Help us write the Job Description – Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing

We recently posted a job that got a lot of buzz because of its qualifications. The Senior Manager, Emerging Media Marketing role had among the qualifications, one year of active blogging experience, and preferred qualifications of a graduate degree, and 250+ followers on Twitter. The last one is what led to the most commentary, spawning at least a couple of blog posts, and dozens of re-tweets and conversations. The graduate degree qualification also created a lot of discussion.

In following the conversation around this job posting we discovered that many people had other ideas for how this job description should look, and what the qualifications should be. We realized that perhaps we hadn’t thought of everything. Beyond that we thought perhaps we could find a way to enable a more pointed discussion about this relatively new job category of Emerging Media.

It seemed to us to be a natural progression to get the community involved in crafting the job description and qualifications. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

We’d like you, (yes all of you), to help us write the job description for our Sr Manager of Emerging Media Marketing job.

We’d also like you all to help us pick the best description.

Here’s How To Participate

1. Starting now, until Tuesday, July 14th, at 5pm central submit your job description idea to our Best Buy IdeaX site. IdeaX is a site where people like you can share your own ideas on how to make Best Buy better – through idea posts, popular vote and discussions with the rest of the IdeaX community.

For consistency’s sake, we’ve offered some parameters outlined in the ‘Guidelines’ (See below). However, if you feel you have a better way to structure the job description and qualifications for this type of role, have at it.

2. To make the voting process easier, use the phrase “job description” – in the tag field on the IdeaX entry form. See the picture below..

This will make it easier for voters to find all the entries more easily by simply clicking on the “job description” tag on the IdeaX site.

3. The winner is the one with the most votes on IdeaX as of Thursday, July 16th at 5pm Central. What does the winner get? Mostly just publicity, some satisfaction maybe. We debated about offering prizes but decided an authentic discussion is more likely to happen when people are interested in the topic without secondary motivations. We’re hoping for a really robust discussion that perhaps will foster clarity for how to craft these types of roles.

Of course the resulting job description that we post is ultimately still up to us, but we plan to incorporate the winning idea’s description and qualifications. It may be that we mash-up the top three, or even other entries. We’re confident that good ideas will come from the discussion, and that we’ll incorporate those ideas.

Why on earth would we do this?

1. No, not because we’re lazy, we just recognize that a large group of people will come up with more ideas than a small group. We’d like help thinking through the important and relevant stuff for this job.

2. This role is a new one for us as it likely is for other companies. We have a lot of smart and social media savvy people here and amongst our partners and friends. However, there are a larger number of smart and social media savvy people “out there”. So instead of thinking we know it all, we’d like to increase our chances of getting it right by surveying the wisdom of the industry.

3. One of our recruiters Joshua Kahn announced this role via Twitter a couple weeks ago. Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang, Jason Falls, and others it spawned dozens of re-tweets and at least a couple of blog posts. Pretty incredible buzz considering it’s a job posting. Many people had alternative ideas for us; good ideas. We thought it would be an interesting experiment to be more deliberate about capturing and actually using those ideas.

4. Based on the buzz, we also thought, it would be a great way to spread the message that we’re hiring for this role.

The Guidelines

A suggested minimal structure for submitting your job description idea to the Best Buy IdeaX site that contains the following sections:

Description of responsibilities
Basic Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
other

Some guidelines for what we’re looking for in this role, and the real challenge, passing the HR test for legitimate qualifications. You’re free to follow whatever creative structure you like, but this is more or less the structure of most job postings.

1. Responsibility section:

Here’s the most basic description for what we need this person to do….

Be the leader for marketing Best Buy’s brands, products, initiatives, services, et al via Social Media, Mobile, and Video.
Lead direct reports and agency partners
Strategy/Budget/time line/project management responsibility
Inspire/Generate ideas
Develop an internal/external network to get the above done.

Please add to, expand upon, and embellish these starting points to your hearts content.

2. Basic Qualification section:

For those unfamiliar with the technical bits here, ‘Basic Qualifications’ are also known as ‘minimum’ qualifications; i.e. the price of entry to even be considered for the role.

A basic qualification is not THE determining factor for who will get the job, it’s a minimum barrier to consideration.

Also, legally, a basic qualification has to be objective. One has to be able to use the qualification and say conclusively if a person has it or doesn’t either via the resume or other visible evidence (CV, Portfolio, etc). “Fabulous personality”, “creative communicator”, “effective leader”, “great dancer”; while great things in a candidate and person, are not verifiable via a resume, cv, or other document, thus are not technically legitimate qualifications. Those more subjective things are important, and are discovered or identified in the interviews.

3. Preferred Qualifications:

Simple; these are the nice-to-haves, not have-to-haves. Again, they have to be objective. This is where we previously had the “250+ twitter followers” qualification.

4. Other

For this part throw in whatever else you think we need to think about for this job. Interview questions, tests to determine social media awareness or capability, creative interview formats, or anything you think relevant to selecting the best person for the role.

That’s it. We look forward to hearing your ideas, and the conversation sure to follow. Stay tuned here for updates. Follow the discussion, vote and submit your ideas at Best Buy IdeaX.

July 8th, 2009 in Uncategorized | tags: challenge, emerging media marketing, job

Comments (263)

joshuakahn (Joshua Kahn)July 8th, 2009 at 10:59 am

Twitter Comment

#bbytweets help us write the job description for Emerging Media role [link to post]

Barry JudgeUpdates from the CMO of Best Buy

Help us write the Job Description – Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing

Comments (263)

Leave a comment

My Twitter

Tags

Most Popular

Search Best Buy Jobs