Okay - that title isn't my idea, rather a client who is tired of hearing the words"social media."  It's not that he doesn't believe in the power of social, it's that he believes we have reached a point where social is the new normal.

Public Relations, Marketing, Customer Service, Recruiting and Sales should be using social media as part of their skillsets, and not counting on someone to do the work individually.  I agree, which is why in the last year I've done a lot more integrated marketing than social media marketing.

One, it sells better.  Two, it allows me to filter with more ease.  Hiring experience in an industry is always easier than hiring a skillset.  Three, it keeps the salaries high, as they are based on previous salaries, and not some amorphous range that differs at each company.

Of course, I agree with the sentiment because I've always practiced it.  It might be strange for the social media headhunter to say such things, but the terms applies as much to my methods as my placements. 

So this year - let's all agree that we'll say integrated marketing or integrated communications instead of social media.  And remember, "engagement" and "transparency" are right out.  They might be benefits, but no company pays for them anymore.

I admit it.  Google's Sitewiki and Facebook's new search features scare me.  If they become fully realized, I'll be busier than a one-armed paper hanger in a, well - I'll be busy.  And yet, that work is far off enough that it doesn't feel that pressing.  Surely we'll have time to catch up? No.  If you fall behind in the next two years, it's going to be very difficult to catch up, because internal alignment with social media is the new holy grail, and that always takes time.

What's funny is I've been preaching the gospel of integrated marketing, but social media headhunting is still heating up for community management and copywriting.  As you can imagine, a lot of people contact me hoping to break into the social media field.  I am terribly sorry, but I simply don't have time to reach out to all of you, and to be honest, there's not much I can do for you.  You don't break into the field.  You can create the position internally, but work as an intern or leaving your job to consult is not a good choice.  Your best efforts come from inside a company.  If you're taking a position, you're going to need enough authority to make decisions and make changes.  Listening and responding gets real frustrating when you can't actually help the people who are responding.

So while my little section of the job market is heating up, I still see the long-term value in being in a established position and using social media to make you more productive.  Facebook skills are great, but do they bring in more money than PPC? And what lessons can we take from PPC on how to improve your Facebook traffic?  That question is one everyone should be able to answer, and yet, I don't see much written (of course, it could be because no one wants to share their secrets). 

So in terms of skills, I'd say this - stay with your company and look for ways to effect change using social media in your current position. If you want to make a change, use social media to learn a new industry that you can port your skills over to, but don't count on online writing and responding to be your holy grail.

It doesn't pay that well.

As you might imagine, I get a lot of inquiries from folks seeking and offered social media positions.  An interesting question that has popped up lately - will taking a social media job hurt me in my career?  At first glance, this seems laughable.  Social media is cutting edge, it's hot for the media, and everyone wants in.

But what if social media is a career dead end?  I'm not suggesting social media is a fad - it's clearly part of a broader trend towards transparency, connectedness, and personal publishing.  And yet the long term social trends have little to do with the actual positions being offered.

Community manager, social media specialist (entry level), and even social media consultant are fun titles that keep you learning and connect you to a bunch of other social media types, but if you need to make a career transition, will your skills in social media transfer?  Will they get you raises? Promotions? Will someone who graduates college and takes a job in social media eventually make it to the C-Suite?

My experience is pretty relevant here.  The people I place aren't top level strategists.  Mostly I work on two kinds of positions - social media doers in the 50K-80K range, and sales, marketing, PR and technology professionals with a good background who made some inroads into social media in their current position.  A social media doer is not a position with career advancement. It's the person who executes the strategy and serves as the face of social media, but I'm always very clear this is not a stepping stone, it's position set in stone.  Lots of people want to do strategy, but few want to lay the groundwork down and get in the trenches.  I hire trenchworkers. And I hire trenchworkers with a background in marketing or PR.  It's hard to imagine a company coming to me to find a social media anything who didn't have current experience in their industry.

Which brings us back to that question.  Is social media a career risk? 

These would be my three top concerns.

1) This is a temporary position with no way to measure success.  A lot of companies are hiring people to test the social media waters, or tasking internal employees to handle the social media duties.  Far too many of these people think time invested is invested time.  If you can't talk about what you learned, and how it applies to your career, you may be in a temporary position.

2) Social Media lends itself to fluff.  If you've spoken with me, you know I mock "engagement" and "transparency" on a regular basis.  I believe in those values, but I also believe that no company is going to pay you for some engagement metric.  Those involved in that fruitless search are going to be dissatisfied, or they're going to be selling snake oil.  Engagement is an intangible benefit of social media, but companies pay for tangible benefits.  If your job is leaving comments and interacting with people on Facebook, your job just isn't that important.  Make sure you're actively engaged in solving business problems if you want to avoid this trap.  Find out how your efforts make or save money, and you'll be in good spirits.  Simply being the social media person in a company that wants to "engage" customers is a dead-end.

3) Don't get trapped on an island. One of the best benefits in social media is the networking, both in and outside of the company.  A good social media person is not a standalone division, but an integrated part of their division.  Connect all of the disparate contact points in a company (recruiting, sales, marketing, customer service, tech support, corporate communications, event planning, philanthropy) and make each one of them aware of company strengths.  Be a good networker, and you may find yourself eventually as a power broker. 

Ultimately your goal is simple.  Companies like employees that get things done.  That skill is in short supply.  If you can leverage yourself into a position where you are an effective manager of resources and a go-to person for information, then the position you hold is not as important as your value to the company.  When being recruited, look for opportunities to make decisions and hold responsibility (especially for budgets and personnel).  The career risk lies in taking a job where you don't see the future, not the position itself.

You know me and short job descriptions.  I need someone to be a social media consultant for a company. The position starts off as consulting gig, but if you do a good job, they will want you to go full time in six months.  I have a fixed rate and salary in mind.

The position is remote, but you'll have a cubicle.  It's working for a nursing provider here in St Louis, helping brand and promote the recruiting department.  The job is not posted, and it's my job to bring a slate of candidates to them (it's retained). 

What you'll do

You'll blog (regularly, and on multiple sites).

You'll monitor the online world for information on the company

You'll look for and post events in other cities.

You'll help the recruiter be the face of the company's employment, but will not be a ghostwriter.

You'll make it so the recruiter and the company are well-known in the geographical area, which means working with them to create a style of writing that agrees with both of you. 

You'll report on results. 

What I need from you.

1) Experience writing consistently in the online world

2) Experience interviewing (reporters and recruiters welcome)

3) Self-disciplined (as in examples, not, "I'm really discipline."

4) Curiousity

5) Functional use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning social networks, Google, and blogging platforms (this is typepad, but you don't need it)

6) Some background in recruiting is great, but not necessary.  Same is true for PR.

7) A desire to utilize social media for results, and not "engagement" or "conversation."  It's a metrics based world.

I can train some of what you don't know, but I'm only training the one who gets the job.  If interested, contact me at socialmediaheadhunter at the google email or using smheadhunter as a headhunter on a number of sites. 

I had the distinct pleasure of joining Michael Kelemen on the Recruiting Animal Show yesterday to talk about Facebook.  If you've never listened to the show, prepare yourself.  It's a call-in show of rowdy miscreants and the occasional unsuspecting guest, all run by the Recruiting Animal himself.  Yesterday's show had some technical difficulties, but the callers jumped in and grilled me, argued with me, and asked a lot of great questions.

There's a segment of the online recruiting world that just doesn't buy into the social media hype.  My hope is I was able to acknowledge their concerns, but also point out there is an incredible amount of value in social media for recruiting, and in the end, that value will begin to creep into even the most stalwart oldtimers.

Here's a short synopsis of what I said, and the major questions.

1) Facebook's new search update will make it possible for recruiters to finally use Facebook as a sourcing tool, but it will require recruiters to build up large networks of candidates similar to what we've done in Twitter and LinkedIn.  The current method of scrolling Facebook updates is inefficient, but with a large enough network and stream, the updates become real time knowledge for sourcing. 

This allows you to combine your personal and professional networks, as before the key was adding only professional contacts so you didn't clutter your stream with personal comments.

2) The addition of the Facebook fan box allows you to port Facebook content out to your career page, but it also allows you to divert traffic into your Facebook fan pages. The major problems with fan pages is getting to them.  The embeddable widget gives you a portal to people who like to use Facebook, and this is a major development for all Facebook marketers.

3) The change happening in internet marketing from Facebook's challenge to Google's targeted traffic will have major implications for marketing and technology recruiters.  Finding people who understand Facebook marketing, and being able to filter them, is a lucrative new niche for recruiters in those industries.

4) The changes aren't there yet, but in abotu six months, we'll start to feel them. The time to build your network in Facebook is now.  Previously, Facebook was only a messaging platform.  It is now a third site for your marketing efforts.

From the questions:
1) Yes, I recruit regularly, and have been doing so since February of last year after a short hiatus.
2) You are not required to play the games or involve yourself in silly activites.  Block or ignore those applications.
3) If you're not getting value from your Facebook friends, you have the wrong Facebook friends.  You're not going to find top executives at Chucky Cheese, and you're not going to find them if you only connect to high school ex-girlfriends.
4) That said, many salespeople and executives are connecting old business connections on Facebook, and driving large amounts of revenue their way.  If your business connections are on Facebook, consider adding them as friends.
5) If you're going to use Facebook for business, add your vanity url to your email
6) The point of social media training is to accelerate your knowledge level.  Yes, you can do it on your own, but you can also learn to play golf on your own.  Or you can take training.
7) If you aren't making money from your social networking as a recruiter, you shouldn't be using social networking as a recruiter.
8) Social media does not replace the skills of recruiting.  I would train recruiters with a bag of quarters and  a phone book before I let them use social media.
9) That said, personally, I would use my current skills over phone sourcing for sales and recruiting (and do).  That's only because I have a solid base of recruiting experience.

If you're up in Minnesota, I want to talk to you.  I have a number of positions up there for different companies (one of the reasons I haven't been blogging much), so please contact me and I'll say hello.  The experience I need is Social Media, but only with Marketing or Public Relations experience.  There just isn't much I can do for folks who want to break into social media.

And if you're in St Louis, and you're one of those folks who don't tend to go to the Social Media events but you are indeed working in Social Media, contact me confidentially - I've got some good things here in the River City coming up on deck.

I've not been a big fan of Facebook for marketing.  Facebook is a difficult beast with low clickthroughs and far more potential than ROI for the majority of marketers, and so when I'm looking for a social media expert, Facebook is about having a profile, not necessarily driving results.  Sure we've seen results, but they've tended to be as a traffic driver for traditional websites.  Lots of folks spend time on Facebook, and thus its natural you have a presence there.  Do some conversion pages - create some groups, and that's about it, unless you have the time and money for apps and contests.

Well, no more. 

Based on my own traffic stats for blogs that range from politics to marketing to fashion to small business, I see Facebook becoming an ever-increasing important aspect of a social media marketing campaign.

This article on Hitwise's estimate of Perez Hilton's traffic was the first clue.  Google typically will deliver 80% of your non Rss traffic if you optimize well, and the revelation that Facebook can outpush traffic is no small one.  You may say that Perez is a gossip, and the only people who want to read gossip are heading there from Facebook, but that's exactly the point.  Facebook is built to keep people in.  When click traffic goes outside Facebook, it's highly targeted.  Those wanting to read gossip go to Perez Hilton.  Those wanting to say, get a job, or buy a product, or watch a video, or learn about a service are also going to self-selecting to be interested.  And they'll be coming from referrals.  Currently, if you have the viral chops, you can drive traffic using your update feeds and getting people interested in joining, writing, and posting content to your pages and groups and updates.  If you have a big network, that can lead to a lot of traffic, but it's entirely based on your network (and their network).  That's some hard slogging, and tends to only work haphazardly.

But now, there's the Facebook search beta, which is rumored to be like Twitter search.  If it's executed properly, which is to say if it actually dredges up content, it could be a tremendous boost for traffic for those outside Facebook.

All of a sudden, those not in your network can find you.  Furniture designers, car enthusiasts, political causes, and job seekers can now search by brand through updates, instead of profiles.  That's huge.  It's a microcosm of what Google and Twitter do, and with the sheer traffic of Facebook, it guarantees some very hot, targeted opportunities for marketers.

I don't see a lot of people getting involved in this.  They're making a huge mistake. This is big.  Much bigger than BING, which is sending me traffic, but not nearly as much as Facebook is.  If I can almost double traffic to every site simply by improving my content to my network, imagine what you can do with a targeted marketing campaign.

It's big.  Gird your loins, and figure out how to build community on Facebook.  6 months from now, the winners will be those with networks in place.