Lately, a few friends of mine are making some moves in their careers, they asked me for my advice, so I decided to give them my observations. I’ll probably refer people to this post, I often use this blog to save me time. One caveat, my experience is within corporate, so if you’re of the entrepreneurial spirit, I don’t have as much insight.

Six Career Tips To Help You Grow

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Learn something new every day
When I was a lowly intern right out of college doing grunt work IT application clean up and light UI design, I asked harassed, my dear colleagues to teach me something every single day. They thought I was bright-eyed, cute, and naive and I ended up learning a little about each of the web developers, system integrators, project managers, web managers, web architects, computer support teams. Although this was clearly outside of the scope of an intern, bit by bit, I soaked in each little morsel about web in the enterprise and it fueled me to learn more. Leo Cheng, Jason Martorano, Oliver Cheng, Dave Giffen, John Perera, Kunal Malik, Jeff Cavano, Aileen Cheng, Robert Cartelli were so good to me, thanks guys.

Often, the fastest way Up is Out
Often, the fastest way up, for those who enjoy working in companies, is out. In most cases, incremental raises are often single digit changes (keeping you above the inflation waterline), and the occasional promotion will be low double digits. For those that I’ve met and move to new job positions, outside of their company they can often expect a 20%-40% increase in salary as they join a new company. It’s interesting to see that firms may value outside talent as more important than inside experience talent, in some cases, a fresh skillset or experience may be what’s needed.

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

You are a company of one
The other observation I share with my friend (and now you) is that you are a company of one. Even though your paycheck is being delivered through your employer, you are solely responsible for your direction, what you learn, how you perform, and how much you’re paid. I firmly believe that you are paid what you’re worth, so when I hear people complaining “they are underpaid”, in my mind, I translate that as you’ve “undersold yourself”, get skilled, spend time on weekends or early mornings to learn more, and apply new projects, programs and skills –or leave. Therefore, you are your own CEO, CMO, CFO, COO, CTO, you’re in control of your destiny. As you can tell, I don’t believe in fate, you are driving your ship of one.

Develop your plan, and put it in writing
If you’re with me so far, develop your own plan, both short term and long term plans, and set goals on how to reach them. Often, these goals don’t have titles or companies in them, but they describe the environment, or the end outcomes of which you want to reach. Over time these goals will change, and that’s ok, but at least you’re looking forward. I learned this from my buddy’s dad when I was growing up, he had several businesses, and one of his dreams was to have a Ferrari –he achieved it.

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Wishing you all the best! (really) I want to see you succeed. I get emails about once a month, where someone has said they’ve achieved more, party due to this blog, (but the majority due to their ambition of course) If you’ve other tips, please share in the comments.

Update: Connie Benson reminded me to post up my mantra of “pay yourself first” and “Manage your time as you do money“.

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The Web Strategist deals with many internal customers
A Web Strategist is an web decision maker, in context of this blog, they are often within large corporations. They have internal customers that range from marketing, product teams, product marketing, support, PR, advertising, IT, and a plethora of external vendors. For many web strategists’ much of your effort won’t be dealing with users or your web team of developers and designers but with internal stakeholders. I’ve seen a lot of this when I was corporate web manager, and I’d guess that over 50% of my time was spent dealing with requests, problems, prioritization of internal stakeholders. (I managed an enterprise intranet, extranet, and aligned a disparate enterprise intranet)

Your internal customer: the stakeholder
What’s a stakeholder? someone who stands to benefit or lose from your direct actions, as a result, they are your internal customers. Stakeholders can make your life heaven or hell, from their requests, or to they way they give feedback to your management chain.

Think of yourself as a chaperone
The way to manage stakeholders is to think of yourself as a chaperone, for your stakeholders, you oversee them, guide them, and direct them where they need to go. This is somewhat of a challenge, as if you’re overbearing and deny them their requests, they’ll escalate to their management (their parents), who will talk to your management (your parents), causing unnecessary headache. It can go the other way as well, if you bend to their will, they will dominate your time, and the user experience (your external customers) of the site could suffer if your put business needs first –rather than balancing the user with business needs.

How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders:

Develop great relations with your internal stakeholders
Make yourself accessible to these teams, and build relationships to understand their business needs and drivers and try to get ahead of their requests, learn to ancipate their needs.

Establish clear roles
Sadly, stakeholders will often grab the first person in the web team they see to make a request, either a small web update or a project with scope creep. Assign someone on your team to facilitate requests, and a role to properly scope projects so you’re always setting expectations.

Make the process very clear
Tasks, Projects and Programs all have different life cycles, roles, processes and requirements, you’ll need to spell out very clearly to your stakeholders how each of those are different, and set expectations.

Develop a ticketing and project system
Deploy a system that will both accept incoming requests, this will help free up team resources, help see all the requests from one view, and help to keep track of many requests. This system will eventually be a great way to report to your management team of your fulfillment, and great for customer satisfaction reporting. Thanks to Adam for the submission in the comments.

Lead the prioritization, but involve stakeholders
You’re always going to have more requests than resources, unless of course your company is headed the wrong way. Make it clear what your current resource threshold is and prioritize projects. As new requests come in, you can have stakeholders work with you to move budgeted resources around –forcing them to prioritize their own requests. Of course, you’ve the final say, and should be empowered by your management to lead this forward with conviction

Train stakeholders
Depending on how your website is setup, some of your stakeholders may be encouraged to publish directly to the website, you’ll need to educate them on how to use tools, analytics, and other know hows to be successful. Train stakeholders on how to understand web analytics and web reports –empower them to take ownership over the content they have on their site. Teach them to fill out a requirements and scoping document, saving your team time and ensuring they’ve fully thought out the request.

Make your schedule and reports available
Let all stakeholders know of what your team is working on, establish an internal calendar with project definitions available, including web analytics reports so business stakeholders can work with them

I could go on and on with other recommendations for success, but instead, I encourage you to leave nuggets in the comments. I’ll add great ones to this list and fully credit you.

Related Resources

The many Web Strategy Constituents: The external forces that shape your website

The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs

A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008

Video: Alastair Duncan on Corporate Website Leadership (3:30)

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Update: Constantin has created a new wiki of Social Media Managers and Strategists at the New PR Wiki.

I stand by my research, personal experience, and industry monitoring that the need for social media managers will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future.

This post is a direct response, refuting and correcting Steve’s post that the Social Media Manager will go extinct.

While I enjoy Steve’s predictions (as well as a peer) that the Social Media Manager will be extinct, I’m here to respectfully correct him and leaning on my research findings from my recent Forrester report: How to Staff for Social Computing. In fact, we’ve found that there are two roles to be found in corporations serious about online communities.

Steve comes from the PR agency perspective and from his view, this makes sense. Yet, I come from where demand actually happens: in corporate enterprise marketing, where I was a social media manager at Hitachi.

Currently, in large corporations, specialized marketing managers, are found often sorted by industries, but also sorted by mediums and channels. For example, there are corporate marketers that focus on Web Marketing (my background) Advertising, Direct Marketing (email, mail) Search Marketing, Event Marketing, and even Print Marketing.

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and the foreseeable, we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

In our recent report, we indicated that there are two distinct roles appearing within corporations, the social media strategist (I gave the example of VP of Social Media, Ed Terpening at Wells Fargo) and the community manager, who is responsible for being an online face to the community (Lionel Menchaca is a great example).

So, until the roles of medium based marketers (like direct marketer, web marketer, event marketer) go extinct or this skillset completely normalizes or the role of communities (another way of saying customers) go by the wayside, we’ll continue to see the growth of these dedicated and specialized roles.

Steve is wise to assert that the blur between social media and traditional media as we know it is correct –from a PR perspective. But when it comes to corporate communities, developing social media programs, these are skills that the majority of traditional marketers have –nor understand.

As an analyst, many of my clients (at Fortune 5000 companies) consult with us for social media guidance, I’m increasingly on more and more concalls where these individuals have a dedicated role in this new medium.

Lastly, to drive my point home, I’ve been publishing a series of blog posts called “On the move” that list out (in groups of 5-6) individuals that have been hired to fulfill this specific job. If you notice, the rate has been increasing, not decreasing over the past weeks. Looking at actual job movements is a more accurate –and telling—way of looking at social media jobs than keywords from a job site.

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Spending time with large corporations and getting to understand how they adopt social media is fascinating, recently, I’ve noticed a trend, not on public use, but on internal organization.

Unlikes Advertising (which is often controlled by a single group) Social Media is being adopted by many business groups across the enterprise, from marketing, product teams, sales, to support. While not uncommon, social media tends to be a grassroots movement that comes from the edges (where customers are) of the company, where individual users, vertical marketers, and client facing teams exist.

At least three models of social media orginization within a large corporation, which loosely resemble a tire, a tower, or a spoke model.

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Wheel
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

What styles of adoption are you noticing from large companies?

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I write for the web strategist (web decision makers at companies) and was really pleased that we got a top notch professional here at named Michele Frost here at Forrester Research.

A few weeks ago, I announced that Forrester is seeking a Community Manager, and wow did we get a response, over 20 resumes!

I offered her the opportunity to guest post, and she’s decided to take me up on the offer, she shares her experience building the right team, esp in the world of social media

Guest Post from Michele Frost, Director, Web Marketing at Forrester Research

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The custody battle is over! After much debate, I’m thrilled to say that Forrester’s newly created position of Online Community Manager will be part of the Web Marketing team. We’re plugged into the business and work online, so it’s a solid starting point.

With Jeremiah’s input, we drafted a job description and spread the word. Now comes the hard part: We need to hire.

My first hiring experience was my worst: It came to a crashing conclusion with my new employee leaving the office via a stretcher within two weeks. She left behind extensive literature on how to collect workers compensation. Lesson learned.

My methods have since improved, which is lucky for me, my employer, and my new employees. Recent new hires have even been quoted as saying that their job matches the job description outlined during the hiring process. Progress.

But with this newly created Online Community Manager hire, I feel like I’m starting from the beginning. During my agency days at Critical Mass, I developed, sold, and managed community projects. But my team and clients majored in something else and minored in community “things.”

Everything is different in this 2.0 pond. How do you quantify Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections? The personal and professional line is blurred on candidates’ sites and I end up knowing more than I should (or care to) about candidates’ positions on religion, gay marriage, reproductive rights, and music.

Later today, I meet with Forrester’s recruiter: We’ll see how current hiring and legal counsel from Strategic Growth maps with the times.

Fingers crossed.

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Jeremiah: It’s interesting that Michele learns a 360 view of candidates online lives, not just the resume that they put forth, truly a sign of the times.

For those that applied, this is a good example of how we’re trying to be transparent, we’re real live people, as we expect you to demonstrate to our customers and clients.

And I can promise you, we’ll do everything we can to make sure no one leaves on a stretcher!

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I can’t imagine ever advising a client to deal with an advertising, PR, or interactive team that doesn’t get social media. Of course, I’m biased as I’m sitting right smack in the middle of the social media space. But with the power shifting to the participants, agencies must demonstrate they can participate before they can ever help clients with it.

Sadly, most agencies still don’t get the new space, or if they do, they lightly gloss it over by saying “Oh yeah, we’ve a blog” and when I look, it’s a bunch of self-serving posts written by a variety of different folks with little strategy and few comments.

Jason Falls of social media explorer asks why I didn’t link to colleague Mary Beth Kemp’s and Peter Kim’s latest report on the The Connected Agency, and he also raises some interesting points on agencies who talk the talk –but don’t walk it.

So which agency is doing a good job being part of the community? I’d love to hear from you, shout out in the comments, but give reasons why.

Update: Steve Ellis of Metia gives practical reasons why they are connected, informative response.

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Click To Play

Which department should take leadership of your corporate web strategy? Earlier this week, I flew out to Vegas to speak on a panel with Alastair Duncan is Chief Executive of MRM, at Intel’s sales and marketing event.

I was really impressed by his nuggets, that I got him on video in the Sands conference center to talk about ownership and governance of web programs within corporations. Alastair’s blog is located Participation Marketing.

What you’ll learn?

Who really is in charge of web strategy programs? Which department (listen to his insightful answer)

How to avoid making your website an irrelevant ‘picture on the wall’

How can Marketing and IT actually get along?

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For us web strategists (those who make decisions for web sites) time is a precious, limited resource that we’ve come to cherish. Here’s a few tips on how to manage your time effectively:

[Time is Like Money: You never seem to have enough, and everyone wants a piece of it]

Time is Like Money: You never seem to have enough, and everyone wants a piece of it. As a web decision maker within a company, you’ll have many touchpoints, since web is one of the most important mediums for business, you’re going to be in heavy demand.

Remember the limited quantity: Cherish your time as you do your wallet or purse, this is yours, and unlike money, you can’t invest and grow new time, you can only manage the existing time you’ve got, cut into other areas, or hire someone under you to do it.

Budget your time like you do money: Set aside time for you, for work, and for passions. I do this before I check my personal email (second priority) then any work email (third email). As soon as you answer emails, you’re now paying for someone else’s time. The same principle should apply for your workout time, reading time, or personal reflection time. Allow a certain percentage at time for writing reports, meetings, and other tasks at work, and defend that calendar.

Pay yourself first: I don’t let anyone cut into this time, as I budget 2 hours every morning to do online reading (to get smarter) and to blog (increase my long term value, and connect with others). Like the advice from most financial advisors, they encourage you to pay yourself first by investing in your own funds, paying your bills, and making yourself (reasonably) happy before paying off your creditors.

Manage incoming web requests: As a web strategist, you’re popular, but will need to manage your fame so you and your team doesn’t burn out. Within your web team, develop a process and tool that will track and prioritize all incoming requests for your web team. Force business stakeholders to justify the need for projects or programs, and seek the ‘cover’ of an executive sponsor who can help prioritize and push back.

Manage meetings with software: Try to avoid meetings, instead use collaborative software of social software after initial the initial kick start meetings. Use the tools that are native to us, I know you shouldn’t have any problems handling this.

Responding to emails leads to more emails: The more you respond to emails, the more you will receive. Keep in mind what your core goals are (why is your employer paying you) and try to manage and budget this.

Instant Messaging control: I avoid using 1:1 communication tools until really needed. I look for one-to-many publication tools or collaboration tools to use, as I can be more effective with my time. The only place I use IM is at the workplace, and in limited quantities. Selfish? yes, but I’ve been doing this for two years, and noticed an increase in productivity without it.

Ironically, I’m spending a great deal of my day online managing for the day job and this blog, while I think I have my budgeting portions right, I’m going to try to trim my overall online time down. I’m actually a bad case for this, so this post is as much of a self-reminder as it is a how to for you.

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Recently, I met a developer who was frustrated. This web developer had been programming and developing websites for nearly 10 years, but admitted he was having a very hard time keeping up with the younger faster developers that knew the new languages.

It’s not really about age, but about the ability to constantly learn new languages and skills in order to stay competitive in the environment. The last thing he wanted to do as a web developer is get stuck doing production work, or maintaining a system someone else had already built for him.

I suggested that he should probably look at expanding his business skills, to grow beyond being a ‘code monkey’ which would lead him beyond tech lead, into program management and eventually strategy.

What specific steps did I tell him to take?

Start reading books on web management and process management

Understand how the software fits into the greater scheme of the business, department, or company

Expand and learn more about user experience research

Grow a network by adopting social media to learn, discuss, and market oneself

Lead projects: develop needs, do research, develop plans, create feature function reports, and feasibility reports, learn cost/benefit analysis

Lead programs: manage a business program (where software is the core) and manage it like a profit and loss, become an integrated part of the business.

Practice presentation to business managers and stakeholders

Engage business teams in meetings, training, and lunch

Ultimately, he should be able to move into a more business role, where business and customer needs are always present (and hopefully, with greater compensation and opportunities). Since strategy is always needed, and armed with a strong technology background, he should be able to move into a position that requires less time to re-invent a new language every other year.

Do you have suggestions for him? What should he do to avoid the developer recycle shuffle and move up the food chain?

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