A bit of a half-formed thought I needed to share whilst spending some time removing a shockingly large amount of unused applications from my PC and trying to rationalise my ever-increasing collection of email addresses and online identities.

When it comes to introducing social media marketing and building content and community at Bauer Media, it isn’t a simple case of just deciding every brand should be on Facebook, for example, and it magically happening. A large part of the work is deciding and clarifying the objectives of using a new channel, and also looking at the benefits in terms of allocating resources, whether financial or human.

Hence why I spend a reasonable amount of time looking at work flows, and working out how we can most effectively work across various channels, and which elements of content work best when shared across various places.

In plain English, it means working out which content we should import into Facebook, or whether we should automate updates to Twitter for certain things, and which location makes most sense for teams to manually update etc.

The irony being that my own profiles and workflows for my two blogs, Twitter profile etc etc have been done on such an ad hoc basis, I really need to sit down and work out a workflow for my personal online world.

And I don’t think I’m the only one.

Which started me thinking about which specialist skills in content, marketing, strategy and management are going to increasingly become things that most people will be using:

• For instance, when it comes to attention-grabbing headlines, how many people are learing how to craft effective content in their Facebook status or tweets on a daily basis, without even consciously thinking about it.
• How many people are starting to think about which sites they want to use, and how to effectively update them efficiently?
• How many people are starting to learn about sharing content and marketing it via social networks and social bookmarking sites simply because they want to be more popular, without ever realising they’re marketing themselves?
• Are people doing their own personal PR, emailing and following people who might repeat their content?

I don’t mean this in terms of people using buzzwords like ‘personal brands‘ – that’s for marketing and aspiring marketing people to make it sound more glamourous and exciting.

I mean this in terms of someone who could come from any walk of life, using the internet, and almost subconsciously incorporating various skills because they want people to see their Youtube video, or to get more friends on Facebook or Myspace.

There’s an understandable backlash from experienced digital marketing people against the growing number of ‘social media experts’ who have a personal Twitter account but haven’t demonstrated their work for their own company or anyone elses. And I’m certainly not saying that this means anyone could run a marketing campaign without any experience or training.

But I just wonder, in addition to the rise of amateurs who are uploading great photography or editing videos etc, whether there is the same blurring of lines between professional management skillsets and what everyone is starting to do as a normal part of their internet life.

So help me out: What traditional management, marketing, publishing, strategy type skills do you see becoming used by everyone, even on a basic level – and what implications do you think it has for the future? Will everyone be more aware of what goes on within a company? And is that a good thing?