Hiring trend: Social media– contractor?

With the economy in dire straits, it seems as though many companies are turning to hiring on social media strategists as consultants instead of full-time,  full-salary (and benefits) roles. Though this is a bitter-sweet turn of events for the social media field, it’s also a great opportunity for true pros to prove their worth, all while having the flexibility of bouncing from company to company.

Why this is good for social media: By continuing to offer positions (though they’re contract positions) it proves that companies are still willing to spend some of their limited budget on social efforts, and understand their value. By offering the position as a contract role, the company is able to save on their end by not having to pay for pesky things like benefits and contributing to your 401k.

Why this isn’t good for social media: By failing to completely integrate a team member into a brand or company, that team member (or in this case, social media strategist) isn’t given the opportunity to truly embrace the brand in a way a “full time” employee might. They’re also (potentially) seen as a much more expendable line-item in the company’s budget.

You have died of Dysentery

The Oregon Trail was right. If I lived back in the days of the “Wild West” (or, pre-internet, for this argument) I definitely would have died of Dysentery. I use the internet for EVERYTHING– including, determining the shelf life of my food.

Case in point? Tonight, I was trying to decide if this package of chicken-apple sausage I had in my fridge was still good, and didn’t know how long sausage “kept for” in the fridge. Rather than calling my mom and bugging her with the mundane question, I hopped online and entered my exact question in Google. (Yes, there was a date printed on the side, but the package was frozen at one point and I wanted to know how long I had from when it was thawed and opened… you get the point. I’m a germaphob, and totally wouldn’t have made it out in “the wild”).

The results were fantastic. First result? A sausage making site. Second result? USDA. Third result? Wiki Answers (look! someone had the EXACT SAME question!) For most online users, performing mundane online searches is something that we do day in and day out. For, me, I “Google” things so frequently, I honestly couldn’t begin to quantify the number of searches I do in one day. I have to know everything. But what impressed me was how advanced and socially oriented search tools are becoming.

Twitter and Hitler

Twitter and Hitler– an unlikely duo, but recently both were featured in an online, viral spoof showcasing

user’s dedication to the service, and, frustrations with the continual outages. (BTW, you should definitely watch the spoof– it’s pretty funny).

As a regular user of Twitter (though hardly a power user like many) I too, understand the frustration of not being able to Tweet the mundane on demand.

But it makes me wonder: do we often take for granted the free services the online world provides? Recently, gmail was hit hard by a group of users, frustrated by their outage for over two hours. Granted many people hang their livelihood on free services like gmail, Yahoo! Messenger, ebay, and yes, even Twitter, but does it make sense? I always believed that the adage of “you get what you pay for” rings true– so if you’re paying nothing and still getting something, why become anything but irked when you run into an outage? Irate gets you nowhere.

From Rammikin

If you’re going to expect to make money off of something that costs you nothing, what is the acceptable level of service that you should receive? However, if we were talking paid services, then, by all means, tweet your heart out. (Irony is: many of the gmail outage tweets also reference twitter’s outage. At what point does the brand equity dissipate and users start to associate the “Great Gmail outage” not with Google’s reliable service, but Twitter’s unreliable product?)