Why My Mom is Now a Fan of Radian6

I have been involved in social media, both personally and professionally, for over six years. While that pales in comparison to my more than 20 years of marketing experience, it is a long time to be involved with such a new area of marketing and communications. My career path has taken me from client-side marketer to agency to social media consultant to social media at an agency. And now it is time for another step. If you will allow me to paraphrase, “One small step for Radian6, one giant leap for Jeff.”

That’s right, I have started at Radian6 as a social strategist. If you are interested in what I will be doing, you can read about it on their social strategy blog. I am excited to be working with Dave Thomas, someone I began stalking when he was social media manager at SAS software. Well, stalking in a social media way, and we even did an interview with him for SocialMediaB2B.com. I was there, as evidenced by this photo.

So onto to the important part of this post, my mom. For years my mom has told me that she doesn’t understand what I do. No matter how many times I have explained, she claims not to understand. But every time there is an article in her local paper about a local company using social media, she is tempted to cut it out and send it to me. Just like I told her not to send jokes by email, or urban legend warnings that were disproven by Snopes.com years before, I had to tell her not to send me the newspaper clippings.

Now that I am working for a social media company, she can go to their website and try to figure out what they do. Frankly, I think she is just happy that I am progressing in my career “in these troubled economic times” and that I picked a growing field to be in.

I also think she is actually a bigger fan of salesforce.com, Radian6′s parent company. She can understand what they do because she used to be in radio sales. A sales-based CRM system is something that makes sense to her. A company monitoring the social web for mentions of their brand doesn’t really makes sense to her because she can’t imagine why anyone would talk about a brand online. Salesforce.com is a company that her friends have heard of and is talked about on tv. She is also excited that I get to go to Dreamforce, their huge tradeshow next week in San Francisco (Here’s a link to a free pass to the keynotes and the expo if you are around). But she a bit freaked out by the re-targeted salesforce.com ads that have started following her on the web.

This position is a great fit with my experience and skills and I am looking forward to working with enterprise companies that understand the value of social media and are looking to improve their adoption of it. If you have any questions about social media monitoring or Radian6, just let me know. I’ll be in the thick of it soon enough.