The diverse skill set required for digital media

Purely by coincidence, a couple of interesting chats I had with two agency chiefs this week ended up with talking about the same person – a digital guru at a significant London agency. The first boss reckoned this person was essentially a genius. Someone who could headline the agency’s digital operation and build the reputation of the company as being on the cusp of the digital/social media movement. The second boss, at a rival agency (and I stress this wasn’t a witch hunt) reckoned this person was “pretty poor and their attempts at digital involved ‘building a web site.’” So what’s my point? A couple really. First of all; perception is everything isn’t it, and this digital guru seems to be extremely good at their internal personal PR. The other, perhaps more helpful point, is that digital is such a vast medium, that surely a digital guru, from an operational level anyway, can’t possibly hope to be a master of the whole medium. Off the top off my head, on one side of the spectrum you’ve got the use of social media, then you've got the issues of providing relevant content for the plethora of different types of media out there.  Then you need to be able to produce this content, both from a production and creativity perspective. Then there is the SEO and website development side of things, potentially involving a micro site around a campaign. Then there is the media relations side of it within the digital media itself. Is one person ever likely to have all of this skill set? Leaving aside the capacity problem, you’d have to say it’s not likely. So I predict the Digital Director/Head of Digital job title will disappear and we will see a whole range of digital type job titles, both at PR agencies and in house, even at the senior level. So prepare yourself for the onset of the Head of Social Media (OK that’s obvious!) but also Head of Production, Head of SEO, Digital Creative Director... Anymore for anymore?