For many companies, the professional world can be divided into two categories:
- Serious professions: banker, lawyer, doctor, engineer…
- Kid jobs: Club Med activity leader, pedal-boat attendant in Annecy, live distributor of free newspapers, server at McDonald’s and… web marketer.
When you browse job sites, you really get the feeling that webmarketing is child’s play: out of 10 job offers in the field, 9 are offered as internships or entry-level positions.
Here is an excerpt from a posting published by the subsidiary of a major French bank for a position as a “web marketing officer”:
“[…] you have good interpersonal skills and a good knowledge of web marketing techniques. You want to enhance your academic background with concrete, rich and educational experience in a company. You are looking for an internship for your degree, which will allow you to put your academic learning into practice. […]”
I’ll skip over the “interpersonal skills,” a tired cliché people love to trot out at trade shows. What makes you smile is that they manage to put “good knowledge of web-marketing techniques” and “internship” together in the same ad.
To do web marketing, you need to:
- Have a good grasp of strategic marketing in order to translate it effectively into operations.
- Have hands-on experience with SEO, SEA, and SMO. Given that good organic SEO only bears fruit after 6 months / 1 year, you can imagine the perspective a freshly graduated student can have (or not).
- Know how to manage communities of several hundred users.
- Understand the technical constraints related to the web and have basic knowledge of HTML (an absolute minimum).
- Know how to write, period, and also how to write for the web.
Easy. These days, young people know Facebook inside out (just like truck drivers know diesel engine technology).
