Employers are Liking and Hiring Social Media Workers--Except Associations

Yesterday I spoke at Digital East about the challenges and opportunities of association social media. A lot of the information I presented came from ASAE's new report, Benchmarking in Association Management: Social Media. I still need to post my slides (not that they'll be super useful to anyone, as I went all Slide:ology and only used images, which resulted in a furious few hours the night before realizing I wouldn't be able to read from my slides so needed to basically memorize the whole thing) but a few findings from the report:

• Associations are mostly still in the "information gathering" stage of social media adoption
• Most (68%) of responding associations have either no staff dedicated to social media or less than 1/2 of a FTE devoted to it
• While social media staffing in associations is projected to increase over the next year, spending on social media is not budgeted to increase. Go figure.

I couldn't help but think what a stark contrast this is to the non-association world, as portrayed in this recent LA Times article. Contrast, for instance, the association hiring stats above with this quote from the LA Times article:

The number of social media-related jobs on Monster has surged 75% over the last year, O'Reilly said. About 155 positions are available a month, up from an average of 88 a month a year ago.

155 social media positions a month? Wow. Who wants to place bets on when there will be 155 social media positions TOTAL in the association world? I'd say the safe bet would be "not anytime soon."