If you're a social media manager—one of the hottest new jobs in marketing—chances are you tweet about your company from the grocery store, monitor Facebook pages during the weekend and even sleep with your smartphone on the pillow next to you.
“Social media is like New York City—it never sleeps,” said Petra Neiger, senior manager-social media marketing at Cisco Systems. “With other communications—white papers, case studies, etc.—you are not on the clock anymore when you complete your deliverables. With social media, even when you stop talking, people are still speaking. People often underestimate the commitment it takes to do social media.”
Neiger has had the senior manager-social media marketing title for just over a year, but she has been doing social media activities at Cisco for several years. Like other companies, Cisco has recently rolled out a formal social media marketing department and created dozens of social media jobs.
At some companies—such as tech giant IBM Corp.—there are thousands of social media practitioners. At others—like JDA Software—there is a one-person social media department.
And while there is little current research reflecting the number of social media manager jobs in the industry, the Social Media Marketing group on LinkedIn has more than 186,000 members, and the Twitter group @socialmediajobs has more than 15,000 followers.
To find out more about what social media managers do, BtoB spoke at length with three of these professionals.
Cindy Kim, director of marketing and social media at supply chain software company JDA Software, is a social media department unto herself. She joined the company last year as director of marketing and added the social media title in October.
“We really didn't have any social media in place prior to October,” Kim said.
Her boss, Heather Loisel, senior VP-worldwide marketing, joined JDA Software in May 2010 from SAP with a mandate to create more of a social business strategy at the company, Kim said.
“My job is to be the person governing social media policy and brand reputation, and working with the responsible groups to make sure none of the policies or the brand usage is being violated,” Kim said. “I also educate the entire organization on what the shift [to social media] means to them and empower these guys to go out and participate in social media.”
For example, last month JDA's social media policy was approved by the CEO, and Kim led an education program for JDA's global marketing team of 33 people. The physical training event, complemented by a live webcast, featured demos on how to use Facebook, Slideshare, Twitter and other tools to communicate with customers and prospects.
“Last October, our marketing team didn't understand social media,” Kim said. “They said, "We don't have the bandwidth for it.' Now, probably close to 80% of our marketing team is on social media. That is tremendous in just six to seven months.”
Kim keeps the marketing team informed about social media by sending out daily tweets, sharing best practices and flagging research papers on social media. She also shares metrics with the executive team to show the effectiveness of the company's social media efforts.
“In terms of executive buy-in, you have to have a champion who sits at the table,” Kim said. “Heather came in, and she understood the value of social media and established goals for JDA. So our social media philosophy was tied to business goals; then, we started to execute on those goals.”PETRA NEIGER, CISCO SYSTEMS
Petra Neiger, who has been at Cisco since 2007, was previously digital marketing strategist at the company. In that role, she became immersed in social media activities as she helped launch Web 2.0 marketing campaigns.
Cisco's global social media marketing group was formally launched about 18 months ago as one of three social media hubs supporting other business units. The other two hubs are social media communications and social media services. All three hubs are coordinated through a social media advisory council.
“In my job, my main focus is what I call "enablement'—helping drive adoption internally, and educating and enabling our employees to feel comfortable participating in social media,” Neiger said.
To do this, she shares best practices and case studies, develops content about social media for Cisco's internal community site, and leads a monthly roundtable discussion in which outside experts talk about effective social media strategies. Another big part of her job is cross-training different functions within Cisco to spread social media expertise.
“Even though you have someone called a "social media manager,' it is a team effort—especially in a b2b environment where you have product lines that require specialized skill sets,” Neiger said. “Your social media managers can monitor posts; but, when it comes to having meaningful conversations [with customers and pros- pects] that require you to really understand the product or solutions, you need to have people in the background that can talk about the subject matter or solutions.”
Neiger has her own blog, where she writes about social media marketing strategies, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
To keep up with trends, she browses her social media feeds every morning when she gets up, throughout the day at work and in her spare time—like when she's standing in line at a store or right before yoga class. She also meets with social media vendors to find out about the latest technologies, and she monitors other industries outside the tech space.
“For example, we are looking at some consumer companies to see if there is anything we can learn from them,” she said. “One thing we're seeing is "gamification,' which we did last year with Cisco myPlanNet [a simulation game promoted on Facebook and Twitter].”DELPHINE REMY-BOUTANG, IBM SOFTWARE
Delphine Remy-Boutang, worldwide digital and social media manager for IBM Software, has been at IBM for 11 years and in her current job for three.
Her role is to support IBM's social media strategy in digital marketing activities around the globe, working with social media managers in other business divisions and regions. She declined to say how many social media managers IBM employs, but noted that the company has been active in social media since 1997.
In the early days of the Internet, IBM introduced social tools internally to facilitate employee collaboration and also sent people out on the Web to find out what was being said about the company, the precursor to social media monitoring.
Today, almost 200,000 IBM employees have Facebook pages (nearly half of its global workforce), 25,000 have Twitter accounts and more than 17,000 maintain blogs.
“We have IBMers active in the social Web who are part of the conversation on behalf of IBM,” Remy-Boutang said. “Our employees are publishers. When you go to our site [www.ibm.com/software], you see IBMers as your first experience. You see pictures of IBMers and have the option to connect with them. It's all about humanizing the Web.”
A big part of Remy-Boutang's job is training IBM employees in effective uses of social media to engage customers and prospects.
“We have conference calls, workshops, face-to-face meetings, webcasts and our own internal tools,” she said.
For example, her social media team trains IBM Software reps on effective ways to share data with customers and prospects using Twitter, LinkedIn, Q&As (on the website) and other social media networks that are popular in different countries, such as Viadeo in France and Xing in Germany.
“The guidance is to always add value before engaging, such as suggesting links to white papers,” Remy-Boutang said.
She also works with IBM's digital marketing teams around the globe on best practices in social media. To keep up on the latest trends in social media, she uses Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and does a lot of reading about social media, which she shares with her global teams.
“I have my tweets and I lead by example, to show what we should be doing,” she said.
