There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and extrapolates it to the entire world".
So, for his 5-person company the social media role "just isn't" a full-time job. I doubt if marketing or HR are full-time jobs there, either.
But at a 1000-person company, they very much are. Tweeters demand and expect instant responses: look how out of the control the Amazon-hates-gays thing got because they took a day or two (fast by corp standards) to respond. You want an instant response from a big company you need a person or team constantly watching and able to get in touch with the people with the answers very quickly. (This fantasy of "everyone in the company can tweet!" doesn't work any more than "everyone in the company will blog on the world wide web!" did)
Similarly, he begs the question hugely with his shade-of-blue instance on analytics and metrics. Not everything that can't be quantified is valueless. It's hard to put a figure on how well-written an article is, for example, or how interesting a story is.
What you can do is measure them by their effects -- see how many readers a story gets, for instance. But even this is a bad path to take: it leads to celebrity gossip and link whoring.
Social media is similar. You might not provide the analytics Spencer wants, but equally you might not want what analytics you do get.
So, for his 5-person company the social media role "just isn't" a full-time job. I doubt if marketing or HR are full-time jobs there, either.
But at a 1000-person company, they very much are. Tweeters demand and expect instant responses: look how out of the control the Amazon-hates-gays thing got because they took a day or two (fast by corp standards) to respond. You want an instant response from a big company you need a person or team constantly watching and able to get in touch with the people with the answers very quickly. (This fantasy of "everyone in the company can tweet!" doesn't work any more than "everyone in the company will blog on the world wide web!" did)
Similarly, he begs the question hugely with his shade-of-blue instance on analytics and metrics. Not everything that can't be quantified is valueless. It's hard to put a figure on how well-written an article is, for example, or how interesting a story is.
What you can do is measure them by their effects -- see how many readers a story gets, for instance. But even this is a bad path to take: it leads to celebrity gossip and link whoring.
Social media is similar. You might not provide the analytics Spencer wants, but equally you might not want what analytics you do get.