Buzzword Chasers

Just as we started getting used to companies utilizing social media as a marketing tool, they change it up on us once again. One of the biggest electronic retailers in the US, Best Buy, has turned to social media as a tool for finding qualified employees, proving that online presence may be just as valuable to a career as education.

The position is for “Senior Manager-Emerging Media Marketing.” Basic qualifications for this position include a Bachelor’s degree, “two plus years of mobile or social media marketing experience” at the director or strategist level, “four plus years people or resource leadership experience,” and “one plus years of active blogging experience.”

The “Preferred Qualifications” entail these two bullet points:

• Graduate degree
• 250 plus followers on Twitter

Although, it is likely that potential applicants for this job already have a strong social media presence, legitimacy is still an issue, because anyone can get followers on Twitter. Especially now, due to the fact that anyone with a credit card can pay companies like Usocial to easily get you 250 followers for $25.00. We are likely to see job requirements include social media presence, especially for recruitment, HR, PR, and anyone dealing with the public. This requirement simply implies that applicants will have a better understanding of how social media tools like Twitter work in a business context, and attract saavy individuals.

Since its launch, Twitter’s purpose was a platform for generating contacts with similar interests. This is a new chapter for Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how many companies in the near future add Twitter to their requirements, as online presence becomes increasingly more important. It is likely that there is a natural progression here that other companies will start to catch on to.