Social media pro today, CMO tomorrow: How the job preps you for the C-suite

“Social is not a career. It’s a job along the way, but it’s not going to lead you to the C-suite,” Dan Gingiss, who has led social teams at McDonald’s, Discover, and more, said in 2019.

And yet, only a few years later…there are CMOs who started out in social media, working at brands, startups, vendors, and other companies. Some individuals who’ve landed lead marketing roles say they garnered a diverse set of skills relevant to the CMO role while working in social media.

Take Lia Haberman, for example. She’s the CMO of Fit Body App, but got her start in journalism before moving into a social media role at Yahoo.

“There’s a perception that being a social media manager is really just a basic job,” Haberman continued, citing the old “even an intern could do it” joke. But the perception of what a social media manager does and what they actually do on a day-to-day basis—creating content, representing the company and/or product, crafting strategy and understanding analytics—are still very different, she explained.

“I actually think a social media manager’s job is fairly diverse. [It’s] just a matter of the rest of the world catching up and understanding exactly what goes into being a social media manager,” Haberman said.

She told Marketing Brew there are a few reasons why a stigma exists around social media professionals climbing the ranks to the C-suite. For one, it’s still a relatively new part of the marketing landscape.

“People who are currently CMOs—especially if they’ve been in the role for a while—are discounting the strategic importance of social because it wasn’t part of the way that they succeeded,” Haberman told us. “It’s the old guard that is looking for people with a similar pedigree” when hiring new CMOs.

Dave Frankland, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence who recently spearheaded a report on the evolving role of the CMO, told us that it’s not common to see social media professionals as CMOs yet, simply because the discipline has not been around that long in comparison to other aspects of marketing.

However, he told us that they might be better suited to become the CMOs of the future than any other type of marketer due to the way the CMO role’s responsibilities have evolved over the years.

These days, the CMO job is less about big brand campaigns, and more about driving revenue, managing tech, grappling with data privacy, and representing the customer. When you start to look at some of those newer responsibilities, it “doesn’t seem that difficult to make the argument for why a good social media manager could translate into being a good CMO,” he told us.

“As the industry matures, it’s inevitable,” Haberman said.

Attitude adjustment

Analytics firm Northbeam’s CMO Matt Kobach, who ran social media at the New York Stock Exchange earlier in his career before becoming Fast’s VP of Marketing, also told us that many skills learned as a social media professional can be relevant to a CMO’s work, including copywriting, identifying what kind of content can “cut through the noise,” crisis communications, and more.

Understanding the customer is perhaps the most relevant skillset they can take from their former careers into their new CMO gig. Being “on the front lines” with the customer lets social media managers get a better idea of how consumers view the brand, according to Kobach.

All that feedback from the masses helps them know what’s working for the brand and what isn’t, he explained. “You get a better sense of how to finagle your message so that it really says exactly what you think it says, and it’s being as impactful as possible,” he said.

For example, by leveraging the social-listening techniques that he developed years ago, Kobach said he’s able to quickly adapt Northbeam marketing and sales efforts. As Northbeam’s CMO, he explained, he’s tasked with positioning its messaging and figuring out what customers want from Northbeam’s products. As a result, he has to know what leaders in the media-buying space want, and what their problems are—and those social-listening skills better enable him to do that.

“A social media manager probably has the best sense of how the business is doing, at least from an external perspective,” Haberman explained. Case in point: Every single day, they’re gathering information from customers, looking at the competition, and doing market research, she continued.

As CMO, she reads Fit Body’s Facebook group posts every day. “It helps inform my understanding of our customer demographic and their cares and concerns, and helps dictate product and communication decisions,” she told us.

Insider acquired a majority stake in Morning Brew in 2020.