educational requirements are generally flexible, other than for certain companies and gov’t corp contracts. but you non-degreed folks always seem to have a bit of a whiney tone when this comes up, no matter how successful you have been without one.

Personally, unless they’re just looking for someone that received a little sheet of paper stating that they attended school, there isn’t a graduate degree in this world that could prepare you for social media strategy.

Obviously, companies still think they need to post that absolutely meaningless requirement because they’re still stuck in a very, very old school frame of mind.

Personally, 99% of social media strategists/internet marketing consultants that I know were busy learning their trade and making tons of money while their peers were stuck in an old fashioned university, struggling to pay for a degree that would end up pretty much useless.

I’m one of those people who decided that I for what I wanted to do in life (social media) school was a complete waste of time, and the funny thing? My degreed friends, to this day STILL beg me for a job.

Suckers.

:)

I’m the guy who started the twitter frenzy around this yesterday. I work in staffing for Best Buy, and its my job to find the right person for the gig. I have to say I’m completely blown away by the response the job description has gotten. Proving once again that its tough to pre-engineer what people will find interesting, controversial, or worthy of mention.

Let me start with this, we’re absolutely not perfect, we know this. Someone said its a post-brand perfect world, and I think its true. This is the first time we’ve carved out a spot specifically for someone in this space, so admittedly, we’re going to stumble around a bit at first to figure out whats right. True enough we’ve had people in marketing and other areas who had a strong interest in social media and took it upon themselves to start trying stuff and learning. But up until recently, there wasn’t specific spots outlined for it under the marketing umbrella.

One note on the Job description: we recently rewrote it with the help of Gary Koelling. Gary is the guy who started BlueShirtNation, the internal social network at Best Buy. Featured in Groundswell by Charlene Li. Gary knows whats up. I will say he doesn’t have final say on the HR stuff surrounding the qualifications.

I’d like to respond to a few specific comments above with my perspective on the inside here.

Sean – sorry, our qualifications for VP are 10,000 followers on Twitter. Keep truckin’.

Ryan – interesting thought, but no way do I have time to go through anyone’s list of followers. Nor am I qualified to determine worthiness/unworthiness – thats Google’s job :)

Rex – agreed, being a native Minnesota boy, the weather is not for everyone. If you like change of seasons, great schools, killer art and music scene, and can handle the occasionally brutally cold winter then Minnesota is the place for you.

Sameer – agreed, most of the time big companies don’t get it. There are some that do though, and I put Best Buy in that category. Ask Jason Falls, ask Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel, Robert Scoble, and Charlene Li. There’s plenty of evidence out there that Best Buy, while not perfect, has as good a handle on social media as any big company. Its a much different challenge to take a large enterprise with entrenched culture, rituals, ways of being and then apply a completely different world view and expect everyone to “get it”. Small companies and start ups are by their nature more agile. So while its easy to look at a big organization and say “bah, corporate morons, they don’t get what the cool kids are doing” I know, I’ve said it too. But be assured there are plenty of us that are passionate about getting this right, and actually relish the challenge of changing the thinking of a goliath organization so that they do get it right.

Curt – you’ve sort of touched on what the crux of this thing is. The qualifications are preferred (graduate degree, 250 twitter followers) so you don’t have to have them, it would just be nice. Also, even the basic qualifications, which are required to be considered for the gig, are a minimum filter, not the ultimate determining factor on your ability to do the job successfully.

Bonochromatic – on the degree you’re right. I spoke with Barry Judge about it, our CMO and he agrees. We may reconsider that. While a graduate degree is definitely a signifier of accomplishment and higher learning, it certainly isn’t an automatic indicator of future success. So maybe we have some further thinking to do on it. Be assured, with all the buzz around this, we are.

More to come today on this…

I’m @joshuakahn on twitter if you’d like to throw any additional comments my way, I welcome the discussion on this.

When it comes to social networking and emerging media, education is pointless. Higher education, as always, lags at least 10 years behind the times, and this position is to manage cutting-edge social media. Six months in social media = an eon.

Anyway, if you have less than 250 Twitter followers, I wouldn’t hire you for ANY emerging media job, let alone this one.

Wake up, people. It’s called a Sea Change.

It sounds like a pretty sweet gig, but number of Twitter followers is a really odd metric to use to gauge the effectiveness of a potential employee.

Imagine this same ad being posted in the 90′s:
Preferred qualifications:
1) Bachelor’s Degree
2) Must have a Web site with a counter that shows you get 250 hits per day