Is chief social media officer the "zaniest human resource innovation in memory"?

This new and trendy job is a two-step process at some companies:

1. Scramble to hire social media officers.
2. Figure out what it is, exactly, that social media officers do and how to measure it.

Is it brain surgery? Well, consider that a decade ago, Natalie Malaszenko could hardly have predicted that she'd now be heading up Petco's social media practices. "This is a career path that I sort of fell into," she says. "I originally was working on a PhD in cognitive neuroscience."