Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
time community engagement
Busy month. Just wrapped up my first of many tweetups here in the valley; and then #socialgulch. I wasn’t sure what to expect with a name like that. But I had a phenomenal time and ran into some really awesome people and good friends like Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Kristie Wells, Chris Heuer, John Furrier and Shel Israel. I also met some really good peeps like Tina Tui, Barak Hachamov & Ilana Gurman from My6sense, Priscilla Scala, Emily Nelson, Jeff Widman to name a few… and, I finally met Jennifer Leggio in person. We have been friends on Twitter for over a year and we both live in San Jose. Here is a full list of everyone who was invited to the party. Voce Communications, PeopleBrowsr, JS-Kit and FutureWorks all sponsored the event.
I had a short yet interesting twitter discussion the other day with Jim Durbin, a social media recruiter, about social media and commissions. It then evolved into a brief discussion about the different roles in social media. I think Jim was perhaps insinuating that I thought social media was just about community management. It’s not.
At the core, social media is about a direct relationship-conversation-engagement-dialogue-poke-nudge-reciprocal-follow between a brand and a consumer. In my mind which has been wrong many times, community management serves as the execution arm of social media in most cases. I am probably oversimplifying it a bit but I think you catch my drift.
Yesterday, word came out that Best Buy was going to leverage the collective knowledge of the community to help write a job description for a Sr. Manager, Emerging Media Marketing. Best Buy CMO Barry Judge is also asking those who want to contribute to post the job description on the Best Buy Ideas Exchange; where other community members can vote it up or down.
This has been an excellent exercise because I think they want to hire someone kinda like me; or at least someone with similar skill sets. Plus, my LinkedIn profile is a little slim so I will probably add many of the below elements to it later.
I wonder what exactly that budget will be spent on.
Today, Mashable highlighted a Forrester report that forecasts budget spend in social media to “grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums.”
The report doesn’t go into specifics on what exactly that money will be spent on; and whether the investment will be used to talk AT the conversation, IN the conversation, or both.
