My Dirty Little College Secret
I have a lot of people ask me where I went to school, and what I studied in order to set myself up for the career path I have now. So it’s time for me to come clean with my dirty little secret:
I don’t have a college degree.
Moreover, when I was in school? I was a music major. Flute performance, to be exact. I am, actually, a professional band nerd.
To some of you, that’s not a biggie. To others, you’re sitting there going “but how on earth do you have a successful career in social media if you don’t have a marketing degree or something?”
My career path went something like this.
I went to school, and while I was fortunate to have some of it paid for, I changed majors and didn’t graduate in four years. And after my fifth year, I couldn’t afford to continue (bartending is awesome but not quite lucrative enough for rent AND a college education). I loved music, passionately, and wanted to be in the industry but not necessarily on the stage.
I walked in the door at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and asked for a job. Any job. Entry level, unglamorous. I got a job as a development assistant in the fundraising department earning $17,000 a year. I worked hard, and I learned.
That took me through 7 years of professional fundraising roles, both in the arts and in social services. From there I was recruited by a former colleague to lead first client services, then marketing and communications at a design and architecture firm, and I did that for several years. Then I left and started my own online communications business, worked my tail off to make it work – I would have been willing to work part time at Target to pay the bills if I had to – and did. A bit more than a year later, I got hired by my then-client, Radian6.
I overcame the lack of a degree with hard work. It’s that simple, and yet not.
In my first few jobs, people asked about the degree. I addressed that discussion by saying that I didn’t complete my degree for financial reasons, but I could point to tangible professional results in the positions I’d had to date, and that I believed they illustrated my capabilities in a more practical way.
Some people listened, some didn’t. The ones that didn’t weren’t the right culture for me. And after that, people stopped asking, because my work spoke for itself. Yes, I’ve heard the “degree is proof that you can finish something” mantra, but I don’t buy it. Wouldn’t you rather know I can finish a project for you that can help build the business?
I earned the role I have today because I have a track record of results, no matter what role I was in, and when I was an employee or a consultant. Period.
But enough about me…
I’m a bit of a heretic. I’ve always defied convention just a little bit, but it’s demonstrated to me that in the career path I’ve walked, the degree wasn’t the important part.
You can do this too.
And even if you have a degree, it IS possible to make it relevant to a new career, a new industry, a new role. It’s about demonstrating how hard you can work, what results you’ve achieved (and what you learned when you missed the mark), and what you’re willing to do to earn credibility and trust that goes beyond your education.
If you don’t have a degree, or the “right” degree, you can very much still build a case for why you can do the job you want without it. That might require being willing to take a more junior role in order to earn your stripes. That might require meticulous attention to tracking the results of your projects, and illustrating how you’ve succeeded without it.
You might take volunteer or internship work (even as an established professional) in order to earn relevant experience in a new field. You might seek out a mentor in your desired field, and patiently spend your own personal time learning outside your current gig in order to build up a library of knowledge that can help you earn the gig.
The point is this: if you want to make something happen bad enough, you do what you have to do, and find ways around the obstacles instead of whining about their existence.
What will you do next?
I feel kind of odd writing a post that’s so me-focused, but I’m hoping that you can take something away from this that’s relevant to you. It is, after all, the perspective and experience I have. And folks ask about it so often that perhaps there’s something in this story or experience that translates, gives you some ideas, or helps you see things through a new lens.
Do you have a similar story to share? Has your degree or college experience helped or hindered you, or have you overcome a challenge on that front? Are you proving your value through demonstrated results and practical examples?
I’d love to hear your stories.
Special thanks to my colleagues at Radian6, most especially David Alston and Marcel Lebrun, for believing in me for what I could accomplish, and not the piece of paper that wasn’t in my pocket.
image credit: pthread1981
Earning Your Stripes for a Social Media Job
More and more social media-related jobs are coming on the scene, from social media directors to content marketers to community managers to everything in between. And there are bunches of folks with an interest in these jobs, but unsure how to best position themselves to get one.
The quick, hard truth: your interest in social media isn’t enough. It’s important and we’ll talk about that below, but it alone is not enough to qualify you for a professional position (unless the company hiring for it doesn’t have a clue.)
I’ve hired several people for social media positions to date, so I can at least tell you what’s worked in my experience, and what I’m looking for when I recruit. Here are a few things you need to be armed with in order to put your best foot forward for a job involving social media responsibilities:
Strong Communication Skills
At the heart of any social media gig is the ability to communicate with people. Not in marketing terms, but in person-to-person terms. If you cannot write well and speak articulately, you can forget it. Here, successful experience in sales or client and customer service is helpful, or another position where you’ve had to put communication skills in play on a regular basis.
This also includes demonstrated experience working well and collaborating with colleagues; these roles have a heavy teamwork component and are often working across several other departments in the organization. Point to examples where you’ve worked well within a team, or led one through a project (and what you learned).
How do you know if you’re any good at this? Ask people to read your writing. Talk to friends and colleagues and have them give you feedback about your communication skills, and where you can improve. (For instance, I know I tend to talk too fast when I’m excited, and I fling heavy vocabulary sometimes when simple words would do, but my strength is in clarity.)
Transferrable Knowledge
Because social media positions are still emerging, it’s likely that you haven’t held a specific social media job before the one you’re vying for. And that’s okay, but you need to learn to translate your experience and relate what you’ve done with what you’re hoping to do.
If you’re a marketer or a PR pro, you’ll need to emphasize your understanding of how people use and consume media, and how companies can best connect with their customers online. If you have a sales or customer service background, you’ll want to look at how your ability to solve problems and establish rapport with people offline could translate into an online environment. If you’ve come from a more technical background, you’ll need to demonstrate your project management and collaboration successes, and probably work harder to show that you have communication chops and people skills.
Changing career industries has always been about taking foundational skills and attributes and applying them to different roles. This is the same thing, so you’ll want to put some thought into the similarities between what you’re doing now, and the role you’d like to land. Build and display your resume accordingly.
Professional Experience
I can’t emphasize this enough, and I talked about it at length over here.
You need to have an idea of what it’s like to work in a professional environment. I know there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, the serious positions out there upon which you can build a career need the perspective and experience that comes with having a few business skills under your belt.
That doesn’t mean it has to be an office: you may have learned a thing or two about business behind the bar (I learned a bit about bookkeeping, for example, and the challenges of hiring and keeping good talent). But if you’re hoping to land a gig leading a cool company’s social media strategy, they’re going to want you to have some demonstrable experience working in a business environment before they’re going to trust you with such a public, visible, and emerging part of their business.
Demonstrated Work Ethic
Part of the hitch with social media gigs is that they’re just not 9-5 propositions. And it takes a certain kind of person that’s willing to take on a role that’s going to require some extended hours, as well as an internal (and perhaps external) leadership role.
Social media folks will have some work ahead of them in terms of establishing some professional standards for their role, as well as expectations with their management and colleagues. They’ll need to be building in new measurement and performance metrics that help the company see what’s working and what’s not. They’ll end up doing a good deal of negotiation, education (both internally and externally), and outlining business cases for their undertakings.
If it’s for a company that’s serious about social media, it’s not going to be a fluffy job. It’s hard work in an emerging field, which means that you’re putting yourself under scrutiny, and likely doing the work of more than one person while you help build a business case for roles like this.
Social Media Experience
Yes, you need it. You might not have it as part of your job right now, but don’t think you’re going to get a gig without it.
And that means a heck of a lot more than having a Facebook page (because that’s just not special in itself). If you have your eye on social media jobs, you’d better start looking at social media through a business lens. Do you have a blog or a Posterous where you’re exploring how to use it to share ideas? Do you have a Twitter account that you’ve used to establish relationships, and can you point to tangible results from that? Have you participated in online communities that interest you to learn about their operation, culture, and nuance?
Don’t expect that companies are going to invest their money in helping you learn social media. You have to do some extra-curricular studying of your own to earn the consideration. That’s the nature of wanting a career in something new. You have to spend your own time learning in order to convince someone you’re a good hiring risk.
Educational Focus
Here’s where I break from the pack: I, personally, don’t care about your degree, and I’ve never hired a person based on that prerequisite. I don’t care where you got it or what it’s in. (I have a secret about my college education that I’ll tell you in a post tomorrow).
In my 15+ years of work experience, the only places I’ve seen specific degrees matter a lot are in technical or highly specialized jobs like medicine, engineering, or law. In most other cases, the most adept professionals I’ve found have a consistent set of skills and attributes that are completely independent from the degree they have (if they have one at all). One of the best marketing people I know has a degree in botany.
Realistically, some companies are going to care. Those aren’t the companies I want to work for, because they’re focusing on past decisions instead of earned skills and potential. But it’s up to you to decide how you’ll handle this bit. If they’re asking for a marketing degree and you don’t have one, you’ll have a job on your hands to explain why your experience and results translate and might matter more.
More Thoughts?
I’d love to hear from those of you that either hold social media positions, or have hired for them, and what I’m missing. Share your experience with the droves of folks out there hoping that their next job is something in this realm.
If we have hope that social media has a legitimate place in the business world forever more, we’d better be prepared to present ourselves as professionals deserving of leading the charge.
What say you?
image credit: Nevada Tumbleweed
How I Made $100K With Twitter
Sigh.
I know some of you are here for the get-rich quick answer, and if you are, you can stop now. That headline was bait, pure and simple. Sorry. But the claim is true, and I’ll explain.
Today on Twitter’s #SMChat, DJ Waldow asked about professional uses for Twitter and what we got out of it.
In my first year as an independent consultant, I can attribute over $100K in revenue for my business directly to Twitter. How?
- I went on Twitter and I followed people who were in industries that interested me, and those that reflected the kind of customers I wanted to have. That was PR and marketing agencies, and mostly mid to larger size brands (because they have money to spend). Twitter is far more about who YOU follow than who follows you.
- I talked to them. Said hi. Had lots of conversations about everything from work to cooking to horseback riding to beer and cars and pets and books. All sorts of stuff. Just getting to know people. I spent a couple of hours a day doing this with nothing more than the intention of building relationships and conversation systems with people.
- Eventually some of those people became business friends and acquaintances. And when it came time for them to ask what I did, I told them. Without the sales pitch.
- If they needed what I did, they said hey, that’s interesting. Can I email you a couple of questions? They did. We talked.
- I wrote proposals. I went on pitches.
- I won some work.
- I worked my ass off to deliver.
- Repeat.
Over the course of a year, it amounted to about $100K in revenue through client work that followed this path, starting with Twitter.
The magic in making money with social media isn’t that the site or social network becomes a revenue center itself. I didn’t sell stuff on Twitter. I gave people access to me and my expertise, and paid attention to when the time might be right to talk business.
That’s the trick here, folks. Social media is rarely the cash register. It’s communication tools that help form the foundation for healthy business relationships that might eventually lead to sales elsewhere. Whether you’re B2B or B2C.
Twitter was just the handshake that got the conversation started. It required an investment of time and effort for me to spend time there and converse without the intent to sell something, and lay the groundwork for trust and relationships. Much like having lunch or going to networking events. I spent time getting to know the people that might eventually be the decision maker for a project that I could be hired for. And when they needed something like what I did, they often thought of me.
It’s that simple, and yet that complex.
There’s no shortcut to success. No formula or checklist that you can complete and be guaranteed results. And in the end, all I’ve done is show you that Twitter is a way to get introduced to people that might want to work with you.
The rest? Well. It’s up to you to do work that’s worth paying for.
[quick point of clarification: I've been working for Radian6 for the last year, and no longer do independent consulting. These are the results from when I was a consultant, and my first year of operation in 2008.]
image credit: Jo Jakeman
My Best Of: Social Media Learning
Over the course of the last year or so, we’ve accumulated quite a few posts over here, many of which I think can really help you put some social media stuff in play for your business. Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to do.
The trick with blogging is that the posts don’t always come in a logical order, right? So I’ve put together some what I think are my best and most useful posts and ebooks here, organized more by topic areas that you might be focused on.
And this is helping me see some other areas where I might be able to offer a little more help and information, and I’m hoping you’ll share that input with me, too.
Culture & Adoption
Getting A Social Media Foothold
On Social Media And Culture Shift
Social Media and The Reality of Control
Social Media For the Risk Averse
7 Deadly Mistakes in Selling Social Media
20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion
Social Media Is Not the Disease
Planning & Strategy
Starting Social Media: Building on What You Have
10 Ways to Get Serious About Social Media
The Albert Einstein Guide to Social Media
Internal Social Media
Internal Social Media: Building A Case
Internal Social Media: Addressing The Fears
Internal Social Media: Building A Plan
Driving Social Media From Behind the Firewall
Engagement & Execution
Elements of Web 2.0 Communication Guidelines
Ebook: The Social Media Starter Kit
7 Sensible Strides Toward A Stronger Community
Productivity and Time Wasters in Social Media
Social Media Time Management: The Ebook
Social Media Roles & Responsibilities
25 Reasons Social Media Can (Should?) Be Anyone’s Job
Five Myths of Community Management
The Ultimate Community Management FAQ
The Unspoken Role in Community Management
Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side
Hiring For Social Media: Good Moves
Hiring For Social Media: What I’d Look For
Will The Business People Please Stand Up?
The Taboo (But Critical) Community Skill
Measurement, ROI and All That Jazz
The Dead Horse of ROI and Analysis Paralysis
The Difference Between Hard and Hard Work
How To Create Measurable Objectives
Wiring In Social Media Measurement
Practical Social Media Measurement: Awareness, Attention, Reach
Practical Social Media Measurement: Leads, Conversions, Sales
Practical Social Media Measurement: Cost Savings
So then. What have I missed? Where are the holes? What topics should we be covering, addressing, and talking about that we haven’t yet? (I see some more stuff we might do in strategic planning, for example). What do we need to look at through a new lens?
This blog is as much yours as mine, maybe more so. Let’s make it more useful for you, shall we? Comments belong to you.
image credit: Muffet
6 Principles of Selling In Your Project
You have an idea!
You’ve thought it through, and you’re excited. You’ve uncovered something that’s really going to help your company or your boss or your client achieve their goals. You want your project to get attention and action. It deserves it, right?
Wrong.
Having an idea, unfortunately, doesn’t in itself entitle us to see it to fruition. Instead, in a business context, we must first translate that idea and present the case for it. Selling in your project requires a few key elements to ensure that it gets proper consideration.
1. Hypothesis
This seems obvious, but is rarely done well. The hypothesis behind your idea should illustrate why your idea is valuable (i.e. what problem you’re trying to solve), a rough sketch of how you hope to get there, both the potential upsides and downsides, and some conclusions you’ve drawn about possible results based on other people’s experiences, your research, assumptions, and data. It’s the underpinnings of an initial plan.
Try something like “I’d like to propose we try X because I think it can help us improve Y. My initial plans would include doing A, B, and C in order to lay the groundwork. Our potential obstacles include D, E and F and we’ll need to consider those in our plans. If we’re successful, based on my research to date, I believe we can achieve Z.”
The more clearly you state your hypothesis, the more likely you are to get and keep someone’s attention.
2. Allies
Cause you gotta have frieeeeenddss…. No, really. It’s very hard to fight a battle much less wage a war (even a well-meaning one) all by your lonesome. Building alliances requires coming prepared to share why you think your project or idea is worthwhile, and illustrating how you’d like that person to help you in your quest. Presenting a united front can help lend credibility to a project, as it demonstrates that it’s not just a solitary whim, but an idea that has backing from more than one mind.
3. The Opposition
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, even when you’re building a project plan. You need the naysayers to lend perspective, as well as demonstrate that you are considering all sides of the equation in your planning, including the not-so-pretty ones.
I’m not suggesting you indulge a jerk that can’t offer a constructive perspective, but I am saying that you need to present the concerns, challenges, or issues that are raised by those who are skeptical of your plan, if they’re out there. It’s doing your due diligence, and can give you a much needed reality check when you’re passionate about something.
4. Translation
If you’re selling a marketing project into the C-suite, you’ll need to talk in terms of how it will impact brand reputation, awareness, lead generation. If it’s a research project, you’ll need to speak in terms of the insights you hope to collect, and what they’ll help you improve or address in your business. If you’re selling a project into your team, you’ll need to help them understand how it will change their priorities, roles, and how you’ll equip them to do it.
It’s absolutely critical to put the project not in terms of how you see it, but in a frame of reference that’s relevant to the person you’re trying to convince.
5. Negotiation
We never win out of the gate. Okay, rarely. Slam dunks are the stuff of legend.
When you have a project plan in hand, come prepared to negotiate. Much like buying a car or selling a house, you know your ideal price, but you also know what you’ll accept. The great negotiators always come to the table to pitch the perfect vision, but prepared to walk away with a step in that direction. That requires a dose of humility – accepting that all of your solutions aren’t brilliant or perfect – and the patience to recognize that some progress is better than fierce and utter resistance.
6. Accountability
Want to win the trust of your colleagues for this and future projects?
Own your part in it. That means sharing the credit for successes – after all you didn’t do it yourself – and being willing to look in the mirror when it comes to assessing what might have gone wrong. It’s also important to have the skills to look at the failures clinically rather than emotionally, so that you can diagnose where the hiccups might have been without making them someone’s personal responsibility.
And when you’ve captured learnings – whether the happy ones or the challenging ones – share them. Liberally. Report back to the boss or the team and chronicle what you learned. Communicate often and openly so that folks know how invested you are not just in the project, but in the results.
What’s Your Principle?
I know you’re out there, those of you who have successfully sold in projects, or struggled to do so. I know you’ve learned in the trenches, and gotten it wrong before you got it right (where do you think this post idea came from?).
I’d love to hear more from you about what principles you have as part of your project pitch, and the questions you have for those that have done it successfully.
The comments are yours.
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