NetProspex: Marketing Folks Are “Social”

If I asked you to tell me which pro­fes­sions have the dee­pest Rolo­dex, I bet you wouldn’t start out with com­pu­ter pro­gram­ming or accoun­ting. I’m gues­sing you’d list mar­ke­ting, sales, HR (rec­rui­ters, any­way) and PR. So it shouldn’t be a sur­prise that mar­ke­ting and human resources/recruiting were the most “social jobs” on thejust-released Net­Pros­pex Social Index (NPSI), which is based on a data­base of “crowd­sour­ced busi­ness con­tacts” (tip: Tech­Flash). The NPSI is a func­tion of three things:

• Social Con­nec­ted­ness: how many peo­ple had more than one social media pro­file (accor­ding to the web­site, these are Twit­ter, Face­book, and LinkedIn)
• Social Friend­li­ness and Reach: the ave­rage num­ber of con­nec­tions per per­son across major social networks
• Social Acti­vity is based enti­rely on Twit­ter stats: num­ber of tweets, num­ber of follo­wers, and num­ber of peo­ple followed

What’s not clear is how Net­Pros­pex clum­ped jobs together.

For exam­ple, there is an “IT” job but also a Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer. (These two dis­tinc­tions were lum­ped into one for the win­ner, mar­ke­ting.) What is an “IT” job? It’s not tech­ni­cal sup­port, which had its own cate­gory. Later in the report it is defi­ned as “IT directors/managers.” By rea­ding the web­site, I can further refine this as “peo­ple who recom­mend and buy pro­ducts” in this sec­tor, other­wise known as “pros­pects.” So calling these cate­go­ries “jobs” is also mis­lea­ding; we’re really tal­king about senior managers.

Accor­ding to the Net­Pros­pex data, Goo­gle leads the pack as far as emplo­yees, clas­si­fied as a B2B pros­pects, who use Twit­ter. It’s not clear how impor­tant having a Twit­ter account is ver­sus having a lot of follo­wers; the algo­rithm used to make the deter­mi­na­tion is not explai­ned. [This is not to the time to explain why num­ber of follo­wers or num­ber follo­wed are not good mea­su­res of suc­cess on Twit­ter.] Nor is there any refe­rence to total emplo­yees; I’ve added that in parens where it was easily found.

1. Goo­gle  (21,805, Moun­tain View)
2. The Walt Dis­ney Co. (144,000, Bur­bank)
3. Live Nation, Inc. (4,300, Beverly Hills)
4. Amazon.com, Inc. (28,300, Seattle)
5. Adobe (8,660, San Jose)
6. Dell Inc. (94,300, Texas)
7. Brin­ker Inter­na­tio­nal (100,400, Dallas)
8. Juni­per Net­works Inc. (7,732, Sunny­vale)
9. Best Buy Co., Inc. (180,000, Min­ne­sota)
10. Com­pu­ter Associates
11. Cisco Sys­tems (70,700, San Jose)
12. Intel Cor­po­ra­tion (80,400, Santa Clara)
13. Yum Brands Inc. (49,000, Louis­vi­lle)
14. Sun Mic­rosys­tems Inc. (Goo­gle­Fi­nance, UK)
15. eBay Inc. (16,400, San Jose)
16. Intuit Inc. (7,700, Moun­tain View)
17. Iron Moun­tain Incor­po­ra­ted (10,500, Bos­ton)
18. EMC Cor­po­ra­tion (43,200, Mas­sachu­setts)
19. Mic­ro­soft Cor­po­ra­tion (89,000, Red­mond)
20. Moto­rola Inc. (53,000, Illi­nois)

What do these orga­ni­za­tions have in com­mon? Cali­for­nia and tech­no­logy! Two are food-related; two are enter­tain­ment; one is retail — but tech­no­logy; 13 are head­quar­te­red in Cali­for­nia (+Sun, which used to be head­quar­te­red there).  Tech­no­logy mana­gers and exe­cu­ti­ves using tech­no­logy to net­work? Let’s chant in uni­son: “doh!”

It’s hard to recon­cile this chart with one that says New York City wins the “most busi­ness peo­ple who tweet” con­test. The mea­su­re­ments are the same: num­ber of tweets, num­ber follo­wed, num­ber of follo­wers. Accor­ding to this mea­su­re­ment, the top five are New York, San Fran­cisco, Washing­ton, DC., Sac­ra­mento, and Phoe­nix. And remem­ber: it’s not “busi­ness peo­ple” per se it’s “B2B prospects.”

Are you a pros­pect? Go check out the data­base.

Chec­king my own name makes the claim of data­base veri­fi­ca­tion … questionable:

First, the HTML Wri­ters Guild board posi­tion was a volun­teer slot … in the 1990s. So it’s not pos­si­ble that this con­tact could have been veri­fied in January 2010. I sup­pose it’s pos­si­ble that there is another Kathy Gill on the board; howe­ver, the Guild doesn’t list mem­bers.

Second, I haven’t writ­ten for About.com since March 2009 … and even then I had no power to recom­mend or autho­rize busi­ness purchases.

Third, a Portland-based Kathy Gill, who is a B2B pros­pect based on her senior posi­tion with an agency, isn’t on the list!

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to actually fix one’s pro­file, not that I want to be a mar­ke­ting target.

Sum­mary: Grains of salt needed.

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