Who Among Us is a Social Media Expert?
I loathe the term “social media expert.” Social media is still in its infancy: who among us can claim to be an expert?
The most anyone can claim at this point is to be a practitioner. Or an enthusiastic student. Or an anthropologist engaged in cultural immersion.
As budgets for ineffective traditional ad campaigns get slashed, many companies are turning to social media as a productive, bootstrapping, grassroots approach to building buzz for their businesses. However, this will leave many ad agencies and PR firms in the breadline – or scrambling to figure out how they can sell their “social media expertise” to clients.
The problem: often, businesses have more social media expertise than the ad agencies who are doing the pitching!
In 25 Ways to Tell if Your Social Media Expert is a Carpet Bagger, authors Geoff Livingston and Beth Harte give you 25 reasons to smile while nodding your head knowingly. The authors provide winning gems like:
- First recommendation is to blog
- Will ghostwrite blog posts and other social content for you
- Suggests publishing promotional copy as social content
What other signs can you spot? While these 25 ways are definite lulus, there are other “tells” that the agency pitching you on a “social media” program is a big fat fraud. I brainstormed a few of my own signs of agency desparation, all gleaned from personal experience:
- Has gorgeous Flash portfolio website and a blogspot hosted blog — with the last post in 2006.
- Interrupts frequently while you’re describing your audience, products, and business goals.
- Google the name of the proposed “social media expert”. See less than 1,000 results.
- Recommends that employees and agency reps “seed” forums and review sites with positive mentions.
- Extreme overuse of the words campaign, strategy, and brand in the pitch.
What other signs lead you to suspect that you might be talking to a bogus social media expert?
And what lulus have you heard in agency pitches?
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Comments
HA! Laura I actually love the term. To your point above, it helps me identify the user immediately. It’s like wearing an exceptionally bright sign that says “don’t waste your time with me.” Hugh did a great capture of this in today’s cartoon: see the center panel - “Social Media Specialist hustling corporate dude for paid gigs!” http://www.gapingvoid.com/brain001JPEG%20B.jpg
This might be reaching a bit and social media really isn’t my thing but I am willing to bet that the fraud’s use of PowerPoint makes it abundantly clear that they somehow never strumbled across Duarte, Reynolds or Atkinson while supposedly working in the social media space.
[...] 20) Won’t act as your social media ‘voice’ or ghostwrite for you (example: Laura Bergells ) [...]
[...] 2) They understand process. As point 20 adds: 20) Won’t act as your social media ‘voice’ or ghostwrite for you (example: Laura Bergells) [...]
[...] 20) Won’t act as your social media ‘voice’ or ghostwrite for you (example: Laura Bergells) [...]
“Lulus” I love it!
Laura, you are absolutely right…social media is in its infancy and we are all still learning. We test, we make mistakes, we grow, and we figure out what works best for the community we are trying to serve. But the problem is a lot of folks aren’t bothering to learn…they are self-proclaiming themselves experts and a lot of unknowing clients are buying into it. It’s a shame because in the long run, it’s the client and their community who might potentially suffer.
Thanks for carrying the conversation forward!
Happy holidays,
Beth