Jesse Pickard

As of late, a large influx of social media internships have popped up on job boards.

Here’s the reason: marketers are discovering that manning a Twitter, Facebook and Myspace effectively means spending countless hours updating content and responding directly to customers. Having fully-paid employees on the hook for responding to every tweet just isn’t going to cut it.

This is not to say that brands should hand over the social network reigns to their summer interns. Instead, marketers should take time out to document and teach an approach to customer engagment on the social web before jumping into the conversation.

On a related note, I was recently quoted in a New York Post article about the expanding role of branded social network profiles within online marketing. Check that out here.