Cameron Olthuis

There’s a great discussion going on about the different questions you should ask before taking on a social media or community manager type role within a company. I’ve been contacted several times in the last few months by recruiters for exactly these types of positions so I thought I could chime in with my experiences.

Just about all of these companies and recruiters I’ve talked are fairly inexperienced with social media. When it comes to engaging people in social media they really don’t have a crystal clear understanding of what it’s all about and even the reasons why it is so important. So you should expect to do a fair amount of educating up front. Not that that is a bad thing as it gives you the perception as a expert or thought leader in your industry.

The other thing that I’ve noticed, which goes hand-in-hand, is that they don’t know the right questions to ask in order to find out if you really are the best person for the role they’re looking to fill. That’s why you should be ready with these types of questions.

Here is the list of questions from James Durbin.

Jeremiah Owyang chimes in with some additional questions as well.

My additions
How do you envision this role?
Where do you see the value in the position and with social media in general?
What role will community feedback play in shaping the future of your business?
How transparent are you willing to be?
Are you willing to let consumer have some control over your brand? If so, how much?
How authentic will these conversations be?
What outcomes are you expecting?
How much influence will I have on the future direction of your website?
How much influence will I have on the online marketing strategies?

Do you like hot sauce? If so, read on…

One of my friends here in San Diego has started a new hot sauce company called Scorpion Bay. He gave me a few bottles a couple weeks ago and man is this stuff good, and I’m not just saying that either. My favorite flavor is the Hotacado, which is an avocado hot sauce. It works really good as a marinade for grilled chicken.

Unfortunately for you hot sauce lovers he doesn’t have a shopping cart on his site so you can’t order anything yet. Also, I was not paid for this post or anything, unless you count the hot sauce I’m eating right now.

Jeremiah Owyang has a great post this morning on the need for evolution on corporate websites.

We’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

Great point! You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t sick of that. This is precisely the reason that consumers don’t use corporate websites to research products. They’re only getting one side of the story, the marketing speak. What we really want to hear is both sides of the story. We want to hear the real story from consumers who have hands on experience with the product so we can truly find out what the product is really like. The endless amounts of user generated product review sites and blogs are testament to this.

Jeremiah goes on to make several suggestions, one of them being for corporate sites to allow customer feedback right on the site.

A savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism.

While I agree that it would be great to have the non-biased product reviews on the corporate site, I don’t think that quite solves the problem. That’s because we don’t and can’t trust the corporations to be truly transparent. To think that a company will allow unfiltered negative reviews along side their products is absurd. That’s why third party social review sites are here to stay.

Instead I think these corporations would be better severed to be active on the social review and other social media sites. They should be interacting with the consumers to recognize their faults, improve their products, right their wrongs, and build consumer trust in the process. As Jeremiah points out, this can also be done on community sites that are setup by these companies, like Dell’s IdeaStorm.

Do you have any other ideas how corporate websites can improve?

If you’re from San Diego and you’re into the tech/web scene at all then you should definitely take a look at BarCamp San Diego. It’s happening next weekend (June 2 - 3, 2007 1pm on Saturday through 5pm Sunday) and will be a great event for networking, learning and sharing with others.

If you’ve never heard of BarCamp before then take a look at the Wikipedia page to learn what it is and what it stands for. Check out the official BarCamp San Diego page for information on the event happening here next weekend. I’m going to give a little mini-presentation on social media marketing and I hope to see you there.

A couple months ago my good friend Greg Hartnett, who has a daughter of his own, sent me an awesome book about raising daughters.

The book is called Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters and is about building relationships with your daughter(s) to help shape her life so she grows up healthy, happy and responsible. The book is very good and I’d recommend it to any dad that has daughters. I’m dreading those teenage-years because I know payback is a bitch so this book had a lot of great advice for me. Hopefully I can raise my daughters to be strong and stay away from guys like me.

Since Greg was very generous by sending me this book I want to pay-it-forward. I am going to send the first 3 dads with daughters that contact me a free copy.

Thanks again Greg!

** Update: Sorry folks. I should have mentioned this earlier but the three copies are long gone. Thanks.