Social media! Some people believe in its power for brands to attain previously unexplored levels of reach and influence while engaging with their audience in a totally new and awesome and visceral way. Some people just use it as a glorified RSS feed. And some people are still trying to figure out what “RT” means. Whatever the case, there are plenty of jobs in social media, and they pay! This distinguishes the other kinds of jobs in social media management, wherein these duties are relegated to a lowly intern with nothing better to do. Which is often the case! And not only do not all social media managers know each other—we hear—but they’re also not all interns! Did you know this? Someone didn’t. Which pissed someone else off.

Fair schooling, to whoever it went out to. But: Is the person running this social media account being a wee bit too touchy? After all, a lot of social media jobs do in fact go to interns. It’s like participating in something you have no choice in participating in but are required to put forth effort no less: you get out of social media whatever you put into it. The problem is that there are a bunch of people out there selling their old traveling medicine show services in social media who promise lots of crazy-great results that also happen to be totally unquantifiable (besides the number of Twitter followers, which can be artificially inflated and which can be rendered moot by whoever’s running the social media accounts for Company X).

So, yes, totally fair to be aggravated that somebody mistook a four-year veteran of public radio for an intern. But whose fault is that, really? At least for now: comes with the territory.

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