Today, when someone mentions a social media job, it’s almost always a marketing job. This is all wrong. Social media pertains to every industry. Not just marketing. And I’m tired of it being bastardized by coat-riders.

I was using social media in 2000 on forums. It’s how I learned my art. Or the beginnings of it. I started blogging in 2003 long before Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

When panelists say, “I’d look at LinkedIn” or, “I’d look at Facebook” when asked what source they would look to if they could only choose one in the hiring process… I want to smack my face!

Why are you going to rely on user-generated content to validate an employee. Ask Yahoo! And their board how that worked out for them.

I can say anything I want. CS degree from University of Maryland (Go Terps!) and 6 years of experience using social media (true, I was a Twitter early adopter and a Facebook member in 2006 when they opened up their walled garden to non-college students). It doesn’t make it true!

But I’m not the guy they want. They want someone with digital marketing experience.

So why the fuck are they looking at FB or LI??

I mean, the bar is set low, right?

I’ve got 10kish followers on Twitter. I must be important. Maybe not as important as, say, @katyperry, but I must be an awesome communicator…

Hahah. Do you see the bullshit I tweet? And my follower count keeps going up! And people still want to hire me for their bullshit marketing jobs!

Common sense… Checked out.

Ronald Reagan said, “Trust yet verify”. Clearly Yahoo! didn’t do that.

And here’s the crux. You’re trusting marketers looking for a job to paint an accurate picture of themselves on social networks that are infested with self-aggrandizing?

“Oh I know the CEO of Startupr… The instagram of photo sharing”.

O RLY? Do tell!

Fuck that noise.

There’s a reason the FBI, CIA and NSA do extensive background checks and polygraphs. And the polys have to be re-upped. Every 5 years. Do we still trust him? Can we verify? Has he cheated on his wife and is he susceptible to blackmail? Same with credit checks. If he needs money, what will he do with our secrets?

(I’d fail)

So stop blowing smoke and hand-jobbing people. That communication intern may be cheap but he’s got 6 months experience and has no LinkedIn quality.

Look at GitHub. That’s social media. Oh but damn… It’s not marketing. Yeah but the code is public and you can bet on ACTUAL data rather that user-generated data.

By the way… I graduated from Stanford.

The thing about my “beat”, as they’d call it in the newspaper business, is that I’m not really all that interested in “the news”. I’m not trying to cover all the stories, nor am I trying to cover most of them. I’m not trying to “break” anything or peddle products. I want to understand how social software affects my life. And yours.

Text comments will be deleted in this thread as I want video comments. ;) Click on the Sessmic Video comments link below. If you don’t already have one, grab a free account over at Seesmic.com.

This is what I want to know. How has social software benefited you? This is open ended and I want you to define what I mean by this. Some example questions might be:

1. How you got a job using LinkedIn
2. How you found an old crush on Facebook
3. How blogging helped you gain support for a good cause
4. How you used Flickr to communicate to your family on the other side of the world
5. How you used Brightkite to track your migration habits
6. How Twitter made the World Series special for you
7. How you had a brilliant entrepreneurial idea from a discussion on FriendFeed
8. How you used VC portfolio companies to attract the attention of a VC and get funded
9. How you made a career by offering advice on a blog

These are easy examples. I want you to offer your own insight on how, sometime, somewhere, social tools have enhanced your life. Tell us your story on video. If you don’t, I’ll look like a complete idiot for this format – but I’m okay with that. :)