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Remember The Best Job in the World: Going Viral from last January? To refresh you on the details, the job involved hanging out on islands of Australia's Great Barrier Reef and talking about it on various social media sites for a huge paycheck. After a long and well-publicized campaign to find the right person for this dream job, the post has finally been filled.
The lucky job winner was Ben Southall, of Great Britain, according to MSNBC. The CEO of Tourism Queensland was quoted on National Public Radio saying that the job and job hunt was basically about creating a publicity campaign where the candidates would create a lot of interest in the vacation possibilities of the islands of the Great Barrier Reef through their online lives.
There were over 30,000 applicants for the job. Some had as many as 80,000 online followers. That's a lot of people talking and thinking and dreaming about a vacation location down under.
The interesting part of this story for me has always been the way the job posting, job search, and hiring of a winning candidate went viral. It's taken everything about the web, social media, social networking, and the Internet and used it brilliantly to achieve something that would have cost millions of dollars to do in a traditional way.
The Murphy-Goode Winery took a page from the Tourism Queensland playbook. On Craigslist recently, they advertised a social media guru job paying $10,000 a month for someone who will use social media tools to talk about vineyards, wine tastings, and winemaking.
The Murphy-Goode Winery isn't being quite so brilliant about the job hunt campaign as Tourism Queensland was, but think about the implications of what they are offering. They are willing to pay $10,000 a month, plus accomodations and expenses, to someone who can run a social media marketing campaign for them. They are advertising the job using the words "social media guru."
What exactly is a social media guru?
Erica OGrady says No, Having A Blog Does NOT Make You A Social Media Guru.
The problem is - Social Media is NOT about technology or Web 2.0 applications. The first question a potential client usually asks me is “What is Social Media?”. Here’s the answer I always give.
Social Media is Word-of-Mouth or Community Based Marketing that leverages technology to enable conversation.
Erica mentions that social media leverages technology. So Facebook, Twitter, websites and blogs are the tools of the social media guru, but knowledge of the tools doesn't make you a social media guru.
Even so, it seems there are many people who can use the tools who are proclaiming themselves social media gurus based on only that skill set. Paychecks like the ones I've mentioned here are bound to bring out the posers.
It you are familiar with the BlogHer community, I'm sure you are starting to think about Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits can Use Social Media right about now. She's shown us time and again how to use social media to raise awareness, money, and take social action. If anybody is qualified to use the term social media guru, it's Beth.
BlogHers also know Tara Hunt from Horse Pig Cow. Tara talks about building community and "the participatory web." She just published a book on this topic called The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business. Here's an example of her thinking in Whuffie Math.
Another name to know is Laura Fitton from Pistachio Consulting. In an article called Marketing: Social media's hidden bubble at CNET, she talked about the difficulties businesses have in finding genuine experts in this field—people who actually understand the art of communicating with a community as opposed to a standard PR approach. Laura's blog is part of the Pistachio site.
If I wanted to transform myself into a genuine social media guru capable of bringing in the big bucks at some dream job, these are the women I would learn from. Are there others worthy of the title guru? Tell us about them.
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Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer Technology Contributing Editor
Web Teacher
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