David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has an interesting blog entry about what a job description for a marketing or public relations practitioner should sound like in this new age of social media. I think the main quality required is curiosity:
You’re curious about new things and always try stuff like Skype, Second Life, Twitter, Ryze, XING, digg, and reddit early.
People who are willing to try new things and are not afraid of a little dabbling should be getting work. Perhaps this is what Joe Thornley was getting at in his assertion that he won’t hire people who don’t blog. I reacted strongly to that statement, but I can definitely see where he and others like him are coming from. They want people who are using the tools already, who don’t have to be taught to use them. But that’s where the educators can seem just a little off base. You can’t teach curiosity, or passion. Joe feels he can figure out who someone is from reading their blog and following their online trail, and he’s right. But should educators be counseling people to create these things in the first place? I mean, if a 50 year old professor has to tell a 20 year old student about new technologies on the web, then something feels amiss.