Career: The Balanced Social Media Manager

This post is about a critical professional point that every social media manager must be acquainted with. It is about the intersection of earned and paid media.

Source: BizzareComics

Recently, I was interviewed by an agency in UK for the post of a social media manager with their client. The board was represented by the digitally sound insiders. At some point of time, an interviewer simply asked ‘what do you think about expanding an earned media base to a paid one?’ – Honestly, the question gave me a second’s goose bump. All these 6+ years of my social media professional life, it was always about the earned media, the engagement, and the two-way flow of communication, dialogue and lots of conversations. Suddenly my so creative social-media savvy mind started freaking out; I took a good pause thinking of uttering paid techniques. And that pause obviously just sent the negative vibes without my realisation; and then I knew that it was the point – the tipping point to rejection!

We, social media managers, are generally the guys good at earned media and at the same point of time we neglect the paid media to demand’s content. We always love to keep a safe distance from media planning and buying. But with the growing social media beard of maturity, a social media manager cannot afford to neglect the basic media planning/buying shaving kit of the paid media. [Getting money (budget) from your parents (boss) is obviously another issue here].

The point, I want to cite here, is about the intersection of earned and paid media that a social media professional must be versed in. Along with his earned media skills he must sharpen his paid media part as well. We all know what Facebook has become in its matured stage than it used to be (for the brands earlier). Enough of earned media format in Facebook, now it is into making brands pay as it intended to. This is just an example; in a near future all the major social platforms will definitely follow the footsteps of FB. And there might be a day when we might even be paying for each of our Linkedin posts to get published.

ROI is another part that favoured my reaserch stressing on the paid media. I asked 27 of Indian and around 13 of international social media manager friends/contacts one single question over the past 2 months - "Attribution of paid media towards the ROI measurement is higher than earned one or not?" And interestingly, more than 73% of them said 'YES'. When there's a proper monetary value attached to an entity, the tendency and potentiality to measure the ROI is much better. That's a practical stuff!

Source: Marketoonist

So, to equip and to mould into the shape of the future (in other words – to save his job), a social media manager must at-least possess some of the attributes of that of a digital media and/or advertising manager. Knowing how FB power editor or Twitter promoted posts work won’t help; he must broaden his horizon beyond social to all the possible digital levels.



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