Job title of the future: social media analyst

Job title of the future: social media analyst: ”

Dave Sifry has another ‘State of the Blogosphere’ report, and this time he quantifies the total number of blog posts per day. That seems like a more impactful measure than just the total number of new blogs created every per day.

Total daily blog postings in February 2005: roughly 500,000. One year later: nearly 1.2 million.

At that rate, it means about 2.5 million postings per day by February 2007.

Pair those numbers now with YouTube; it appears that the number of videos posted to the video-sharing site is tripling every year. Right now, daily video uploads are about 35,000. Based on a four-month trend, daily uploads could be 100,000 by the end of 2006, with some 130 million daily viewings.

That’s a substantial amount of data to follow, categorize and analyze. (It seems, too, that the world could use a Technorati that follows video sharing sites.)

All of this seems to point toward a new job responsibility inside companies whose growth depends on word of mouth: social media analyst.

If a social media analyst could port into Technorati’s data warehouse (or BlogPulse’s) and rely on her imagination and knowledge of company strategies to create her own, real-time dashboard of gauges, maps and charts of what’s being said online, she would probably become the company’s most foremost expert on trends, word of mouth and the democratization of culture.

Update: Stowe Boyd on the idea of a social media analyst:

‘Maybe that’s too remote: all that staring at graphs and so on, like the
foo-foo dust that business intelligence firms peddle. I think it is
more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog
relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to
see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and
on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.’

It seems like the responsibility of blogger relations could fall under the job duties in PR, customer service, marketing, call centers… A job responsibility like that is not easily painted across every industry.

I see the role of a social media analyst as someone who crunches numbers on all of the data being generated by social media. From that analysis would come guidance on what companies should do.

A social media analyst could also be responsible for quantifying the effects of social media-driven word of mouth on sales.

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(Via Church of the Customer Blog.)