So many of us are one (wo)man machines. We jumped right in the fire doing employer brand­ing, recruit­ing, mar­ket­ing and mon­i­tor­ing rep­u­ta­tion our­selves. We spend count­less hours (though we should start count­ing if we want to be able to cal­cu­late the ROI) set­ting up and nur­tur­ing accounts across mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions. For most of us it’s not our pri­mary job. We have adopted social media as a tool to help us do what we do better.

But what if it is your job? What if you are lucky to land a posi­tion like this?

Address: Encino, CA, 91316
Date Listed: Aug-27–09

Did you read all those respon­si­bil­i­ties and then get wide eyed at the com­pen­sa­tion of $9.00 per hour? I did. For it to be done with any sem­blance of qual­ity how would you get a per­son to work for that hourly rate that really knows what they are doing to make a worth­while invest­ment in time, money and resources?

e_man @karla_porter $9 an hour!  That’s a joke.  It should be a LOT more.  IMO.

Paris22 @karla_porter @sarahw79 I have apos­t­ing for a Social Media Job all com­mis­sion but will come out to alot more than $9 per hour.

So I started digging…

Bro­ken down to an hourly rate using the stan­dard of 2080 hours per year, at the low end of the range Payscale.com sug­gests social media man­age­ment is val­ued at $17.97 per hour. At the high end $34.43.

Since the field is so new there are no rel­e­vant comp stud­ies to back up these numbers.

Yet.

Con­duct a sim­ple Google search with terms like  “social media com­pen­sa­tion” and you’ll find it’s start­ing to be dis­cussed. Most of the grass roots con­tent is found, appro­pri­ately enough, on blogs.

Social CRM asked the ques­tion, “Are you think­ing care­fully through your “Com­pen­sa­tion Plan” in your social media efforts?” in May of this year.  It’s a thought for med­i­ta­tion.  No one answered.

Jim Durbin, aka @smheadhunter with a blog of the same name and a ning site, Jobs in Social Media (which I joined to get info for this post), has a lot of infor­ma­tion posted about these types of jobs. He even has some listed. But.…. I didn’t find what I was look­ing for, a con­ver­sa­tion on salaries.

I got all excited for a minute think­ing I found the social media com­pen­sa­tion gold mine when after 2 cups of cof­fee and a dish of veg­e­tar­ian Chana Masala while search­ing I came across a post at Online Com­mu­nity Report.  They’re doing research on this topic for the 2nd year and  closed the 2009 sur­vey for the Social Media Com­pen­sa­tion Sur­vey Report on August 28th. They part­nered with Online Com­mu­nity Research Net­work for the study. They don’t state when the results will be avail­able. In any event, unless you par­tic­i­pate you will be charged for the results. Last year’s price was $295. They do offer a free sum­mary report after a registration.

Key find­ings from the report:

• The aver­age annual salary for the 145 peo­ple sur­veyed in the US was $84k
• 11 peo­ple par­tic­i­pated from the UK and the aver­age was $67k
• 10 peo­ple responded from Canada for an aver­age of $64k

My eye­brows raised.  I’m not sure how I feel about the sur­vey results. The pool of par­tic­i­pants was only 225  and they came up with things like work­ers over 60 were the high­est earn­ers. In social media? Really? IDK, maybe I’m being naive. You might want to take a look to see what you glean from it. Come back to let me know, OK?

If you do SEO or SEM there is a sur­vey going on at Word­stream Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Blog through next week. It’s really a poll, not exactly research by Equi­lar but I give them credit for trying.

In the end, there is such lit­tle data avail­able on new media com­pen­sa­tion that you either have to be a great nego­tia­tor or accept the job for the glory, because there isn’t much to back up what you feel (and know) you’re worth.

Where are all the Com­pen­sa­tion Spe­cial­ists on Labor Day when you need them?