In this article we will discuss about the various roles of social media. Social media is actually about a direct relationship, conversation, engagement etc between a consumer and a brand.
There are many job functions that fit beneath the social media center of responsibility like:
• Social Media Strategist: The job of this person is to define a global strategy that includes corporate blogs, training, Youtube, community applications and capabilities etc. They have to provide guidance to other marketing groups and to managers who want to employ a social media program. They may help execute in some cases.
• Social Media Manager: This is a hybrid role; and may define strategy as well as execute. They own marketing campaigns and probably manage an agency or vendor. They may also be in charge of buying media within social media channels like Facebook, Digg, etc. They may work closely with community managers to leverage/integrate the conversational elements into each campaign.
• Community Manager: They manage an editorial calendar for a twitter account, a community/ blog and many third party social channels. They also manage a social listening platform such as Radian6 and filtering conversations to others in the business. They may organize in person events to get feedback from the community sometimes. Community Manager is the face of the brand.
• Public Relations: PR serves as a pivotal role in social media in many organizations. They usually use twitter and blog. They also have relationships with external bloggers; and they may attempt to seed stories to influencers.
• Social Media Metrics: This person is responsible to define a social media metrics framework both on and off domain and to report the results back up to management. About a given campaign, they may even make specific data driven recommendations. Metrics may be the responsibility of any of the above positions in some organizations.
• Privacy/Security: There position is important and they work closely with legal. We called them the Paranoids at Yahoo. They interested to protect the privacy of corporate assets and also they ensure that marketing organizations abide by privacy laws on the Internet.
• Ad Sales: If this person is selling ad space at Yahoo, Digg or anywhere then they will need to understand the dynamics of the communities they represent fully, that would require some level of participation.
• Customer Support: There may or may not be a dedicated resource from the customer support group depending on the size of the organization that manages social media opportunities. The role would be to search opportunities on the web which may run a sour situation into a sweet one and delight the customers on the web.
• Employees: Some companies empower their employees to participate in social media on behalf of the company. This participation is done above.
So, these are all the roles of Social Media in any enterprise.