As social media becomes an integral part of how companies communicate and market themselves, a new breed of jobs is being established to create, manage and operate social media programs and activity.
So far, we’ve seen positions such as community managers, community evangelists and Twitter specialists. There have also been suggestions for chief social media officers, who would be part of senior management.
In a blog post, Rohit Bhargava raises the idea of a new position: Content Curator. Bhargava suggests that a content curator would be part of corporate communications team, and be responsible for “continually” identifying, grouping, organizing and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.
“The most important component of this job is the word “continually”, ” he said. “In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. If you look at how many individuals are currently using their Twitter account to highlight interesting bits of content they locate or how del.icio.us users have tagged and shared content on that site for years, you’ll understand that this idea has been steadily growing organically.”
In theory, a content curator makes a lot of sense. However, I think it could take awhile before these positions exist given many companies are still trying to get a handle on what to do with social media and how social media programs should be run. As a result, they’re are going to be cautious in terms of staffing up.
Tags: content curator, Social Media
To be useful and to catch on, it seems like we need a definite answer to the question “What are the actions that a company might take as a result of having a Content Curator?”
But before we even get there, I’d be interested to know what tools are currently available for someone in a curator role right now – how would a curator provide a snapshot to their senior management that accurately reflected the current state, and more importantly the ongoing trends… “389 people retweeted our most recent press release and 43 people blogged about it” is pretty basic stuff now, but digging deeper into the trends… WHO blogged this and what else have they blogged about in the past, for instance.
Adina Levin wrote an interesting piece on synchronic and diachronic streams a couple of days ago. Her main point was that it is at least equally important to monitor conversations that go on over a period of time (versus Twitter which tends to be more synchronous). I pointed out that there is no way to persist a conversation over time in the way that was done in previous time through differing genres (my example was newspapers and pamphleteers).
The ability to curate is potentially a massive task. There really needs to be a set of tools that aids in the curation process. Otherwise you’re hiring someone with a very difficult task.