Why Those With Social Media Skills Will Rule The Future

I have a secret. Well it won't be a secret anymore when you read this. I have a huge book collection on the desk I don't use in my Microsoft office space. That's right, I don't use a desk because in the future we'll work on our feet moving from place to place. Besides, sitting is the new high fructose corn syrup haven't you heard? :)

For those who stop by my offices (and I have meetings with anyone who comes to Seattle and wants to meet with me so feel free to reach out), I require those people to tell me their favorite book. I always think books are a great conversation starter and I can't read enough. In fact none of us can. So I keep a collection in my office (right now I'm reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future" from 2006) where people can come and trade me a book for any book in my office as long as they promise to "pay it forward" by passing that book along to someone else after they're finished. I gain a new book from them which I'll eventually pass along to someone else and they gain one from me that they will share with someone else. Through sharing the cycle of knowledge will continue to spread via my little book exchange.

Sounds a lot like social media doesn't it? Well, this is why everyone needs to learn social media. And when I mean learn, I mean all the intricacies of it from content creation, distribution science, paid amplification tools, design, human behavior, social listening, social business, collaboration, employee advocacy, open source communication and how social acts as the glue for every part of the world of business now and moving forward into the 21st Century.

Social media has always been traditionally thought of solely in a marketing context. Yet it goes way beyond promotion and amplification. Social media skills represent a “deep” area that is highly in demand and spans a range of functional silos and levels in the job market and amongst large and small businesses alike. It also is the key tool for personal branding in what is becoming evermore a "DIY economy."

More and more, social media is becoming the fabric of how we live, work, learn, make others aware of injustice, create, find employment and play.

While many organizations are, of course, hiring for social media marketing positions, organizations need to pivot and begin to hire people for a variety of positions with these skills. These range from sales leaders to legal departments that need to account for social media policy, to developers who need to integrate social media APIs into products, and communication designers for CEOs who will manage and communicate with internal and external audiences through social media. My goal in life is ultimately to use my background in social media, coding and APIs to help empower every employee at Microsoft (that's 90,000+ worldwide) via education and evangelism to be avid users of social media. This is because the skills of social media are so versatile, so well-rounded and touch so many areas of business from planning, supply chain management, sales, customer service and product development (developers!) that not having deep skills in these areas disadvantages organizations in a world moving at the speed of the cloud.

Just as it used to be important to note on your CV and resume along with your LinkedIn profile that you had skills in Microsoft Office, it will be a more important factor to note how the use of social media platforms, including optimization and analytics, is the gateway to many jobs currently and in the near future.

These in-demand skills areas represent more of a structural shift than a passing trend which many people told me was the case when I informed them about Friendster in 2004. It is because of the rapid, daily fragmentation in media and communication that requires new approaches to human capital development. While you may scoff and say, "Social is just a bunch of people 'liking' things on Facebook or Tumblr," you're missing the point of what social could offer. At the basic root it allows for connection and understanding who other people are from a variety of different disciplines from a number of geographical areas with a sense of empathy usually missing from most communication platforms.

From this, one can literally create "design thinking" opportunities for the future. While traditional business models are currently the norm in our culture (working for one company for a long tenure and creating things with little customer interaction or feedback), social media represents the dawn of a new landscape. One where people who speak different languages, use different apps and tools intersect to build new solutions in tandem with the users of those tools and solve some of the most daunting questions that face us as a species. Social media is the tipping point toward an economy just emerging built around collaboration, non-company affiliation, alliances via APIs, non-hierarchical leadership models and meritocratic workforces.

What is your opinion on this topic? Better yet, what's your favorite book? ;)

Geoffrey Colon is a Group Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft. You can follow him here on LinkedIn and on Twitter where you can @ message him the next time you're in Seattle and want to set up face-to-face time to talk about the future of any subject or your favorite EDM DJ. You can read his Futurist Lab blog on Tumblr, listen to his podcast on Spreaker or visit this site for details of his upcoming book Disruptive Marketing being released in 2016 on AMACOM Books with IBM's Michelle Killebrew.