these companies know how important it is.
we know this because they insist on having a twitter, a facebook, an instagram, and sometimes a youtube channel.
and they know its part of marketing. and maybe PR, even though thats dangerous, but whatever. they understand the power.
and yet i see people asking for 1-2 years experience. the same people say they want to pay them $30-$35k
a year.
who do you think youre gonna get for that rate? and what do you think that person is going to create in the one spot that routinely is the face of the company? probably nothing interesting because, like seriously, youre gonna let the lowest paid person on your team do cool outside-the-box shit on your twitter? daily? without you watering it down so that its no longer cool nor outside the box? doubt it.
when you apply for jobs they usually ask you to write a cover letter. sometimes they may even ask what you would do to improve what is currently being done.
every now and then im tempted to say, “i’d change everything. i’d stop mimicking what everyone else is doing. i’d be original. i’d pretend that social media is new and the rules have not been established. and everything is changing, so why not BE THE CHANGE instead of aping what tom dick and harry have done?”
ok fine, i have said that in some cover letters. and it gets tossed just like the boring cover letters.
i even had one guy have a good interview with me and then say, “give us a few pages of what you would improve on.”
i wrote six pages. starting with SEO. lord knows know 23 year old is giving them a full page critique about their meta tags, their mish moshed index pages, and how their content – if tweaked ever so slightly – could turn their website into a monster in a short period of time for very little cost.
a couple weeks later they said they were gonna hire someone from within to do their social and i was all mmmm hmmmm. but i looked at their meta tags and they didnt change shit. they just wanted to underpay a pretty girl.
people dont wanna change the world. it doesnt matter what their mission statement is, how punk rock they pretend they are, how progressive their so called style is. they hire people who look like them, not people who look like LA. how do i know? LA is 47% latino. let’s start there. talk to me about your last 20 hires and then tell me that 9-10 of them were brown or black.
it’s like when i clean my room. maybe i’ll put that one little thing over there. or that other little thing in the trash. but if i was serious about cleaning my room, it would look noticeably different when i was done. and it would look like a mess while i was doing it.
which is why I look like a mess right now.
cuz i am going through a metamorphosis. because if i dont, i’ll die. and be nothing. like half of the places who wont even write me back.