I just updated the growing list of Corporate Social Strategists, you can take a look at these 280 professionals leading the charge at their corporation.
For a few years now, I’ve been managing the list of Corporate Social Strategists at large corporations (over 1000 employees, and on the buyer side). Part of my passion from being in this role at Hitachi a few years ago, has lead me to conducting in depth research on the future of this role, the Corporate Social Strategist (persona, title, degree, background, challenges, goals, teamcount, budgets). Since then, I’ve been making regular updates on the weekends when I can find time, and wanted to post a few stats:
- 280 folks have this highly coveted role, and growing. When I first published the list on Jan 7, 2011, there were 161 Corporate Social Strategists. Today on March 20th, the list is now 280 members (growing 73% since Jan), and the submissions continue to come in. I’m not suggesting the roles are being hired between Jan and March, but likely the awareness of the list.
- Technology companies lead the pack, at 37% of list. No surprise, but tech companies are the first to adopt new technologies. In fact, by my count, both the hardware and software groups (I had to seperate them out as they are so large) account for 104 of the strategists. This early adopter market has tended to be the first group out of the gate, with many of them being B2B.
- Don’t discount regulated industries, which comprises of 20% of the list. A growing 57 members of the list are in the regulated space, which I accounted as: energy, financial, insurance, health and life sciences, and government. One could argue that automotive would fit this bill too, but I didn’t account for that. In fact this role becomes incredibly important for regulated industries who need safe measures in place as they are under immediate scrutiny. In fact, as I argued in my recent post about Social Media Management Systems, regulated industries will need to have a social strategy for compliance reasons.
At Altimeter, we’re proud that Read Write Web’s top editor Marshall Kirkpatrick has identified that three of the top four Twitter accounts followed by these social business buyers are at our firm. Much of my time is spent helping these Corporate Social Strategist to stay out of the “social media helpdesk” and achieve scalable social programs, including getting them ready internally. I’ll be going through a great deal of my research at full day workshop in April at the Kansas IRL conference, hope to see you there.
If you want to keep track of who’s getting hired in this space, see my long term archive of folks “On the Move” in the Social Space, which I’ve been tracking since 2007.
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