Dear MTV, here's how not to choose a social media manager
There's a disconcerting trend among companies now to hire a social media or community manager via a contest. People can seek nominations from friends or put their own name forward in an attempt to prove that they're the most popular choice for the position. Unfortunately, what's popular is not always right, and these contests are doing more harm than good. Why?
They're trivializing the role a social media manager can have within an organization.
Would you hire your next HR rep because of a LinkedIn poll? Your next video producer from a YouTube vote? A copywriter because of her following on Twitter? No, at least not solely on those qualifications. Yet these "be our next social media guru" campaigns continually stress getting votes, making popularity the applicant's number one qualification.
For an example, here's how MTV is hiring their new "Twitter Jockey". They selected 18 candidates on their own, and are now crowdsourcing the final 2. The 20 finalists will "compete in a series of online challenges this summer designed to reveal their personalities and demonstrate how they connect with Twitter followers." (source) Want to be one of the two crowdsourced candidates? Here's how they're being chosen:
- Users go to the MTV TJ (Twitter Jockey, get it?) site and are immediately confronted with some bizarre co-branding. The site is a 50/50 mix of MTV (expected) and ZYNC (a new card from AMEX).
- In order to nominate anyone, the user first has to allow an application to access their public Facebook profiles, post status updates, find the user's birthday and access contact information.
- Then the user has to "like" ZYNC on Facebook. That's right, you're forced to connect with a page that essentially has nothing to do with the campaign as it's promoted. The website won't let you move forward unless you "like" the new credit card.
- Finally, you're allowed to nominate a user. And, judging from the recent submissions, once you're in you can nominate someone as many times as you'd like.
The person selected by MTV will be a voice for the brand to thousands, if not millions, of people. MTV is definitely generating buzz around this contest, but once that dies down, what will the TJ do? How will he or she fit into the current social media mix? What kind of content will he or she be responsible for creating? There are so many questions to ask (many of which are answered during a traditional interview), and MTV might not know the answer until the winner has been declared.
So where did MTV go wrong? As people pointed out to me on Twitter, it is a campaign from MTV, so it almost fits their brand. But a bizarre co-promotion and game-show style process for selecting a person to be a voice for your company on social media? That decision's on par with deciding to renew Jersey Shore.
What do you think? Can you the most qualified candidates by holding a contest?
