I am sure that all of us have encountered our fair share of Social Media experts. Often many of them are fairly one dimensional. Among a target group of their peers they may generate an adulation feast but in other marketing sectors they meet skepticism because they only have one credential.
I think social media experts abound because social media is such a fire hose nobody can really grasp it all. Everybody has their drink and knows their one sector and there is so much activity fragmentation that people can claim expertise that some find difficult to challenge.
A CEO told me the other day that his social media agency had arranged a Tweetup with 1.5 million participants. That’s what his social media experts told him. A Monday Night Football game may only capture 15 million viewers Nationally.
In social media there are few career benchmarks or protocols. If you described yourself as a Brand Manager or an Account Executive you would come with a pedigree of experience and a predicable certain skill set. Not so in social media. If I ask somebody, “What did you do before you became a Twitter expert?” They respond, “I was a Realtor and then I got into social media because the market wasn’t that hot.” Not exactly P&G.
I read a great analogy the other day from a writer I wish I could credit here who described social media as pearls on a dress. One piece of the outfit. Now if you walked into a room wearing only pearls you would certainly grab everyone’s attention and be certain to get a ride home but you would probably only be remembered for one dimension.
If you ask many social media experts to define a GRP or Gross Rating Point they can’t. Or an electronically optimized press release, or a VAR channel, or a listing allowance or segmentation studies. You get the drift.
Social media is one vertical, one channel of the brand’s dimension. When I worked at agencies such as JWT you had to immerse yourself in all the facets of the brand experience. You knew how to read Nielsen reports, you did store checks, you rode with sales people, and you knew research methodologies up and down because flawed research could upset the apple cart. During an internal brand review at JWT, the General Manager asked the AE how they liked the Oscar Meyer slices. The AE said they were vegetarian. Very quickly they weren’t working on Oscar Meyer.
Sure people visit Facebook over seven times a day but the average person surprisingly to me still watches over 25 hours of TV a week and they listen to a lot of radio.
Only ten years ago we had the .com bubble. At one time .coms that hadn’t made a penny profit were valued more than GM. Wall Street believed it and the papers printed it and people talked about it. Then the .com bust came. The .com bust certainly didn’t kill the internet but it certainly diminished the hype. The same will happen with many social media experts.
Just Ask Jeeves about how things can change.
Hank Blank frequently speaks on Networking and the New Business Process. His presentations are called “How to Rise Above the Crowd” and “Why Agencies Don’t Want New Business.” To contact him to speak to your organization or company send him an email to hank@hankblank.com.
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Even with the .com burst some of the successful businesses are .com. The problem is at the time people didn’t know how to monetize a .com. The same is occurring with Social Media, these sites have clear value, but no revenue. Becoming a social media expert is easy, you just need to hear about the latest thing first in a world where everything has already been said or Tweeted, its nothing about business. Once there is structure to social media its hype will fade, but its importance will stay. Imagine if Facebook charged each member $1.00 a year. The monetization would be fantastic and the social media bubble would burst, yet it will still maintain profitable and be one of the biggest businesses. Just like the .coms. This could make room for actual experts to once again enter the game.
Your statement: social media is one vertical speaks volume. I really enjoyed this post. Hank I will call you when I meet a sm expert, but I would advise not to hang by the phone.
Hank, thanks for your posts. I enjoy reading them. While I agree with many of your points, I believe social media is here to stay and will be integrated into every piece of business – similar to digital and eventually mobile. There will always be specialists in those areas of business, but it will be more streamlined. At my past agency experiences, I too, had to develop a breath and range of skills, and I think that has helped me to focus more on client’s business objectives, goals and audiences, rather than a specific social tactic to solve the problem. We need to continue to bring more of the business focus into the social media space overall and we are starting to see that happen.
Great post and very challenging to all us “experts.” I see social media more as online networking than anything else. The same principles apply as meeting people face to face, sharing ideas, developing relationships and becoming friends. The best B2C brands on Facebook engage consumers in a way that feels one on one to them. LinkedIn is a great forum to share ideas, best practices and connect with like minded businesspeople. Twitter is a world of real time discussion in countless categories and a wellspring of ideas and information as well as a great connector of people – one at a time. YouTube, StumbleUpon, blogs… There are so many platforms today and to me they all keep us linked and grow our networks, leading ultimately to profitable relationships so long as we stick with the 3 A’s I’ve been speaking on: you must be Active, Attractive and Alert. I’ll ad a fourth for this comment: Accessible. Cheers!
Well said, Hank. And good links to back up the point. Even people like Chris Brogan and Brian Solis have described themselves as “students” of social media, because we’re all still learning. Social media is just one more marketing tool.
Your perspective is always appreciated – particularly by those of us who have worked for ad agency and/or client positions. For 99% of brands, hiring a social media expert is like a construction company hiring an employee only to do Phillips screws. Social media is just one source of traffic to your website or impressions for your brand. I admin about 8 Facebook pages and review dozens of Goggle Analytics and rarely see Facebook represent more than 5-10% of traffic and Twitter is usually a point or two at best. A fair amount of the traffic from Facebook is coming from paid advertising on Facebook – not just the fan base. For smaller brands and those with limited geographic focus, Facebook is an excellent option for building and maintaining awareness.
None of the Facebook pages I admin has more than 20,000 fans so the time investment is rally more than an hour or two per week. If we were to be having dozens or hundreds of fans commenting a day, the labor intensity would increase and I look forward to the day when these brands need that level of support.
So next time you talk with a social media expert, have them talk about the page views and time on your website by social media driven visitors. What is going to provide more value to your brand – following thousands of people on Twitter who aren’t engaged with your brand or having thousands of visitors on your website that look at 6 pages and spend three minutes? Social media is very much part of the media landscape today, but like everything you read on the internet, it must be evaluated and taken in the proper perspective.
I like your advice because it is result-oriented. I am sure there are many who create a presence in cyberspace all over various forums thinking that getting the job done simply means saturating the media. Being from DM, I like tangible and measurable data. What is the point unless you can demonstrate the pathways leading from one site to another? Then going further, are there measures that this traffic translates into some action taken by visitors to the site.
Thanks for all the great comments and opinions. Take care. Hank
A social media expert is one who knows better than to call him/herself one.
A social media expert needs to demonstrate how he used the tools to his own benefit, and can do the same for the prospect.
The danger is that the ‘expert’ may be skilled in the use of only one or two tools. That’s as bad as a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer.
Great post! I beleive that social media is becoming another “tool” of the integrated marketing, not a marketing strategy itself. I prefer to be a consumer expert and use different tools to reach my audience than to become a “tool expert”.
However, this blog is your social media, isn’t it? How would you rate its reach???
Personally, I find the label “social media expert” a cause for alarm. What does this mean, who decides, and how can someone really understand this free for all? I try not to be labeled as anything other than a curious marketing mind in a rapidly changing digital universe…or the wild wild west relived, take your pick.