The Emergence of the "Social Media Expert"
There's been a trend recently in LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts, blog posts and marketing buzzwords. It's a trend that reminds me of the days when SEO first started to gain ground. A trend that was relived when AdWords started ripping through most company's marketing plans. This trend is now rearing its ugly head again; only this time, it has taken the name "social media expert."
Now I'm not attacking people in the SEO or SEM field; however, I will say that those supposed "experts" that came crawling out of the woodworks with their "I can get you #1 in Google" and "Make $10,000 a day with AdWords and arbitrage" have made things very difficult for the real SEO and SEM industry experts. It's put a black mark on the entire niche, and some of my good friends have to battle daily with misperceptions, as well as the ruins left behind by shady "get rich quick" hacks.
The "social media expert" is the next title being usurped by these black hat charlatans.
First, we need an understanding of what social media entails. In fact, ask these "experts." Chances are, many don't actually know. Social media refers to content created by everyday people that is shared through various community-driven tools. This includes videos on YouTube or Vimeo, photos on Flickr, blog posts, wikis, podcasts, and various interactions and group communications on social networking sites. Traditionally, social media results in a "sharable object" - whether it be a video, photo or a retweetable sentence. The beauty of social media is the lack of expense in creating the content and the community feel surrounding its existence in cyberspace.
So what is a social media expert? What exactly qualifies you as a social media expert? How many videos do you have to watch on YouTube? How much time do you have to spend on Facebook and Twitter to be an expert?
These social software applications are not marketing engines in themselves. They're tools. Each one usually has a personal value that precedes any network interaction. With Flickr, the value is in the photo organization - not the contacts you have. With Twitter, the value is in the real-time search and the soapbox stress relief - not the people you follow. With TripIt, the value is in the itinerary created for you - not the people you share it with. Personal value precedes network value. Always. Even Facebook has its greatest functionality wrapped around personal value. Its stream can aggregate all your activity - both from the network itself, and from third-party applications into one feed that you can peruse.
To be a social media expert, you're putting the value on the network - a network which always tends to be secondary to the personal value of the application. A social media expert is really a marketer, nothing more. Only this marketer is attempting to take advantage of the often viral sharing that occurs in social networks. In lieu of this, you constantly get "Twitter spam" followed by marketing and "social media expert" accounts that end up forcing you to log into Twitter in order to yield the mighty block button. This type of active self-promotion, though it may work for some, often leads to a community disgruntled over the "spam" prevalent on the network. It has considerable backlash.
Now this isn't to say that you can't be a "social media expert." To the contrary, just like there are great SEO people out there who understand that content is king and do solid optimization, content management and reporting, there are social media experts that know how to successfully market brands and content through passive promotion and authentic conversation. Authentic conversation is the key. These are the true social media experts. Unfortunately they are often overshadowed by the loud marketer who slaps a shiny new label on his profile page to exclaim his expertise in a newly minted buzzword.
