how you interact, what you post, and how you marry your individuality and personality with your professional reputation and obligations. They’re inextricably tied and related to one another, and if that’s your career choice, you’re likely going to have to make some sacrifices on the personal front in order to maintain a professional persona that’s appropriate for your work. It’s just part of the gig.

Your ego and hunger for the spotlight will hit reality speedbumps when they have to give way in the face of projects, professional objectives, company systems (or policies, even) or collaborative, team efforts. If you think it’s about being a social media rockstar, think again. The real work – the stuff that’s driving your business – has very little to do with the fleeting, superficial world that is internet fame or schmoozing at the parties.

You’re going to have to let go of the idea that your Twitter following is what makes you, and get comfortable with the idea that your business acumen and success are what you’ll be measured against. Social media is just the vehicle. What you’re accountable for is the success of the business and your performance on the projects that matter. Not all of it will be sexy. The CEO can’t and won’t cash a check against how many “likes” you have on your latest blog post. And while your Facebook fans might be important to you, they’re not the ones that pay your salary or determine your long-term value to the business.

My job is as a business woman, not a social media guru.  Community is my focus, and customer loyalty and business growth are my goals. Social media is just one way that I get there. I build strategy full of measurable objectives that takes more than a few fluffy words on a piece of paper. I execute projects, work long hours (the internet doesn’t sleep very well), get my hands dirty, find things that aren’t working and fix them. Driving business through awareness, business and relationship development, and loyalty is what I’m held accountable for, and metrics prove whether or not I’ve performed.

Don’t misunderstand: I love my job. I love what I do. But it’s not cake. It’s challenging. It’s real work, not just sitting on the internet all day. It’s every bit of a professional commitment as many of the jobs I’ve held in the past, probably even more so.

So, are you sure that social media job is what you think it is? Are you still hoping it’s just fun on Twitter and Facebook all day? Or are you ready to step up to it as a professional?

image credit: kennymatic

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Are You Sure You Want That Social Media Job?

The quick, hard truth: your interest in social media isn’t enough. It’s important and we’ll talk about that below, but it alone is not enough to qualify you for a professional position (unless the company hiring for it doesn’t have a clue.)

I’ve hired several people for social media positions to date, so I can at least tell you what’s worked in my experience, and what I’m looking for when I recruit. Here are a few things you need to be armed with in order to put your best foot forward for a job involving social media responsibilities:

Strong Communication Skills

At the heart of any social media gig is the ability to communicate with people. Not in marketing terms, but in person-to-person terms. If you cannot write well and speak articulately, you can forget it. Here, successful experience in sales or client and customer service is helpful, or another position where you’ve had to put communication skills in play on a regular basis.

This also includes demonstrated experience working well and collaborating with colleagues; these roles have a heavy teamwork component and are often working across several other departments in the organization. Point to examples where you’ve worked well within a team,  or led one through a project (and what you learned).

How do you know if you’re any good at this? Ask people to read your writing. Talk to friends and  colleagues and have them give you feedback about your communication skills, and where you can improve. (For instance, I know I tend to talk too fast when I’m excited, and I fling heavy vocabulary sometimes when simple words would do, but my strength is in clarity.)

Transferrable Knowledge

Because social media positions are still emerging, it’s likely that you haven’t held a specific social media job before the one you’re vying for. And that’s okay, but you need to learn to translate your experience and relate what you’ve done with what you’re hoping to do.

If you’re a marketer or a PR pro, you’ll need to emphasize your understanding of how people use and consume media, and how companies can best connect with their customers online. If you have a sales or customer service background, you’ll want to look at how your ability to solve problems and establish rapport with people offline could translate into an online environment. If you’ve come from a more technical background, you’ll need to demonstrate your project management and collaboration successes, and probably work harder to show that you have communication chops and people skills.

Changing career industries has always been about taking foundational skills and attributes and applying them to different roles. This is the same thing, so you’ll want to put some thought into the similarities between what you’re doing now, and the role you’d like to land. Build and display your resume accordingly.

Professional Experience

I can’t emphasize this enough, and I talked about it at length over here.

You need to have an idea of what it’s like to work in a professional environment. I know there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, the serious positions out there upon which you can build a career need the perspective and experience that comes with having a few business skills under your belt.

That doesn’t mean it has to be an office: you may have learned a thing or two about business behind the bar (I learned a bit about bookkeeping, for example, and the challenges of hiring and keeping good talent). But if you’re hoping to land a gig leading a cool company’s social media strategy, they’re going to want you to have some demonstrable experience working in a business environment before they’re going to trust you with such a public, visible, and emerging part of their business.

Demonstrated Work Ethic

Part of the hitch with social media gigs is that they’re just not 9-5 propositions. And it takes a certain kind of person that’s willing to take on a role that’s going to require some extended hours, as well as an internal (and perhaps external) leadership role.

Social media folks will have some work ahead of them in terms of establishing some professional standards for their role, as well as expectations with their management and colleagues. They’ll need to be building in new measurement and performance metrics that help the company see what’s working and what’s not. They’ll end up doing a good deal of negotiation, education (both internally and externally), and outlining business cases for their undertakings.

If it’s for a company that’s serious about social media, it’s not going to be a fluffy job. It’s hard work in an emerging field, which means that you’re putting yourself under scrutiny, and likely doing the work of more than one person while you help build a business case for roles like this.

Social Media Experience

Yes, you need it. You might not have it as part of your job right now, but don’t think you’re going to get a gig without it.

And that means a heck of a lot more than having a Facebook page (because that’s just not special in itself). If you have your eye on social media jobs, you’d better start looking at social media through a business lens. Do you have a blog or a Posterous where you’re exploring how to use it to share ideas? Do you have a Twitter account that you’ve used to establish relationships, and can you point to tangible results from that? Have you participated in online communities that interest you to learn about their operation, culture, and nuance?

Don’t expect that companies are going to invest their money in helping you learn social media. You have to do some extra-curricular studying of your own to earn the consideration. That’s the nature of wanting a career in something new. You have to spend your own time learning in order to convince someone you’re a good hiring risk.

Educational Focus

Here’s where I break from the pack: I, personally, don’t care about your degree, and I’ve never hired a person based on that prerequisite. I don’t care where you got it or what it’s in. (I have a secret about my college education that I’ll tell you in a post tomorrow).

In my 15+ years of work experience, the only places I’ve seen specific degrees matter a lot are in technical or highly specialized jobs like medicine, engineering, or law. In most other cases, the most adept professionals I’ve found have a consistent set of skills and attributes that are completely independent from the degree they have (if they have one at all). One of the best marketing people I know has a degree in botany.

Realistically, some companies are going to care. Those aren’t the companies I want to work for, because they’re focusing on past decisions instead of earned skills and potential. But it’s up to you to decide how you’ll handle this bit. If they’re asking for a marketing degree and you don’t have one, you’ll have a job on your hands to explain why your experience and results translate and might matter more.

More Thoughts?

I’d love to hear from those of you that either hold social media positions, or have hired for them, and what I’m missing. Share your experience with the droves of folks out there hoping that their next job is something in this realm.

If we have hope that social media has a legitimate place in the business world forever more, we’d better be prepared to present ourselves as professionals deserving of leading the charge.

What say you?

image credit: Nevada Tumbleweed

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Earning Your Stripes for a Social Media Job