Town criers used to be really important.

Imagine this: You are an illiterate peasant, toiling away in your cow pasture circa mid 16th century Europe. You know little of worldly affairs. In fact, you know very little of the world outside your village. Ok, once you sold a sow to the cooper living one village over, but that was the extent of your wanderin’. When it comes to what’s going on in the village, hey, you’re in everybody’s business. But you are ignorant as to what is happening around the world because you can’t read, you almost never leave your home, and visitors are very rare because almost everyone else is illiterate and never leaves their villages either.

Suddenly you hear the town crier from the main square call out “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” (which was really a fancy of way of saying “Hear ye!”) You immediately drop the piece of cow dung you’re holding and race to the square eager to hear the news the crier brings. This event only happens once a week, and it’s a big deal. What news of the plague? Is it another public execution? Has His Majesty gotten married? Most importantly, when will the monks finish brewing that wonderful wine of theirs?

Ok, so you’re probably thinking “What the hell does this have to do with social media? You lied to us Stanowich, luring us here with the promise of a poignant article on social media obsolescence. Instead you’re talking about town criers, peasants, and cow dung!”

Hold on gentle reader. There is a method to my blathering. I believe the role of the Social Media Manager will soon be as obsolete as the town crier. Let me explain why.

The town crier was the gatekeeper for information back in his day (they were usually men) as he could read, had contact with the outside world, and therefore had control over what information was conveyed to the populace. In many organizations, a social media manager performs a very similar role, as he/she (I’ll use she to keep it simple) often acts as the gatekeeper for social media within an organization. She’s often responsible for communicating and curating information from the outside of an organization to those within the organization. This usually involves spiffy graphs and lots of talk about sentiment and awareness. She is the voice of the organization to the public via social media, and in return funnels the vox populi to the power brokers in the organization.

But the very nature of social media makes it democratic and as its use becomes more and more ubiquitous, more people become comfortable with using it. As the rate of literacy and travel in early modern Europe increased the town crier eventually became irrelevant. As peoples’ comfort and skill  with social media increases, the sum effect will be that social media will no longer be seen as a dedicated job role, but rather as a skill set.

When was the last time you put “understands MS Word” on your resume? Everyone knows how to use MS Word and other basic productivity tools. As more and more Millennials join the ranks of the workforce, they will bring with them their skill with social media. This will make it easier to disseminate and collect information via social media channels throughout a workforce, making a sole gatekeeper unnecessary.

This will not happen overnight. A crucial point is that just because everyone knows how to use social media effectively for themselves, does not mean they know how to use it effectively for their organization. Comfort with a technology, does not imply mastery of it. Someone can post to Facebook or write a blog, but does this not make them an expert in social media for customer support, sentiment analysis, and increasing the bottom line.

But eventually in the not-to-distant future, people will be looking up from their wearable technology screens that will be darn near everywhere as they deal with their constant streams of social feeds and say “Hey, remember when we had ONE person use that thing called HootSuite to manage Facebook and Twitter? Boy, can you believe people were worried about this stuff?? Now excuse me while I get back to watching the Oilers game via the feed from the players’ Google Visor.”