Social Media Expert Bashing
21st May, 2009 - Posted by admin - 15 Comments
It has become an unfortunate trend lately, for mainstream media commentators and even tech media commentators to criticise social media consultants as a bunch of silicon snake oil merchants. Part of the reason given for the criticism, is that many self-styled ‘experts’ have only just come to the discipline, or they claim to have had a long history with social media but do not actually have any practical experience in either marketing, business management, technology development, journalism/communications or instruction design. The other main criticism is that such ‘experts’ are not delivering on product sales for firms with which they engage.
I acknowledge freely that these criticisms are well-founded in many cases. But it is both generalising and potentially damaging to suggest that all social media expert consultants operate with such poor credentials and that the advice they give is only broad guidelines rather than specific tactical and strategic rethinking of audience engagement.
It is actually quite simple to identify a genuine social media expert. They have 10-15 years experience in working with internet technologies and they usually have some programming background, or at least extensive HTML and common gateway interface and/or CSS customisation skills. They have often a diverse portfolio of marketing, mainstream media, public service and private practice experience, and they generally have been associated with the building or execution of either content delivery platforms, or they have been involved in identifiable content-oriented projects.
If you come across a self-styled expert with experience only as a marketer, or only as a journalist, government official or business coach, the likelihood is that they will have limited understanding of the technologies and limited capacity to think strategically or tactically about business engagement with social media. So don’t employ them to do that job. Simple.
For those of us that do have the skills and experience required to address the needs of commercial and third sector organisations, you’ll find the engagement of consultants as trainers, business planners, marketers and strategists will be very finely tuned to the objectives of the organisation, and they will be willing (and indeed eager) for a project to be defined clearly, with success and failure criteria identified, clear timetables and targets for execution of objectives, and a structured reporting and sign-off process for all social media activities.
Most importantly, a valuable social media consultant will note that the benefits of social media lie in tracking idea development, human filtering of concepts, and reinforcement of choices/activities, not in accrual of friends/followers or in eyeballs visiting a website. And they will understand intuitively, that the most over-valued business activity of the past 60 years – advertising – is set for massive redevelopment in the next decade.
So if you’re confused about social media expertise, or if you’ve had a bad experience with a social media consultant, I suggest you use word of mouth to find someone who actually does know about technology, interaction design, business strategy, professional development and sheer sales. Only then are you likely to get someone who will deliver on the opportunities of social media.
15 Comments
Rob Murray
May 21st, 2009 at 10:38 am
I think this post is long overdue (not by you but just generally). Every day I see ‘social media experts’ being the butt of criticism and snide remarks.
I’m by no means an expert but I aim to become respected in the field eventually. If and when I do i’d like to think I wouldn’t be persecuted for it.
Time to stop social media consultants being the double glazing salesmen of marketing!
Beth Granter
May 21st, 2009 at 10:45 am
Great article. It’s good to hear that someone appreciates a social media expert with technical web design and development experience, not just marketing knowledge.
James Whatley
May 21st, 2009 at 10:50 am
Good words and about time someone kicked back.
The only thing I take issue with is:
“They have 10-15 years experience in working with internet technologies and they usually have some programming background, or at least extensive HTML and common gateway interface and/or CSS customisation skills.”
As 10 years ago I was still in college. I’m not a coder, but I know what is and what isn’t possible within the realms of every day computing.
Saying that, I wouldn’t call myself a “Social Media Expert” either I guess maybe just “v. capable in my field”.
So I’m told anyway
*bookmarked*
admin
May 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
Rob – agreed. The tendency of marketers to simply adopt social media as if they nderstand it, and without engaging deeply with the technology and implications is not just dreadful, but could also result in damaging brands.
Beth – yeah. It ought to be obvious that tech dev skills are needed to be a social media consultant.
James – I think you underestimate your skill set, mate. You may have been in college 10 years ago, but you were probably building sites and playing with devices back then anyway. And I have heard you speak often enough on tech specs (hardware and software) to know you understand the tech. Plus running Mobile Geeks of London and being an employee and community manager of a mobile technology service provider, and understanding the need for sales actually checks all the boxes I identified above. So… Whatleydude: expert mobile social media consultant.
Peter
May 21st, 2009 at 12:41 pm
May I suggest/request a set of questions that you can ask your “social media expert” candidate as part of the engagement process?
The idea being that if they cannot answer these to your satisfaction then don’t play with them.
I regularly do this to my own potential clients, project managers, professional service managers et al.
If they know the answers that’s great, if they don’t know the answers that’s fine, but if they pretend to know the answers or dodge the question then they are flagged as “dangerous”.
Peter
admin
May 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Peter – good idea and a suggestion that’s actually been made before. Dave Fleet developed 8 questions to ask a social media expert (see http://davefleet.com/2009/02/8-questions-to-ask-your-social-media-expert/) and these aren’t bad but they don’t test for technical understanding and expertise. There have also been social media marketing questions posed (http://www.whitepapersource.com/socialmediamarketing/report/) but these don’t necessarily test skills, instead testing strategies – perhaps useful more as potential performance measurement tools on projects.
But I’m happy to collectively generate more questions for self-styled experts, taking suggestions from you to start!
Peter
May 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Admin (sic) – Off the bat, I am by no means a “social media expert” (as you well know). I’ll have a go without looking at the link.
The first thing that I’d ask them is to define social media. Of course, this would require me to smile kindly and drill down into their definition to see if they are responding by rote. It wouldn’t have to match my definition, but it would need to be consistent, have boundaries and be defendable.
The second thing would be to ask them how they think that social media “should” be used in general. What benefits will it bring to me if I’m not trying to share photos with my family, or tell people “what am I doing”. This also would get the smile-kindly-drill-down treatment.
The third thing I’d probably get to is a current affairs sort of question to see if they are actually aware of what is going on. For this comment I choose the “How is Twitter going to ever make money”? Then I’d probably follow that up with “Advertising, is that the best they can come up with?! Ok, how would you recommend that Twitter make money?”. Smile-kindly-drill-down.
Fourth thing would be some sort of nice open question directed at seeing if they have ever heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Probably done by using a term like “market as conversation” or something like that. SKDD.
Fifthly, (I can’t help it but) I want to know if they understand, either innately or explicitly, Sarnoff’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Reed’s Law. This will probably be demonstrated by talking about being able to talk to/at more people, being able to listen to more people, and being able to collaborate with more people respectively. SKDD.
Which is a nice segue way to the sixth thing: co-creation of value. I want to know that they understand that through collaboration with my market I create an experience that is hard to replicate and of special value to them. I want them to show that they understand the solid value in starting that collaboration, how the value of that interaction will need to be maintained, and that if it is done right that it can be a self-sustaining source of value by allowing my customers/consumers to collaborate within my “brand” (and a natural lockin). SKDD.
The seventh thing: I want to see if they pick up on that I am actually after the same level of collaboration with them as I am with my customers/consumers. If they don’t pick up on that, then I’d probably ask them directly about that. SKDD.
Now I am aware that this list isn’t quite as accessbile as we’d like, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the candidate social media experts.
Peter
Also, as a preemptive defense for being bashed around the side of the head for being ignorant of standard definitions and well discussed conversations in the social media arena, let me just say: “I am ignorant of of standard definitions and well discussed conversations in the social media arena.”
Alex H.
May 21st, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I think there are different kinds of expertise. I think I’m a social media expert, and probably have some depth of expertise beyond those who are making money consulting on social media. But that expertise may not, sometimes, be directly applicable to ROI.
I guess the environment is particularly frustrating to someone like me–someone interested in doing more consulting, but who is largely “breaking in,” and finding that there are a lot of people who started using the term “social media” three years ago and moved their consultancies from marketing or PR to focus on the most current buzzword. Frankly, a lot of them are in a good position to be hired, exactly because their message will be something the client is more comfortable and accustomed to hearing.
jj
May 21st, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Alex – I think it’s absolutely true that marketers are in a good position to be hired by companies because they are au fait with business language and concepts. But this is precisely why I see a social media expert consultant as one who has business experience: you need to have an understanding of the priorities and processes of business in order to apply social media for business purposes. It’s just that you also need to understand the technology and theory of social networks to apply social media *effectively*.
As for there being different types of expertise, I agree that there are expert theoreticians and expert practitioners. Academics (of which I have been one) tend to be more expert theoreticians than expert practitioners, and while theory has its place in business strategy, the problem with expert theroists generally is they are too interested in the process, and not sufficiently focussed on outcomes. While a process-approach in business contexts can have long term benefits, it is frequently not in line with the business strategy being pursued by organisations, thus theoreticians are widely avoided by companies because they are seen as being high cost over a short period for negligible or insufficient results. While the theoretician may be playing a ‘long game’ in benefits, economically, the cost is higher overall for firms, because the long-term gains come at the cost of short term lost opportunities, reputation and higher costs of customer acquisition.
Now this is not to say that boffins don’t understand economic theory and the benefit of using short term tactics to finance long-game strategies and gains – indeed, those who understand these concepts as well as the cultural and technological impacts of social media make some of the very *best* expert consultants – it’s just that there are a disproportionately high number of theoreticians who are simply not prepared to bargain effectively to achieve both the long term gains and the short term deadlines and productivity required for corporate interests.
But Alex, I have no doubt you have not only the expertise, but the capacity to emulate the marketer’s method of gaining business. Perhaps business experience is not yet on your side, but if you start with social enterprises as clients you will soon find your reputation and your portfolio of projects impressive enough for larger corporate engagements.
jj
May 21st, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Peter – I love those questions and with your permission I’ll add them to a new post tomorrow (with full credit of course). Don’t be at all embarrassed by Sarnoff/Metcalfe/Reed’s Laws – I use them so extensively myself I think they are crucial to understanding the value/utility of social media (and understanding these is concommitantly essential to calculating the potential and output-oriented value of any social media strategy).
The things I’d add/amend to your list are:
* [your 1st point - define social media] – probably need to set some criteria for a successful answer, whilst also enabling divergence of thought. This should be easy enough to do.
* [your 2nd point - how social media should be used] – we should actually clarify a case study. The generic question works. But having a range of case studies to provide contexts for engagement tests how agile a social media expert can be in different environments. (It also provides a context for testing their creative thinking, incidentally.)
* [your fourth point - knowing about Cluetrain] – I’d be much more open about it. Ask for what they regard to be the three most important theses, and get them to explain why they feel these are the most significant. If they don’t know Cluetrain, then they are instantly out!
* [your sixth point - co-creation of value] – i think they ought to be able to make some estimates about the financial value of that collaboration in both short and longer terms.
I also think we need some basic technical questions – how would you embed an RSS feed of brand news stories and blogging/microblogging commentaries into a WordPress Blog/Drupal installation/other platform; what are the differences in bandwidth use for recommendation engines in comparison with databases and what impact does this have on user experience; where do you place a script in the code of a page in order to speed up load time – that sort of thing. If they can’t answer any of the above they don’t have sufficient experience to be classed as an expert, IMHO.
Peter
May 21st, 2009 at 9:53 pm
jj – Permission granted, go nuts.
Peter
June 9th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Bump.
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