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?

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?

So according to MyBlogLog social media optimizers are spammers.

Tonight they introduced tagging and a bunch of related features, one of them being a way to tag spammers…

Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe.

That’s a pretty low-blow for those of us social media marketers that DO NOT spam. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just use the word ’spammer’ as the actual tag instead of giving us another black eye. It’s hard enough distancing ourselves from the word ’spam’ as it is.

People that spam social media are not social media optimizers, they are spammers, simple as that.

The ironic thing is MyBlogLog recently hired their own community manager, which is somewhat equivalent to a social media marketer.

After thinking a lot about my post about Digg yesterday and following the story from all angles, I have come to a couple of conclusions (or are they theories?).

1. Perhaps some of the stories are being buried based on an algorithm to prevent collusion. It seems that there are some common traits for some of the stories that are mysteriously disappearing. They are being dugg up really fast and they have many of the same people (friends) digging each story.

The problem with this is that Digg seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why is there a friend feature on Digg if they don’t want friends digging each other’s submissions? How can they tell what the users true intent is? How many stories are perfectly legitimate that are getting deleted?

2. Digg needs to be completely transparent on this issue. If they want to bury stories for one reason or another that’s fine, but they need to stop lying about it and tell the community the truth.

Is there an algorithm to prevent collusion or is Digg burying stories based on their own disgressions and interests? Is this some kind of vendetta against marketers or is that a tin-foil hat on my head?

After some great detective work, Neil broke the story this morning that Digg is censoring content internally by burying stories before they reach the homepage.

You probably think users buried the story, but it actually was one of the Digg employees who buried it or an algorithm that is targeting specific content topics/sites. If you don’t believe me, here is a document that contains 10,000 buries from that day and none of them seem to be buries for the “I’m in like with You” story

I’ve suspected that Digg has been censoring content internally now for quite some time. I’ve seen many great stories get buried just before reaching the homepage with no evidence of the community burying them. The problem is that I’ve never had proof before.

When this issue has been raised in the past Digg claims the reason is that Digg Spy doesn’t show all activity, only a small sample. Well, now there is proof with this URL that shows the last 10,000 buries on the site. If you have a submission that has been buried and you check that URL and see no buries then chances are you’ve been censored by Digg.

So why is this a big deal? Well because the Digg model is supposedly based on a non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. Meaning the community is supposed to dictate what does and doesn’t reach the homepage, not Digg itself.

Is this more evidence that Digg has jumped the shark?