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Media International Australia

Social media work: reshaping 2017, Vol. 163(1) 122­–136

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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X17693702
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Anthony McCosker
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Abstract
Social media platforms are associated with significant digital transformations but also carry
some uncertainty for organisations seeking to capitalise on their affordances while developing
new professional roles. This article explores the characteristics and contexts of social media
work and the different approaches of organisations as they enter a second wave of application,
moving beyond participation to data extraction within conditions of continuous connectivity and
community management. The article uses hybrid methods: analysing job market data and in-depth
interviews with 18 social media strategists and workers from 13 different organisations. The
analysis is informed by critical accounts of digital labour, and emphasises organisations’ strategic
search for new affordances such as analytics that extract additional value from carefully managed
communities. The findings reveal how social media work has become diffused across industries,
and is understood ‘ecologically’, as a capability that operates right across organisations within a
dynamic and changing media environment.

Keywords
affordances, analytics, media ecology, social media, work and labour

A number of reports have recently warned of substantial transformations in the future of work,
describing the role of technology in fast-tracking ‘digital disruption’ and automation, positioning
these as threats to professional and service industry workforces (Hajkowicz et al., 2016; Harvard
Business Review (HBR), 2010, 2016; Spitzer et al., 2013). A report by the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) titled Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled
Workforce, identifies the key drivers of rapid change: ‘exponential and/or steep growth in comput-
ing power, device connectivity, data volumes and artificial intelligence’, the ‘recent ascendancy of
the peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace (e.g. Upwork, Freelancer, Kaggle, Task Rabbit), and the rise of
platform economics in a globalised labour market characterised by entrepreneurial activity’
(Hajkowicz et al., 2016: 7). The uptake of internal social media systems, such as Slack or Yammer,
for workflow management and information sharing across large organisations could be taken as an
embryonic symptom of this evolution. Social media platforms and new professional roles in social

Corresponding author:
Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University of Technology, John Street, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia.
Email: amccosker@swin.edu.au
McCosker 123

media work play a central role in defining and shaping the contours of the contemporary organisa-
tion. Whether as a matter of influence, analytics and insights, brand and community development
or crisis management, organisations are striving to use social media more effectively and, in turn,
are playing a part in reshaping the digital environment.
This article is about social media work, the dynamic communication ecologies and organisa-
tional contexts it emerges out of and affects, and the search for new affordances that constitute the
current wave of digital transformation. As an archetypal case study within the new creative indus-
tries (Hartley, 2005), social media work defines a more expansive range of media industry and
organisational settings than the more defined and siloed traditional spheres of media work (Deuze,
2007, 2011). Social media work operates across media agencies, of course, but also in contexts
such as retail, hospitality and tourism, health services, government departments and even mining
and construction, among other industries.
To understand this changing environment, the article asks two sets of questions:

What are the organisational contexts and characteristics of emerging professional roles in social
media work, and how are these managed and negotiated in practice?
How is the logic of social media, and the possibilities for networked communication, data
extraction and insights, reshaping organisations and enabling new capabilities?

I use hybrid methods, presenting analysis of recent jobs data to provide baseline evidence of the
evolving landscape for social media work, and show its reach across diverse industries. This is com-
plemented with in-depth interviews with industry leaders, social media strategists and workers across
13 different organisations to provide more nuanced understanding of the adoption of social media and
characteristics of social media work in particular organisational contexts. Each interviewee stressed
the continued search for new affordances in their efforts to make use of social media platforms, was
heavily engaged in establishing new roles in social media work, and understood social media ‘eco-
logically’ as a dynamic environment through which they were compelled to engage.
There are two elements to the ecological character of social media work detailed in this article.
The first involves the shifting organisational structures and strategic positioning of social media
right across organisations from a wide range of industries (beyond media agencies, and beyond the
boundaries of marketing). This manifests in the search for new affordances in social media use.
The second involves the professional practices that seek to activate these affordances while nego-
tiating a dynamic work environment. The analysis follows ecological psychologist James Gibson’s
(1986) understanding of affordances, later adopted in design and human–computer interaction
(HCI) research, as a ‘relational property’ involving the ‘possibilities for action’ that objects, or
tools such as social media platforms, are perceived to offer (Bucher and Helmond, 2017; Nagy and
Neff, 2015). The qualitative analysis details the new wave of application of social media for organ-
isations and a shifting ecology centred around the perceived affordances of data insights and com-
munity management. Participants articulate the intensive labour requirements and expanding skills
required to capitalise on these transformations. Social media is no longer just about ‘joining the
conversation’ for organisations, but involves core community management skills and practices in
addition to capabilities in data extraction and analysis.

Second wave digital transformations: the search for new

affordances and the extraction of social media value
Digital and social media technologies are associated with the disruptive transformation of organisa-
tions and work, and often deterministically positioned as ‘drivers’ of change. A key initial development,
124 Media International Australia 163(1)

as Mandiberg and many others have explained, lies in the move from ‘a unidirectional relationship
between a few trained professional media producers and many untrained media consumers’, towards
‘active audience participation, uprooting the established relationship between media producer and
media consumer’ (Hartley, 2005: 12; Mandiberg, 2012: 1). More specifically, the ‘logics of social
media’ for Van Dijck and Poell (2013) involves a mutual ‘programmability’ between social tech-
nologies and the agency of human users, the ‘popularity’ embedded in trends or algorithmic filter-
ing, inherent and increasingly automated ‘connectivity’ and the ‘datafication’ of everyday activities.
These logics, or high-level affordances as others describe them (Bucher and Helmond, 2017),
underpin the ways organisations have sought to use social media to enter conversations directly and
stake out a presence in networked communication environments.
However, there is already some evidence of a shift in the perceived affordances of social media
for organisations. Two research reports by the Harvard Business Review (HBR 2010, 2016) indi-
cate the move away from an initial wave of enthusiasm, where organisations attempted to ‘join
the conversation’ using social media in order to communicate more directly with customers and
to expand markets through social media branding or online trading. Just over half a decade after
its initial 2010 account of social media’s role in sparking ‘the new conversation’, the HBR’s 2016
report asks ‘what’s holding back the digital revolution?’ This later report points to the role of
‘digital and analytical technologies and the opportunities they offer’, but identifies cultural and
structural forces at play in the reluctance of many organisations to invest resources in digital and
social media channels or applications. The qualitative analysis below provides further evidence
that a new wave of organisational communication is beginning to shift the focus from social
media participation alone towards data extraction and analysis and around-the-clock connectivity
facilitated by strategic community management. How can we best account for this shift, and
where to next for organisations’ use of social media?
There are a number of approaches to researching this evolving communication environment. A
macro approach focuses on the manoeuvrings of the ‘social media industries’, and the technology
companies behind the dominant or start-up platforms and apps as these developments in turn drive
change elsewhere (Albarran, 2013; Cha, 2013; Van Dijck, 2013; Wilken, 2017). Others have
explored the transformation of the institutions and professions of journalism, advertising and pub-
lic relations, publishing, screen media and digital games and other areas of media work (Davis,
2011; Deuze, 2007, 2011; McStay, 2009; Miller, 2013). Some of the most detailed research explores
the changing practices and blurred boundaries of journalists working with social media, and the
impact of digital and social media on journalism itself (e.g. Bossio and Bebawi, 2016; Bossio and
Sacco, 2016; Lewis and Westlund, 2015).
Studies of media work, digital and immaterial labour are useful in mapping the turning points and
transformations in the application of new platforms. This scholarship foregrounds practices along-
side affordances, entrepreneurship and diversification, while taking into account the issues of pre-
carity and automation (Albarran, 2013; Deuze, 2007, 2011; Scholz, 2012; Terranova, 2004). Some
critique the relationship social media platforms have to capital, their role as marketing engines, and
the various exploitations of ‘digital labour’ within accelerated 24/7 communication environments
(Andrejevic, 2013; Gregg, 2011; Van Dijck, 2013; Wajcman, 2015). Media work is central to this
acceleration as digital labour reaches well beyond the boundaries of the organisation or corporation
(Deuze, 2011; Terranova, 2004). All forms of digital labour, including the blurred lines between
what counts as play, social communication, curation and content production and consumption, are
battle grounds for shifting notions of work. These are the sites for an often-contentious ‘bleed’
between professional work and personal or social life (Gregg, 2011), between labour and play,
where the Internet stands as both ‘playground and factory’ (Scholz, 2012).
It is also useful to look at how organisations take up particular platforms and tools and establish
certain professional roles within specific industry contexts (Leonardi, 2009; Nardi and O’Day, 1999;
McCosker 125

Treem and Leonardi, 2013; Vaast and Kaganer, 2013). Two conceptual approaches are useful here.
Firstly, social media can be understood as part of a broader information, communication or media
ecology; and secondly, we can examine how social media’s ‘technological affordances’ are imagined
and realised within dynamic media ecologies. Media ecology theories have generally sought to
understand the relationship between new media technology and society as a shift in capacity – not
only in how we communicate, but how we organise and act socially (Lum, 2014). Rather than looking
to define new digital media technologies and chart their effects, a media ecologies approach posits a
‘symbiotic relationship’ between people, social contexts and technologies, as dynamic, fluid and even
contested (Lum, 2014: 137). This can be seen, for instance, in large-scale media infrastructure pro-
jects such as high-speed broadband rollouts, as these are operationalised in national, local and house-
hold contexts (Wilken et al., 2013). Importantly, the concept of media ecologies highlights the
dynamic, uneven, ‘fluid structures’ at a range of scales (global, national, institutional, local or inter-
personal). This dynamic, uneven media ecology can be examined in relation to the ‘affordances’ that
are introduced, imagined, developed and put to use in particular social or organisational contexts.
The work of ecological psychologist James Gibson (1986) has been influential, particularly in
design theory, in explaining the way objects, tools and by extension the features of media technolo-
gies and social media platforms are perceived in relation to the actions they enable – their
affordances (Bucher and Helmond, 2017; Nagy and Neff, 2015). The notion of affordance refers to
the continuously changing features of an environment or platform and the ‘sensemaking’ processes
that combine to embed technologies in specific contexts (Gibson, 1986; Weik, 1993). While schol-
ars acknowledge the multivalent character of the concept of affordance (Bucher and Helmond,
2017), it is useful for exploring change and continuity in communication settings, and for mapping
the broader drivers of organisations’ searches for new capacities. As Gibson might have put it, we
cannot understand social media other than through its affordances as these affordances are imag-
ined and put to work by those who use them. By identifying platform affordances – or what social
media offers organisations and vice versa – communication researchers have begun to show how
digital media technologies are fundamental to the transformation of ‘organisation’ itself (Alfaro
et al., 2013; Treem and Leonardi, 2013; Vaast and Kaganer, 2013).
The focus on affordance helps us to understand how organisations and media workers are
implicated in and responsive to platform changes in terms of their features, capabilities and their
individual and collective cultures of use. This relates to specific media ecologies because it situ-
ates social media within material and historical contexts, and considers technologies, infrastruc-
tures and platforms, as they interact with the practices and behaviours or the professional roles of
those who put them to use as they engage with communities or publics. Following an extensive
review of empirical research into organisational social media use, Treem and Leonardi (2013)
argue that the various features, tools, options and restrictions of social media afford organisations
‘high visibility, persistence, editability, and association’. These are the ‘high level affordances’
(Bucher and Helmond, 2017) that characterise what Van Dijck (2013) sees as the underlying ‘con-
nectivity’ of social media platforms (p. 13). An additional imagined affordance prominent in the
interview data presented below is the capacity for ‘extraction’ that accompanies analytics and data
insights. The key point guiding my analysis is that social media technologies are already both
reshaping and are reshaped by organisational needs and new forms of labour and expertise as part
of a dynamic ecology framed by a range of new and emerging high-level technological affordances.

Navigating the demands of social media work: job data and

industry interviews
In this section, I draw on Australian job market data to examine the distribution of social media–
related jobs across different industries and organisations. Following this, to better understand how
126 Media International Australia 163(1)

Table 1.  Participating organisations and industries.

Organisation Industry
Telstra Telecommunications
Alannah & Madeline Foundation NGO child safety
Emergency Management Victoria State emergency services
Swinburne University Tertiary education
Helen’s Hill Estate Winery – retail
cohealth & eheadspace Health services
Madman Entertainment Entertainment media
Maxus Melbourne Media agency
Isobar Australia Digital creative agency
GPY&R Advertising agency
PHD Media agency
SOCiETY Social media agency
Clemenger BBDO Creative agency

NGO: non-governmental organisation.

social media work has been incorporated into specific organisational settings, and how organisa-
tions conceive of its uses, I report on in-depth interviews with social media managers, strategists
and workers (n = 18) from 13 organisations based mainly in Melbourne (Table 1; see also McCosker
et al., 2016). While convenience sampling was used, the interview participants represented organi-
sations of varied size and structure. They ranged from Telstra, one of Australia’s largest corpora-
tions employing around 32,000 people, to a comparatively small non-profit organisation (Alannah
and Madeline Foundation) and a vineyard employing one part-time social media officer, along
with a number of creative, media, digital and social media agencies that sit within the umbrella of
the advertising and marketing industry where the boundaries of social media work are perhaps
most actively negotiated. These differences allowed for the exploration of the contrast in the capac-
ity for engaging with social media and employing specialists, and showcase a range of rationales,
strategies and levels of incorporation of social media within the organisation.
Interview data were coded and themes developed using the discovery principles outlined in
Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) grounded theory approach. An open coding process was conducted by
three researchers, with the aim of extracting prominent themes, and the broader findings are pre-
sented in a separate report (McCosker et al., 2016). This article draws on that report and the associ-
ated interview data, focusing on a more specific set of themes dealing with organisational context
and the ecology of social media, technical affordances and data insights, and patterns, changes and
tensions around new social media expertise and work practices.

A lateral, diverse job market

Job market data provide a base level of evidence about employment in a given location. To extract
job market data, the study drew a sample of ‘social media’–related job advertisements in Australia
from one employment site (Seek.com) over a 1-week period in November 2014, and repeated in
June 2015 to check that the industry categories and job descriptions were consistent between those
two periods. The sample used for analysis is the 2014 data and comprised a total of 242 job adver-
tisements. The breakdown uses Seek.com’s own industry categories, and while these may not
always be an accurate reflection of the industry standing of an organisation, this provided sufficient
range and standardisation for the purpose of examining the distribution across industries and
organisations.
McCosker 127

Figure 1.  Advertised social media positions, by industry.

A large number of new job listings are targeting social media expertise across a wide range of
industries or organisational settings. While there is a concentration of social media roles advertised
within traditional communications and marketing organisations, retail (19%), hospitality and tour-
ism (10%) and technology companies (7%) also dominate among a diverse range of 21 other
industry areas seeking social media experts (Figure 1). The high number of jobs in retail, hospital-
ity and tourism shown in Figure 1, was to some degree surprising. A 2013 study by Alfaro et al.
(2013) analysed a higher number of social media–related job advertisements in the United States,
identifying over 9000 organisations, and also identified 20 different industries seeking social media
workers. However, in Alfaro et al.’s study, retail represented only 3% of advertised jobs. The dif-
ference illustrates how social media expertise is now seen as an essential part of the operations of
service-oriented businesses, and is increasingly central to the marketing and communications
teams with small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
The labour market for social media work can be described as highly lateral, meaning that as
more social media work is being taken in-house, we see the expansion of the range of industries
and organisations incorporating this form of communication work, as reflected in the data pre-
sented in Figure 1. The proportion of the job position descriptions designated as social media work
also varied. Although job titles change often in emerging professional fields, 14 core social media
titles were extracted from the sample job advertisements (e.g. Social Media Coordinator, Officer,
Community Manager, Creative Social Media Strategist), and 12 associated titles (e.g. Digital
Content Coordinator, Digital Media Strategist, Campaign Manager), with a range of variations on
each of these core titles.
The jobs data show clear signs that creative media production or communications roles were
being integrated within organisations rather than outsourced; and, the distinctions between
marketing, creative media practice, digital media design and production roles seem to be
128 Media International Australia 163(1)

blurring. This general scenario of lateral, dispersed sites for social media work, and emerging
professional roles, was also apparent in the responses of interviewees, where accounts of the
diversity of roles and increasing impact on organisational structures and communication prac-
tices were evident.

Organisational contexts: shifting structures and social media ecologies

The incorporation of social media work is built on an understanding of its potential to transform
many aspects of organisational communication and data-driven decision making. It involves an
awareness of social media’s ecological character – its role in the shifting media and information
ecology. In Altheide’s (1995) conceptualisation of the ‘ecology of communication’, this entails
relationships that come into being through processes and interactions, the negotiation of elements
and technologies that are developmental and contingent, and form fluid rather than fixed systems
(pp. 10–11; see also Wilken et al., 2013); and, this was evident in the complicated structural posi-
tioning of social media communications. The ecology of communication described by the inter-
view participants also involves uncertainty or tensions in terms of the kind of work, where it ‘sits’
and skill sets required. It entails the realignment of organisational structures, work roles and organ-
isation-wide communication processes (and systems), as these also undergo transformations in
capacity and use more broadly. Hence, organisations are increasingly restructuring to incorporate
social media work within core operations and communications activity, and as a new avenue for
service delivery. This opens opportunities and alters the commercial landscape for the distribution
of creative industries roles. Mark Coad, the CEO of media agency PHD points out that, for them,
‘last year expenditure in digital exceeded expenditure in TV […] so we’re beyond that tipping
point’. Jason Laird, Chief Social Office at Telstra emphasises that ‘we’re communicating through
social channels more and more; this is not going away, it’s not some fad’.
There is a sense that social media offers organisations a range of dynamic channels to build and
communicate a brand and keep targeted audiences informed and engaged with products, events,
causes or services. Social media is, thus, described as ‘a means of distribution’, a place to ‘tell a
story and have a point of view or [for] a brand to stand up for something, and also tell its own story’
(Adrian, Maxus). It has an ‘intrinsic value’ for brands (Ben, ex-Clemenger BBDO), and a ‘piece in
the puzzle’ for building a campaign (Daniel, GPY&R). A sense of urgency follows, and a general
‘realisation that you can’t not do it’, that ‘we can’t afford not to be there’ (Sam, Alannah and
Madeline Foundation). And yet, adoption of new technologies and platforms is driven by organi-
sational strategy that often involves resistance and uncertainty (Cunningham et al., 2016; HBR,
2016; Treem, 2015). Those organisations doing well with digital and social media, according to an
HBR report, are working in a holistic way from a corporate management framework and through
executive leadership, so that strategy and resources are integrated across all parts of the organisa-
tion (HBR, 2016: 1).
As the study participants represented organisations of varied size, structure and industry
context, there was different capacity to engage with social media and employ specialists.
Natalie, social media strategist at SOCiETY, a Melbourne-based social media agency, noted
that ‘the appetite for social media has grown. It used to be a bolt-on activity […] but now it’s
become a fully integrated part of a number of our clients’ marketing programs for the year’
(SOCiETY). Social media agencies or integrated digital creative agencies, such as Isobar,
have developed a range of specialised positions, and a whole career path, around social media
work. Isobar supports a range of junior, senior and ‘lead’ community managers, ‘a whole
bunch of strategists, our office planners and senior planners right through to associate direc-
tors’ (Andy, Isobar).
McCosker 129

Direct reference was made to the complexity and integrated or ‘ecological’ character of the
media and communication environment, with emphasis on the need to think broadly about what
social media is. Mark Coad at PHD explained that ‘I don’t see social as a channel or a platform, I
see it as a discipline or a capability that you could apply to any media channel’, ‘it’s not even a
channel or a platform, it’s almost like a capability that sits across everything we do’. Siloing social
media is often not possible or the best approach. This is echoed by others: ‘It’s an ecosystem and I
think to be able to manage communities you need to understand that ecosystem’ and ‘what drives
it as well’ (Leah, Maxus Melbourne). The implication here is that social media goes beyond the
specific platforms and analytics tools and sits across all aspects of an organisations’ operations, not
just in marketing and communications even if this remains a common perception. As a capability,
or set of evolving affordances, social media designates the potential to drive and capitalise on dis-
tributed, networked and intimate forms of communication.
As an indication of the foundational transformations associated with social technologies,
Telstra has come to position itself as a ‘social enterprise’, not only in its ambitions to improve
human well-being and social conditions through its services (in the traditional sense of social
enterprise) but also in the way it operates structurally, and logistically, through social technolo-
gies and platforms. Jason Laird explains that, ‘The idea that you can empower your employees
to make a conscious decision to represent the company in a way that you would be proud of
them doing’ (Jason, Telstra). The different roles for social media work at Telstra reflect the
many departments and complex structure of the large organisation that initiated a ‘Digital First’
program in 2011. This could be described as a whole of organisation approach to digital tech-
nologies and social media, one part of which is the social mobilisation of the workforce. Jason
Laird was appointed Telstra’s Chief Social Officer in early 2014, in addition to his role as
Executive Director of Communications. Part of the aim for this role was to consolidate different
departments and mobilise the large workforce around social media platforms and tools: ‘we’ve
got 32,000 people so if you could get even 10% of them posting content … ’ (Jason, Telstra).
The inference here is that this would not only boost the brand but also open up new avenues for
service provision. Telstra developed an innovative 24/7 frontline social media support system
through Facebook, and offered digital first support through its mobile app and the dedicated
help forum CrowdSupport, along with use of LinkedIn for business-to-business support. The
24/7 Support and main Facebook Pages have a combined 870,000 fans, and about 40 people
dedicated to the content and community building and management work done through them,
with an additional communications team of 20 social media workers. Telstra is also the largest
user in the Asia-Pacific region of Microsoft’s internal social platform Yammer, crucial for
reshaping work practices and internal communication.
As an interesting contrast, social media work at Madman Entertainment – a Melbourne-based
screen media distributor and film production company specialising in licensing anime series and
distributing DVDs – involves a very small team, engaging with a large, passionate and active fan
community. Responding to the changing media ecology, and with declining DVD sales due to
broader developments around high-speed broadband and the move to streaming and video-on-
demand, Madman places a strong emphasis on building and maintaining fan communities and
employing equally passionate fans. Madman’s AnimeLab, developed as a streaming channel for
anime products fast tracked from Japan, has around 1.19 million Facebook Fans, but only one com-
munity and content manager.
In the very different communication environment of disaster and emergency service opera-
tions, social media platforms and expertise have become vital. In addition to monitoring and
circulating critical information through social platforms, part of the social media work under-
taken at Emergency Management Victoria deals with extracting ‘intelligence’ or ‘what
130 Media International Australia 163(1)

information we can gleam from the community that assists us to respond’ (Reegan, EMV). For
instance, ‘the value of that with any Instagram or videos obviously is that it gives you the tagged
location’ (Reegan, EMV). This affordance of visibility and the locative capacity of Instagram
images are quite specific to the needs of an emergency management organisation and the envi-
ronmental context, the ecology, in which it engages with social media. However, it is the way
social media is understood to afford insights through analytics that indicated one of the key shifts
organisations were dealing with.

Social media management and the rise of data analytics

Social media researchers point to the underlying potential of ‘the wealth of networks’ to use
Benkler’s (2006) influential phrase, and the new opportunities associated with distributed net-
works, digital labour, information and knowledge. Graham Meikle (2016) frames his analysis of
social media industries around the centrality of ‘sharing’, in a way that tries to get at the base value
from social media platforms (see also John, 2012; Kennedy, 2013). There is an additional step that
comes from recognising that the customer or client of social media corporations are businesses and
organisations more than users, who would be better positioned (though problematically) as produc-
ing the raw value of social media in the form of usable data (Albarran, 2013; Fuchs, 2013; Jin and
Feenberg, 2015). After share, comes extract. Through data extraction, social media offers organisa-
tions new insights and intelligence. But this involves a shift in the range of imagined affordances
(Nagy and Neff, 2015) from connectivity per se towards insights.
Use and engagement data are understood as commodities that broaden the importance of social
media beyond personal communication. It is this step that now properly defines the value base for
social media work and the industry that is evolving around it. There is a sense that the kinds of tools
available for insights and analytics can feed into what Fuller and Goffey (2012) describe as the
mythologisation of decision making, ‘operating on a replicable, reproducible, and mathematically
quantifiable basis’, to underscore corporate strategy and drive ‘productivity’ (pp. 132–133).
Decision making becomes more distributed and diffuse, data driven, rather than of simple hierar-
chies. All the participant organisations used commercial social media monitoring and analysis
software for these purposes, and the most commonly mentioned and most desirable of those tools
was Radian6, now part of the Salesforce cloud computing suite. Beyond social listening and data
analysis, its functions include organisational monitoring and management (task and case manage-
ment, automatic routing and event escalation), workflow management, data storage and analysis
and content automation for social platforms.
However, simple tools and labour workarounds sometimes suffice, and offer simple direction
for organisational social media activity. Skilled strategists and managers work with the tools they
have: ‘When I started here I really wanted Radian6. I relied quite heavily on that in the past but
now I don’t feel it’s as important. Every time we need something, we find a way around it’ (Jess,
Madman). Certainly analytics, as they aid in decision making and inform the routines of social
media work, help to codify and hence manage intensity and affect – those peaks of engagement,
attention, complaint, conflict or crisis events (McCosker and Milne, 2014). The operations of the
software, code and data move between and mediate customer, fan and worker practices (or labour)
as these become targets of strategic management within an organisation. Beyond the high-cost
platforms such as Radian6, all participant organisations used the native platform analytics for
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as a basis for monitoring and analytics. Simply Measured and
Social Sprout are two of the prominent social media management and analytics platforms, and
these were used by some of the participants, along with simple monitoring and team management
McCosker 131

tools, such as Hootsuite and Geckoboard, or free tools such as Tweetdeck and others. Adrian at
Maxus explains their strategy:

So Facebook, they have their own tool for managing large campaigns, Editor, but we often use ALCHEMY,
which is a big management platform for big, involved campaigns. That’s probably the one we use. In terms
of monitoring […] we tend to use Radian6, Socialbakers; Socialbakers is amazing […] Hootsuite a little
bit. We use Nielsen in terms of numbers, just audience numbers. (Adrian, Maxus)

But there is not always agreement at media agencies as to the best methods for providing
insights and analytics, or the value of the expensive commercial tools available: ‘it’s just not at the
point where you can reliably say that 100% this is what we know is the sentiment […] if we had
the time, it would be more reliable to manually calculate the sentiment’ (Daniel, GPY&R).
The emphasis on the knowledge production capacity, and the affordances of extraction and
analytics, characterises a key component of the second wave of social media participation for
organisations. What is happening here is the negotiation between social media technologies and
their evolving uses and data extraction capabilities, the emergence of third-party software develop-
ers and social media specialists within organisations who are seeking to make use of these capabili-
ties and restructuring their work in relation to them. This is an ‘information ecology’ in Nardi and
O’Day’s (1999) sense of the co-evolving interaction of ‘a system of people, practices, values, and
technologies in a particular local environment’ (p. 49). As social media tools are understood to
contribute to organisational decision making and insights, their status elevates. Significant critical
attention has been paid to the social implications of this growth in a surveillance and analytical
capacity. Describing the value of what he calls ‘estranged free labour’, Andrejevic (2013) details
the precise nature of the exploitation here: the unequal access to wealth creation on the basis of
social media participation that reaches right across the population. In addition to privacy concerns,
personal data gain value as they become alienated from the agents of their production. Furthermore,
while the study participants were reluctant to emphasise the negative qualities of the capacity for
data insights, internal social platforms such as Yammer or Slack offer organisations a new window
into workflow and productivity and tools for its management often experienced negatively as
modes of surveillance (Treem, 2015).
At a strategic level, analytics will have a significant impact on organisational communications.
The CSIRO’s 2016 Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled Workforce report makes the case that the spe-
cific role ‘of “decision support analyst” isn’t new. However, this role is likely to grow in promi-
nence and redefine itself due to two drivers’: the emergence of ‘big data’ and their potential uses
and applications and the ‘explosion of choice in an online and globally connected economy’,
including the uses of automation and artificial intelligence or social media bots (Hajkowicz et al.,
2016: 77). The use of social media platforms defines only one aspect of the role of social media.
These discussions indicate that a significant affordance of social media for organisations can be
located in the potential for insights or knowledge generation as these are shaped, and constrained,
by platform data access and third-party analytics tools. The attributes of the share and like econ-
omy are predicated on the metrics attached to social media use and interaction. Parallel to this runs
the negotiation of new professional roles and expertise.

Social media expertise and 24/7 labour

Across the organisations examined in this study, there was a consistent set of characteristics for
social media work, along with some common tensions and recurring issues. These characteristics
connect practices associated with community management, cultural knowledge, content production
132 Media International Australia 163(1)

and curation, with imagined affordances regarding technical capacity with particular software or
platforms, data analytics and insights, monitoring and response or crisis management. The goal for
organisations is to create the conditions to grow and manage a well-defined, relevant public or
community in the face of dynamic change in the media ecosystem, and in relation to evolving skill
sets, professional roles and technical capacity. Emphasising the importance of technical, critical
and creative ‘skills mixing’, a 2016 Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) report
points to an environment of entrepreneurial work and corporate competition favouring organisa-
tions that initiate and experiment with the use of digital technologies (Cunningham et al., 2016).
Social media workers, as Adrian at Maxus Melbourne puts it, ‘have to be all-rounders’. But there
is a sense that the expertise requirements are far from settled. During the research project, a number
of new appointments were made, teams expanded, new tools and techniques appropriated. Social
media roles are moving targets. This is a significant part of the coevolution of digital technologies,
social media and organisations.
Even among the digital and social media agencies, there was often no direct work trajectory or
set of qualifications underpinning their appointments. Digital specialists have global skill sets as
well as high context-specific experiences or technical knowledge. Participants emphasised creativ-
ity, storytelling, content design, technical capacity with free or proprietary tools, cultural knowl-
edge and analytical skills. To adapt to changing media environments, organisations have had to
develop or take on new kinds of expertise. For Telstra, ‘because things change so quickly we’re
trying to bring more analytics in and research but add that to the creativity and the critical thinking
and the questioning side of things’. Jason Laird at Telstra insists that the balance must be there,
however, ‘between analytics and critical analysis capabilities’: ‘I need people who can stare deep
into [the data] and give me insights that I don’t have’, particularly at moments of public relations
crisis for the organisation.
Social media workers managing Facebook Pages, blogs, Twitter and Instagram accounts,
experimenting with Tumblr, Snapchat and many other applications play a significant part in deter-
mining what social media are, how they are used, how they may evolve and their social value (for
organisations, individuals and society), through the roles they play in generating and circulating
content and interactions, but also as the targets of commercial platforms’ efforts to monetise plat-
forms and derive profit. The role of ‘social media community manager’ is vital here. When asked
about the skills associated with this kind of work, the response was diverse and detailed. Above
all, the community manager was seen as essential, involved new kinds of skills and abilities and
was sometimes contrasted explicitly with roles involving social media strategy and direction, or
data analysis:

A community manager needs to know more about creating content, what’s engaged with, creating brand
guidelines, and those type of elements […] I think in time we’ll see more and more people doing community
management as well as looking after the advertising element. We’ll start to see those roles mashed up.
(Leah, Maxus)

Community management is a really tough one because it’s quite expensive for the client and so what they
tend to do is take that in-house. They take it in-house because if it’s a large client they need lots of them
and so it just becomes a project that’s not sustainable to pay someone else to do it, it’s much cheaper to put
full-time people on it internally. (Natalie, SOCiETY)

One of the defining features of social media community management work, and something that
project participants raised, was the demanding ‘24/7’ labour. A large organisation such as Telstra
has been able to achieve 24/7 service via social media and other channels:
McCosker 133

that concept of, ‘We’re on right around the clock’, a lot of people have come to copy it later and have
realised that to do it around the clock is a big deal. So, I think a lot of the impetus around our social
presence was around, ‘Wow, I can go on at three in the morning and you guys will respond’. (Telstra)

Judy Wajcman (2015) has provided a nuanced account of the resulting ‘temporal density of work’,
and questions the determinist role often ascribed to technology in theories of ‘the high-speed net-
worked society’ (pp. 6, 78). Social media platforms in themselves don’t produce 24/7 ‘around the
clock’ digital labour. They are, however, deeply implicated in the search for connectivity as an
affordance that meets both organisations’ and consumers’ needs. For Bucher et al. (2013), this
involves new skills and capacities that involve ‘an extended kind of professional literacy’ (p. 1640),
and a need to balance professional and personal boundaries through social media communication.
Less well-resourced organisations may feel the need to match that level of service and contact,
even where this is not practical, as Jane (a former Swinburne Communications Manager) observed,
‘I think there was an expectation that that person would be available 24/7 to respond to a crisis or
be available to tell a great good news story. And there wasn’t really that understanding of how to
manage that’.
Since Terranova’s 2004 critique of ‘free labor’ and the conditions of digital exploitation among
early Internet work, there have been many studies focusing on the inequalities and exploits that
occur in these spheres of work. Concepts such as free, immaterial or affective labour attempt, in
different ways, to capture what is at stake economically and emotionally in the relentless cycles of
social media participation, circulation and exchange (Scholz, 2012; Terranova, 2004). An associ-
ated issue that arose in the interviews is the gendered nature of social media community manage-
ment work. There is the potential here for what writer and social media editor Alana Hope Levinson
(2015) has called ‘the pink ghetto of social media’ in the gendered distribution of social media
work, particularly between senior ‘strategists’ and female dominance of more junior community
manager roles.
A number of study participants referred to the emotional drain or ‘affective labour’ of social
media work and community management, particularly in addressing online abuse or dealing with
public relations crises. As an aspect of immaterial labour, affective labour described as ‘labour that
produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or
passion’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108). It has a long, often unacknowledged, history in service
industry work, associated strongly with female-dominated professions. The demands on the work-
force participating in those conversations are great, raising questions of trust, autonomy and man-
agement systems for an organisation of this size. A single social media manager can oversee,
monitor and help to maintain 30 or 40 local Facebook Pages distributed nationally and across time
zones emphasising the varied scales and locations characterising social media ecologies (Nardi and
O’Day, 1999; Wilken et al., 2013). These patterns of social media work appear at times unsustain-
able, and some participants noted high turnover and high stress in this area of work, reflecting the
ongoing adjustment of norms around roles and labour practices.
The smaller the organisation, the more difficult is the process of managing expectations about
24/7 activity. When the role falls to one person, this creates additional pressures and challenges.
However, this is not always perceived as a negative when it comes to things such as having a spe-
cific, culturally nuanced or creative voice as a community manager, or maintaining a particular
strategy, as Jess at Madman explains of the Anime Lab social media community:

We pretty much work 24/7 here as well, but I almost feel like if there were more people, it wouldn’t work
as well because you sort of become the community and you know all the people who comment regularly
and have those conversations. For us, it’s a very personal experience without becoming intrusive, although
this is bound to change as we grow larger, as it’s not manageable. (Jess, Madman)
134 Media International Australia 163(1)

In this case, managing the social media side of a predominantly online media entertainment
company, with a highly defined fan base devoted to anime and manga, also involves having very
specific cultural knowledge and even Japanese language skills in Jess’ case.

Conclusion
This article has examined how organisations incorporate social media into their operations and
negotiate new professional roles. The jobs data and interviews show that a diverse range of organi-
sations are seeking to incorporate social media into their operations, and capitalise on new
affordances for data extraction and analytics and 24/7 community engagement. The 2016
Tomorrow’s Digitally Enabled Workforce report not only singles out social media and digital data
analysis as growing areas – two key elements of the new communication ecosystem – but also
describes them as areas of skills deficit (Hajkowicz et al., 2016: 35). There are many factors con-
tributing to this skills deficit, not least is the rapid pace of transformation in the ecosystem of media
technologies, and the need to negotiate new professional roles and proficiencies
Organisations are a rich source of information on the coevolution of social media platforms and
practices. The analysis presented in this article shows signs of structural shifts and support for new
professional roles that manage social media participation and look to capitalise on affordances, such
as data extraction and analytics and continuous social connectivity. This is reflected in Telstra’s
stated aim to become a ‘social enterprise’, drawing as much from the logic of social media to imbue
all operations with social media connectivity, as the notions of social good associated with that term.
The expansion of social media into organisational management can be seen in developing forms of
data insights derived from analytics capabilities. Finally, social media work involves new areas of
expertise responding to the shifting media ecosystem and imagined and actualised affordances of
social media. These roles continue a longer trajectory of tensions associated with 24/7 labour that is
emotionally demanding, and often reproducing divisions around affective versus strategic labour
(an issue that requires further targeted research). However, each of these developments points to the
coevolution and vivid impact of social media work both on organisations and on social media plat-
forms that requires ongoing mapping through empirical and theoretically informed investigation.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank David Reid, Cathy Farrell and Jessamy Gleeson for their role in the interview data collection
and initial data analysis.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This project was supported by a Learning Innovation and Quality Support Scheme Grant
from the Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology.

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