After making a hit-or-miss joke about salary compensation I want to follow up with a more informative post on the Forum One survey. Also, Jeff and I invite anyone working in web marketing, design or social media to take a short survey (18 questions) that will help answer the salary question in a more robust fashion.

A follow up on data from Forum One Networks.

• 52% of respondents are female.
• 54% of the respondents spend 50% or less of their time interacting with social media.
• 70% of respondents work for companies with more than 25 people.
• 38% have more than 9 people in their department.
• 36% of respondents are not attached to a department.
• Respondent had between 1 and 120 subordinates.
• More women are satisfied with their jobs (rate 4 0r 5 out of 5)

The following groups had decreased year over year salaries:

• Under 25
• 31- 40 years of age
• Over 60

Community Managers,  the most common designation for women, are paid the least. This group includes; Community Lead, Community and Training Manager, Social Media Manager, Head of Community & Marketing, Sr. Manager Customer Success and Community, User Community Manager, Research Community Manager, Senior Community Relations Manager and Communities and Forum Manager. Their reported salaries range from $22,500 – $46,500.

The numbers for men and women:

As you can see women fare strong except at $95 k and over $150k.

Here are the issues that I still have with the reporting.

• They included volunteers and un-waged business owners in the calculations. I don’t think that unpaid should be included in salary calculations.
• They did show wage by education, but, they did not show education by gender (education had a surprising effect).
• They did not show position by gender.
• They did not show “unpaid” by gender.
• They do not show experience by gender.

There are a number of things that I find to be questionable about the reporting. So, I would love for Forum One to either disclose their data differently or for some of you that are actually working in the industry to answer a survey to help answer the questions better.

Please fill-out this short survey (Salary For Web Workers) it will take about 5-minutes. We will provide a free download of all data we collect both in its raw form (Excel Files) and as charts.  We also invite you to share this with anyone you know who works in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics or Web Design & Development (Click Here to take survey).

Thanks,

Carlos and Jeff