Just a few years ago, a media job could only mean a few things: a job with a print publication like a newspaper, magazine, or publishing house or maybe a career in television news. With the invention of the Internet, having a media job took on a much larger number of possibilities. If you’re interested in breaking into this industry, take a look at some of the most prevalent positions in this ever-growing job sector:
Internet Marketer
As an Internet marketer, one of the most popular new media jobs, you will learn to leverage the power of the Web to promote and sell products and services. In addition to creative and engaging websites, Internet marketing includes email campaigns, viral videos and social marketing. To determine your next move and measure the success of your marketing strategies, you will become intimately acquainted with a wide array of analytics provided by Google and other measurement services.
Social Network Manager
The world of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, is growing in popularity. In fact, many people spend a large portion of their day, every day, online chatting with friends, playing games, and looking for long-lost friends and family. Savvy businesses have discovered that reaching this captive audience can grow their business to new levels. As a social network manager, you will be responsible for maintaining a positive company image on these types of sites by monitoring buzz, answering questions, offering special deals and responding to complaints.
Copywriter
Did you think all that verbiage just magically appeared on all those web pages? The often-unnoticed copywriter is responsible for writing everything from product descriptions to informative “about” pages to useful how-to articles. If you choose to enter this field, make sure you know how to write clearly and concisely. While it will be someone else’s job to draw traffic to the site, it is your job to catch the visitor’s interest, engage them with useful content, and keep them coming back for more.
Web Designer/Developer
Without the website itself, no one else’s efforts matter. As a web designer or developer, you’ll create the eye-catching graphics and easy-to-use navigation that makes a website great. You’ll learn how to balance those cool, CPU-intensive flash animations with the need for quick loading pages, how to integrate music and video with content, and how to create secure pages for payments and personal information.
Market Researcher
Someone has to research the wants and needs of the target market. By using surveys and polls for market research, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of your company’s entire customer base. The information you collect can identify the enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses in addition to helping determine its future direction. Your efforts will also provide the foundation for many of the other media-related tasks.
While these positions are a few of the most popular, this certainly isn’t an all-inclusive list. As the Internet evolves, expect the media job category to expand to meet new needs and opportunities. In fact, this may one day be the biggest employment sector in the world. What special talents do you have to join the growing community of media professionals?
