Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and blogs present resource problems for corporations that want to use these channels as marketing tools. Managing multiple channels that lack unification requires more time, resources and specialization than most companies can afford internally. Firms like Page One PR have benefited from this problem because we specialize in the unification and management of social media marketing programs.

At the same time, we’ve learned that proprietary corporate portals that combine video, forums, reviews and blogs can serve as an alternative to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. A corporate portal is more integrated and easier to navigate than individual social media sites. Social media channels are wide and shallow, but the corporate portal is narrow and deep. For customers who want depth of information, the corporate portal may be the better answer.

A good example of a corporate portal is the SAP Community Network (SCN)*, an online community that doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter. SCN is based on proprietary technology developed at SAP. The community consists of more than 1.7 million people, 9,000 companies, 60,000 wikis, and 3.5 million forum posts. The corporate portal offers an efficient way to get product-specific information that can be searched and managed from a central location. However, even a corporate portal that is enormously successful such as the SCN portal can’t contain all discussions. Online discussions will bleed over to other channels such as Twitter, Facebook or whatever tool may be hot at the moment.

While there are excellent examples of corporate portals — just as there are excellent examples of social media campaigns — even companies at the cutting edge of marketing are only just beginning to integrate their efforts at managing peer-generated content that originates in the ‘wild’ with content in their portal. Today there is a great opportunity for smart marketers to leverage the strengths of both the corporate portal and social media channels by integrating a corporate web site with popular tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This will mark the dawn of Social Media 2.0.

I see this next stage of social media marketing consisting of the following elements:

* There is a central hub for online communication where customers can get updates. The infrastructure for the central hub could be a simple tool like Twitter, or it could be a more complex corporate portal.

* Careful deployment of a central hub helps corporations streamline the official communications spokes linked to the hub. It’s much easier to eliminate redundant channels, clearly define goals, and manage messages. Many corporations are running too many similar corporate Twitter channels and Facebook groups that focus on the same products. Eliminate the redundancy.

* A much larger network of community-generated content is freely created around the “official” hub and spokes.

* Online conversations are monitored at all levels – hub, spokes, and community networks.

Social media, with content generated by peers, is now an important part of our daily communication, not just for technology hobbyists or businesses, but also for everyday people making decisions about how to spend their time or money. We are at the cusp of a moment of great change in how real people find and assess the value of information. I look forward to seeing how companies merge the great content and infrastructure they have on their corporate web sites with the amazing opportunities presented by vast amounts of unfiltered content produced on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

*Disclosure: SAP is a Page One social media client.

So just how big is the World Wide Web 2.0?  13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 900,000 blog posts are written per day, which are read by 77% of the active Internet users.  Facebook has a population of over 250 million people, making it the fourth largest country in the world.  There are almost 4 billion Tweets to date (that’s 560 billion characters or so…and counting).  These numbers are sure to have shot up even higher by the time you get to the end of this paragraph.

Whether you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid or gone off the grid, there’s no denying that there are huge, new forces changing the way that we consume and transmit information and there’s a whole new set of tools whose potential we’re only just starting to understand. This is social media. This is Page One PR.

We are a Silicon Valley public relations firm that caters to the B2B industry and we are currently looking to add consultants to our Social Media Team in the San Francisco office.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

Page One is looking for brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individuals who want an opportunity to impact real companies’ business decisions with social media.

Social media is constantly evolving, so we don’t expect you to be a “social media guru”.  No previous PR or social media experience is necessary, but if you’ve got some, we won’t complain. What we’re looking for are people who understand what social media is and how it can be used for the good of our clients and their customers alike.  If you can see yourself executing strategic PR projects and developing never-done-before social media campaigns, you could be who we are looking for.

WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:

Ask yourself if you like who we are. It’s important.

We are 100% about our people: over-achievers who get the job done better than anyone else and still have fun doing it.

As a new Consultant/Page Wonder, you’ll learn from the best: our Sr. PR people have developed social media strategies for Cisco, reported for the Los Angles Times, managed social media campaigns for SAP, placed cover stories in BusinessWeek, taught graduate journalism at UC Berkeley and even created the first ISP in Japan.

We’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, writing skills and a track record of success.

When it comes to work/life balance, we don’t just work. We are marathoners, salsa dancers, music enthusiasts, avid travelers and more. Page One gives us the time to do what we love, and even incorporate those interests into the work we do.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:

We don’t look for gutsy people just to take up space. There’s no paint-by-numbers or auto-pilot.  By-the-book at Page One means going off-script.  Social media is constantly evolving, so our processes have to constantly evolve with it.  That’s where you come in.

Page One’s Social Media Consultants help design social media strategy and execute innovative campaigns for some of the most well known technology brands in the Valley.  Daily activities could include social media monitoring and analysis, video production, blog writing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn management, and social media strategy development for our clients. Every Page Wonder actively engages in developing clients’ PR, marketing and brand management strategies. As a PR agency we specialize in company launches, product launches, media relations, messaging and positioning, analyst relations and (of course) social media.

WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:

Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.

Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off from your first day on the job.

• 20 PTO days (even in your first year)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance
• Flexible spending account

If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Consultant at Page One, email a resume and a note telling us about yourself to Shelly Milam at socialmediajobs@pageonepr.com.