New job: social-media tweeter

"The secret for these companies is to have identifiable people whose job it is to tweet," Paul Carr told New York Times blogger MP Mueller in a piece posted today on "You're the Boss," the NYT blog on small business.

That's the first time I've ever heard it spelled out. New media is creating jobs in small businesses if only the small business owners recognize that new media needs full-time workers filling the jobs. What small business is going to hire someone to "tweet" all day?

Naturally, Carr, who is making the recommendation, is also a blogger and a journalist, someone getting paid for writing up suggestions, not for making payroll.

But Mueller also quotes a businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, who sells wine and helped boost revenues of his dad's New Jersey liquor store from $4 million to $50 million through social media. Vaynerchuk told Mueller he spent 12 hours a day answering e-mail and working Facebook and Twitter since 2006 to accomplish that. I suppose his dad was working the counter all that time.

The point I'm trying to make here is that new media requires work time from those who would use it to self-market and build their businesses. True, the time can be written off to marketing and customer service, but the time has a per-hour cost that often goes overlooked by those who recommend such investment.

"You're the Boss" features Mueller and a half dozen other bloggers on small-business issues at the New York Times website. I recently discovered the blog and have found the content interesting although a bit too "ivory tower." Check it out for yourself at the same link as I've included above.