Dream Jobs for Social Media Junkies

I meant to post this last week; it originally ran in MediaPost. Posting will be light this week as I have some downtime, but check back shortly for more.

Could it be commonplace someday to create a resume that shows how
much time you spend using social media? Is that really a job skill?

US News and World Report thinks “the Facebook future is now” and released  “The Seven Best Jobs for Facebook Addicts”   (though   I only counted six
). The jobs include recruiters, tech reporters, product managers, and
photographers. They didn’t mention event planning, which has become a
cottage industry on the site.
On my blog I offered a few other picks
for Facebook-inspired careers, such as matchmaker, professional
Scrabble player, contact importer, and Jewdar technician. What about other social media sites, though? Here are some jobs that could benefit from other social media skill sets.

Digg

· VH1 or E! producer: How do you get the experience to create those
massive programs about the 100 worst celebrity breakups or 25 things
you didn’t know about Topher Grace? Digg’s power users excel at this,
creating and promoting any content that’s in the form of numbered
lists.

· Infomercial celebrity: If you go on digg, you’ll likely find some
post about 20 things you never knew you could do with a Wii remote.
This is the greatest site for fans of the phrase “and that’s not all!”
For some reason, you click and read the whole thing as if your day
would not be complete otherwise. All these lists need are calls to
action.

Twitter

· Book editor: Just imagine if a Twitter user got his hands on
“War and Peace.” It would be pared down to a few pages, with each
chapter summarized in 140 characters or less. It would open,
“@AnnaPScherer tells @PrinceVasili about war horrors of antichrist;.
@PrinceVasili just wants a good cup of tea.” See how well Twitter users
can get to the heart of everything?

· Personal assistant: Ever wish someone was paying attention to your
every whim? Twitter users excel at this, though many are too fickle and
would wind up following someone else as soon as they got bored of you.

MySpace

·    Escort: This doesn’t need much explanation if you get the same kind of mail on here that I do.

· Interior Designer: The whole point of a MySpace layouts is to make
people feel at home and express themselves. Why confine that to the
digital world?

StumbleUpon

· Film critic: Do you give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down?
StumbleUpon users can dream of following in Roger Ebert’s footsteps
thanks to their rating skills.

Del.icio.us

· Librarian: How great would it be to go into a library and find
every book tagged appropriately, and you can then browse the stacks by
tag instead of obscure numerical systems? Then again, it’s all much
easier just using the Kindle.

FriendFeed

· Asset manager: On FriendFeed, you can take stock of others’
entire digital portfolios and get a sense of their social capital. Once
one masters social capital, managing tangible capital’s the next step.

Stardoll

· Fashion designer: Imagine Project Runway: 2012 (which, please,
better be back on Bravo by then). Some of the portfolio shots you see
could be from social shopping sites like this.

When I was in middle school, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do
for a career, and I told others at the time that whatever job I’d wind
up in probably hadn’t been invented yet. Similarly, for avid users of
these social media sites, many of the jobs they’ll wind up in — and of
course create — probably don’t exist yet. We’ll have to see where all
the tagging and tweeting leads.