Is Corporate Blogging a Skillset Yet?

In the past, I've used Monster.com to do some unorthodox things:

• serve as a data point to find out where early-adopters are with respect to a technology
• provide a sanity check on how much a particular technology has dispersed
• figure out where labor demand is (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley).

Now to give a little context on how this might work over time, back in 2000 I was chartered to find customers and partners that were ripe for extensible markup language (XML) technologies (I actually secured a six-figure $$, early adopter customer using laser sighting techniques and based on what they posted on the job boards). Anyway, if I recall back in 2000 when I did a search on Monster, there might have been 20 job postings returned max. Now it is 2005, and the number of postings matching XML exceed 1000, and Monster cannot return all of the results it is so many.

With that as backdrop, is blogging an actual skillset? Well, here's an excerpt from an actual marketing job posting by Working Assets:

"The ideal candidate is the kind of person who:
• has a gmail account
• reads at least two of the following blogs daily (talkingpointsmemo,
  dailykos, atrios, juan cole, wonkette, instapundit, brad Delong, MyDD)
• took time off from your job to volunteer during the election campaign
  (or tried but couldn’t get anyone to call you back).
• Maybe never bothered to finish the Cluetrain Manifesto but you got the
  point."

Cool. That's pretty darn specific about blogging, so this might lead one to believe that blogging as a skill set is really coming into its own.

If one looks further though, searches for "blog", "blogs", "blogging", etc. all seem to return from 10-30 job postings. Most of the jobs are technical or product management jobs that match the tech players in the aggregation space and list of major software vendors that blog (as cited by Dave Sifry's study of the corporate blogosphere) - this are companies like Macromedia, Microsoft, etc. Plus the job skill is a "desired" skill. That said, many of the non-technical jobs involving blogging surround community development (e.g., ESPN, AOL).

Couldn't find postings for premo, hired guns positions (like evangelist Robert Scoble).

Maybe we'll have to check the executive recruiter databases next ...  ;)

Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group