A job posting crossed my feed last Tuesday. Social Media Manager, mid-size consumer brand, and the listing wanted someone to own the brand voice across five platforms, build and run the content calendar, handle community management and escalations, shoot and edit photo and video, report on performance monthly, and support paid social. Two years of experience required. Forty-two thousand dollars.
I read it three times because I assumed I had missed a zero.
I had not missed a zero.
That listing is not an outlier. It is the median. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where we spend six weeks and a substantial retainer defining a voice, deliver a beautiful document with a tone spectrum and sample sentences, and then hand the actual daily execution of that voice to the lowest paid person in the building.
The person writing your brand's public sentences is doing the highest-risk work in your marketing organization for the lowest compensation in your marketing organization.
Consider what the job actually is. One, it is copywriting, at volume, in a voice that is not the writer's own, published with no review cycle. Two, it is customer service, conducted in public, where the angriest person in the queue gets the largest audience. Three, it is crisis communications, because the first sign of a crisis almost always arrives as a reply thread at ten at night.
Any one of those, staffed separately, would command more.
Look at the accounts this industry holds up as proof that brands can sound human. Wendy's. Steak-umm, which spent this spring doing clearer public communication about misinformation than most institutions managed. Merriam-Webster. Those accounts work because a specific person with judgment and range is making dozens of small calls a day about tone, timing, and when to say nothing. That is senior work. It is priced like an internship.
Here's the part that gets lost. When one of those calls goes wrong, and eventually one will, the company treats it as an individual failure. The strategy deck never gets blamed. The person who was handed a forty-page voice guideline, no approval chain, and a notification at midnight gets blamed. That is a design problem, not a talent problem.
Any one of those, staffed separately, would command more.
I do not have a clean fix. I have a floor. If a role owns the public voice, pay it like the strategy job it is, give it a named approval path for anything sensitive, and let the hours end. Truffles and Barnaby have strong opinions about hours that end. They begin voicing them at six, loudly, and neither of them has ever been asked to wait for legal review.