“Social Media Experts are the Cancer of Twitter (and must be stopped!” was an article that naturally ruffled a lot of feathers on Twitter last week. In it Michael Pinto describes a scourge of social media expert “zombies” who follow each other, and what’s worse, aspire to manufacture other zombies: “Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.”

Despite its inflammatory tone, the article nonetheless resonated with me and other social media practitioners I know. After I posted the article via my Twitter feed, one representative of a prominent institution DM’d me to say how surprised she was to find that a significant slice of her “followers” were not regular members of the museum-going public but “social media experts.”

So if they’re not zombies, who are these people?

Confession time: I’ve been there. I’ve been in organizations where no one really knew anything about social media and with my Facebook know-how and interwebs surfing ability I’ve been tempted to cultivate my waning whipper-snapper aura and stick on the badge of “expert.”

But I’m here today to say, fellow social media practitioners, its time to put down the crack pipe.

The truth is, there are no experts yet in this  emerging field. Social media is simply a set of tools you can experiment with, in the hopes of finding a better way of dealing with traditional business challenges: interacting with customers, promoting your goods or services, and cultivating a positive image.

Further, I believe that social media will create jobs, but they won’t be for something so amorphous as “social media expert.” Rather, social media will begin to be integrated into traditional job functions, rather than being seen as some superfluous extra. But what do I actually mean? It was fun to think about how social media will inform the jobs of tomorrow. These are my predictions. Obama are you listening?

From Information Technology to Interaction Design

For many years, technology made the flow of information easier, and it was good. Gradually, it became clear that technology is not the be-all, end-all. We have to be extremely mindful of how people interact with technology. Technology and systems aren’t everything—social media is there to remind us that online media, in the end, is a people-centered enterprise. Interaction Design is a real discipline that involves psychology, design, information architechture, and clean writing and is absolutely a field that’s poised to grow immensely in the coming years.

From Customer Service to Community Management

Time was, a customer had a problem and someone in Customer Service from up on high issued their proclamation: free coupon! We’re sorry! You’re SOL! These days, if the only time you hear from a customer is through a complaint, you’ve blown it.

Social media will tweak the traditional customer service relationship from top-down to putting a company representative right in the mix: chatting with actual, real customers all day, solving problems and whipping up positive enthusiasm. Twitter is already beginning to make this happen, with corporate representatives manning the desk for @Starbucks and @Zappos. But expect “Community Manager” to become a must-hire of the social media rich future.

From Marketing/PR to Conversation Leveraging

If it sounds like tomorrow’s “Conversation Leverager” ought to have his organization’s  “Community Manager” on speed dial, that’s because she should! It’s time to start breaking down the wall between departments, people. That’s part of the revolutionary change social media will bring.

And gone are the days when a Marketer tells the public what to think. Instead, social media is creating an atmosphere in which the successful Conversation Leverager puts their ear to the ground, measures the affinity for their brand that already exists, and then channels that affinity into the media and platforms that will amplify it.

Let’s face it: people call themselves “social media experts” because the field is incredibly new and there’s no one around to tell them to stop. As a community of social media practitioners, we can do better.

We can recognize the most wildly successful players on the social media scene right now—the people inspiring great community conversation, building fan bases on Facebook, and getting a lot of buzz going—are people who know better than to slap on a label that places them above their audience.

Where are these people? Good question—you don’t see them because they are down in the trenches, actually interacting with their communities. More than that, they are learning from their communities. They think of themselves as students, not experts.

So let’s all be students for now. Let’s recognize that there’s a lot to learn. And let’s be good community players and egg each other on to better integrate the tools afforded by social media into our current jobs.

How do you use social media in your job today? And how do you think social media will affect the jobs of tomorrow?

-Amanda McCormick is the web editor of the Film Society of Lincoln Center

Getting the okay to start an official, company-sanctioned blog may take some doing, however. Your organization will likely have people who don’t know what a blog is, to those who furtively check Perez Hilton daily. A “blog”—an online publication with datelined posts—encompasses so many different kinds of outfits, from a mommy blogging about Junior’s first words to the Huffington Post, that perhaps it’s natural that the concept strikes fear in the powers-that-be in many a company.

Starting a blog is a worthwhile endeavor for many outfits, however. And you can put your organization on the couch, listen to its fears and allay them. Here is the heads up on some of the objections you’ll encounter and how to deal with them head on.

Organizational fear #1: What happens when we can’t control what the public says about us?

This, I would say is the # 1 fear organizations have about social media: if we give people the ability to comment on what we are do, what if they use our site to say bad things about us? Leave this part out of your spiel to the bosses, but the days of completely controlling the public’s ability to talk smack about your brand or product is over. Social media has put a lot of power in the hands of users. So you’re either in or you’re out—you’re using social media to spark, leverage, and maintain positive chatter, or you’re letting the public completely define who you are in the social media space.

But what will soothe this key fear? A few precautions will help you:

• First, make sure that people have to register to comment. This will weed out the vast majority of people who are out to cause problems in comments.
• Work with a lawyer to hammer out a solid “Terms and Conditions” policy that establishes the community standards for your site. Yes, it’s the mousetype that no one reads, but in the unlikely event that anything goes wrong, it’s the policy that indemnifies your company against bad actors. Assure the head honchos that malicious commenting on an organizational blog is actually very unlikely. Chances are what you post won’t be the most controversial stuff in the world, and thus unlikely to start a flame war.
• Realize your worst enemies are going to be spammers, who are easy enough to deal with via sophisticated spam catching software.
• Do establish monitoring of commenting activity on your blog, but recognize the real risks are actually very few

Organizational fear #2: What if no one comments on our posts? Doesn’t that mean we are a failure?

The fear above has a flipside: the fear of launching a blog and then hearing nothing but crickets. As blogs aren’t traditional marketing or traditional PR, you have to carefully manage your bosses’ expectations about what they can and can’t do.

Blogs that aren’t updated frequently won’t catch fire. Blogs that don’t offer their readers any value—that is to say, do nothing but promote the organization—won’t get you far in the online space. But even when you attain a measure of success with an organizational blog, you may not get a tremendous amount of comments.

Why not? First, remember that it’s only a tiny slice of the readers of any site that actually take the time to participate—some experts put it at 10%. Second, commenters are drawn to provocative, controversial content, something that an organizational blog will likely not cultivate.

Finally, remember that the number of comments aren’t the only way of judging the impact and influence of a blog. Number of visits certainly matters, and so does the number of links you receive from other sites. Are other sites talking about you? Can you use your blog to make ripples across several social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? When you are using a blog to cultivate awareness and affinity for your organization, sometimes it’s these trickier measures that mean the most.

To survive and thrive, a blog has to be lively, but remember to take in a full range of different metrics when looking at the success of your blog.

Organizational fear #3: We have a really established “voice” and we can’t be messing around with that.

Moving from a “read-only” culture from a new digital age “read/write” culture has moved once sacred branded properties into the hands of consumers, Lawrence Lessig writes about this in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Today, your brand has to live on platforms you don’t own like Facebook and Myspace. Its needs to, in other words, learn to speak new languages. A blog is one way to take your “voice” down a peg and make it a little more accessible to the consumers who are currently dying to interact with you.

Organizational fear #4: Aren’t successful blogs always driven by a single personality?

Many of the most popular bloggers—Dooce, Perez Hilton—have carved out their fame on their individuality. However, when you look at Technorati’s ranking of top blogs, group blogs are all over it: Life Hacker, Boing Boing, Gawker et all.

Whether your organization blog is voiced by a single person or several employees is a key decision that will affect the way your blog is perceived. There is no right answer to the question of how your blog’s “voice” should be defined. It’s an evolving process—chances are you’ll go through a process of trial and error before getting it right. And that’s okay—that’s what blogs are for. The bottom line is that any blog, even an organizational one, should have a personality, even if that personality belongs to the collective.

Organizational fear #5: Won’t this take our employees away from more important work?

Because blogs are rather informally written, people sometimes underestimate their power in reaching out to an organization’s audience. And it’s true that blog don’t write themselves. They take a lot of care and feeding in order to survive—a person or group who are willing to champion the medium as a way of connecting with new audiences and building a new channel of communication. Building a quality conversation with your audience—especially in the social media saturated world we live in—isn’t just important work, it’s critical.

Amanda McCormick maintains the filmlinc blog for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.