There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere right now about hiring social media managers – what the roles and responsibilities should be and how much current community managers and socmed managers are being paid. We have to tell ya, what we’re seeing is not encouraging.

Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side (Amber Naslund)
Hiring For Social Media: Good Moves (Amber Naslund)

Amber’s two posts frame this issue quite nicely, I think.  A social media manager role is really important for many reasons and she does a good job of illustrating why that is by looking at good and bad job descriptions.

Forum One also recently published their Online Community and Social Media Compensation Survey 2009.  This does not apply to associations and nonprofits only, but regardless, the results are underwhelming to say the least.  Here are three posts explaining why.  The titles speak for themselves, but do click through to get the scoop.

So, What Do Community Managers Make? (Tom Humbarger)
Social Media Salary Report: Ladies, It’s Not Pretty (Maggie McGary)
Is There a Disconnect Between Social Media Job Descriptions and Compensation? (Tom Humbarger)

Needless to say, this whole sorry situation is just underlined by the fact that by the time my Associations Now interview  on 3 new community managers was printed, 2 out of the 3 had moved on to greener pastures.  Lynn Morton talked about this issue in her post Community Managers Fly the Coup!   I can tell you more about the specifics regarding my two interviewees, and in fact Maggie McGary and I will be doing a session at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference in March about this topic, but the bottom line is that it appears from all of this that social media positions are not being taken seriously and not being integrated properly to the structure of the organization as a whole.

I know several social media managers who are actually quite happy in their roles – and every single one of them is supported by the organization they work for.  We also work with some great associations who are taking all the baby steps – and leaps of faith – they need to work through to build their organizational capacity to do this work.  They all know consultants like us can help them define and prioritize their issues, but we can’t do the work for them. 

So what’s going on here?  Are some organizations just not ready to do what it takes?  What’s really behind the disconnect? 

Amber’s take:

“Based on all the reading I did and evaluation of some of these job descriptions, there is one key thing that jumped out at me, over and over: Companies still don’t know why they need or want social media.

This is partially due to the nascence of the industry, partly due to the need for more and better education on tool-agnostic social media strategy (h/t Jay Baehr), and partly due to our pervasive human desire for the latest and greatest shortcut to awesomeness. Companies are in a big, fat hurry to put social media in the mix, but they’re looking at it tactically, not strategically. Throw a person at it, and check it off the list.”

Thoughts?