You’re not a social media expert, you’re just another schmuck with a Twitter account.
There’s no denying that the web is full of snake oil salesmen, and with the explosion of social media, there is no shortage of charlatans looking to make a quick buck, establishing themselves as consultants and ‘social media experts’.
Experts my arse.
Give a man a Twitter account, and he’ll tweet for a day. Teach a man to use the web, and he’ll be able to setup his own accounts. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress. You name it. Even when these services are dead and gone, and something else replaces them.
The tools are exactly that, just tools. The investment in UX that these tech companies and others around web have made it easier than ever before for anyone to use. Hell, if a 104 year old woman can do it, so can anyone.
Herein lies the root of the problem. There’s so much hype surrounding the tools, that services to teach people to use the tools have taken focus, rather than addressing and teaching basic internet marketing skills.
That’s what social media marketing is all about – its another string in the bow of your online marketing strategy, and another way to grow traffic and achieve business goals. Otherwise, what’s the point?
At its core, social media should be tightly woven around a website promotion and SEO strategy and if you are lacking in these skills, or aren’t outsourcing them – you are doing clients a disservice.
If I was looking to hire a so-called expert (which I’m not btw) here are the skills and experience you’d better be bringing to the table, and the questions you better have the answers to.
1) Ability to determine a voice for a brand. It’s not what you say in many cases, its how you say it. You have to be able to immerse yourself in a company’s culture and ethos before you even start to communicate on their behalf. Personally, I don’t really agree with third parties managing the voice of brand – it should come from within an organisation so it has authenticity.
2) Have content strategy as part of your core service focus. Consideration should be given to micro and macro content, with everything from tweets to blog post to linkbait.
3) Outreach. The ability to take that content and promote it. Do you have established networks of people / partners / bloggers and influencers? Who are the influencers in your niche? What strategy are you going to use to build out my network?
4) How are you planning on distributing content across the web? Twitter and Facebook aren’t and shouldn’t be the sole way to get the word out about a brand, and if you can’t think bigger than that I wouldn’t hire you.
5) What impact does social media have on SEO? Can you explain how it positively or potentially negatively impacts SEO? Is linkbuilding part of your proposed strategy?
6) How are you planning on listening to the buzz surrounding my brand on the web? How are you going to deal with any negative sentiments? Do you offer reputation management?
7) What other communities should we be a part of on the web? From a technical perspective what should we change on our site to make best use of social media? Is there an opportunity to build and expand upon that community on our own site?
8) What way should we handle user generated content? Is there an opportunity to grow our site with a user generated content strategy?
9) What mobile strategy should we put in place? Technically how can this be achieved. Is there an opportunity for hyper local?
10) How should we synergise online and offline marketing efforts? What do you know about our existing offline marketing? How can social media be used to bring these together?
11) How are you measuring and reporting your social media marketing? Can we see reports month end? Are you focusing on conversions or traffic?
12) Where are the highly traffic’d sites we should be involved with or engaging on? What experience do you have in growing traffic for others? Can you show me evidence of websites you’ve been involved with helping?
There’s plenty of people waxing lyrical about social media and its benefits, people without the experience of having been in the trenches themselves. With the above questions and skills to search for, you should be able to quickly weed out the people who really don’t have a clue.
linky
posted:April 24, 2011 3:21 pm
I’ve got no more words to say unless to agree with your points.
Hary
linky
posted:April 24, 2011 4:59 pm
Excellent (and challenging) post, Dave. Here is how I would answer your questions:
1) Voice – I agree wholeheartedly that customer experience should be an immersion. However, I disagree when you say it can’t be done through third-party service: a good professional can capture the voice – and, more importantly, the essence – of the brand. All you need is to talk to them and know what they want to say to their public. What message do they want to communicate?
2) I also agree about that. No matter the media, the company should always communicate its essence.
3) About the ability to take content and promote it: the web is an ever-changing field. Youtube may be effective today, but not tomorrow. The same applies to Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media tools – even if they’re here to stay. From my own experience, it’s hard to tell how effective your strategy will be without data and research. If you don’t have access to what tools are most successful for a certain type of business, you are experimenting – that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you don’t have the budget, though, considering the costs to start an internet strategy cost far less than the ones you would use in traditional media.
4) I completely agree that Twitter and Facebook should not be the only tools to use if you want to advertise your brand – however, actually creating a loyal community takes time, and communication can’t ever be perfect: we can only get so close, but not to perfection. If you’re investing in many social media tools (say, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and so on), you must make sure you have the time and money to dedicate yourself to them.
5) Yes, I can explain. Social media can help you rank among the first results on Google, and it can impact you positively or negatively. Contrary to conventional advertising tools, social media is dynamic, and everyone can post as he/she pleases. Therefore, social media is a double-edged sword that must be handled with care – and more often than not, even big companies do cut themselves when using this sword. Therefore, should any sign of damage to your brand reputation arise in social media, someone should intervene. The best strategy is not to run away and be as transparent as you can.
6) Though question. You can use your brand name as keywords on Google and search for any news, keep track of any communities around and hear their feedback. What do they think of your brand? Are they satisfied? If they aren’t, what are making them unhappy? A good case study would be the Sonic franchise, owned by Sega. After a somewhat bad decade, they are listening to Sonic fans more closely – and attempting to actually release the games they like. Their last game, Sonic colors, sold pretty well. By the way, Sega’s strategy was not only to create an official forum, but to send their PR management to talk personally to communities influential on their market, such as Sonic Retro.
7) The communities you should be a part of depend of the profile of your company. However, as a rule of thumb, you usually want to be as closer to the non-official communities your customers as possible. Keeping close to suppliers, if are an industry needing raw material, for instance, is also a great idea: you may even get a discount. Who knows?
8) If user-generated content looks good enough, of course you should promote it! If you do promote it, chances are you’ll get a more engaged user, and increase brand loyalty.
9) Again, this depends of the type of the company you run. If you run a bookstore, for instance, you can implement an integrated SMS messaging system that would allow someone to pre-order a book, for instance. However, if the local community doesn’t like to use (or can’t afford) a mobile strategy, you may be shooting yourself on your foot.
10) Again, you should focus on transmitting the essence of your brand. But not only that, of course. Let’s talk about Bullfrog Media here: Bullfrog Media is an innovative company that helps its customers to manage their communities. What could be done is to use non-traditional offline media to show how modern you are, and always post a link to your main site; you can get a conventional magazine to talk about Bullfrog Media, and again, keep with the same strategy. The opposite is also true: you can talk promote an offline event on your site. This not only promotes your company, but also generates Word-of-Mouth.
11) Social media can be measured through Klout, for instance: you can see how much of your audience is engaged, how much your message is amplified, if you are connected to influential people, and so on. But, of course, this is only the beginning: you can also use Google analytics and estimate how many tweeter followers are actually reading your content, the average time they spend reading your news, the rejection pages, and the keywords that lead to your site. There are many other tools around, of course – you shouldn’t rely just on one. Synergy is also the answer here.
12) I’ve been writing SEO-Optimized articles for quite a while now. Yammer is just an example. Evidence on traffic growth? Yes, I can show you! When I wrote to Yammer with a CEO-optimized article, I also posted it on my portfolio blog. On that day, my traffic was amplified four times the usual. Not only that, but because Yammer also published the article, this also generated traffic growth for them. Because Yammer spoke to me on my Twitter account, this also generated them extra traffic as a bonus.
Carlos A. R. de Souza
linky
posted:April 24, 2011 8:33 pm
While I agree wholeheartedly with the core of the post, don’t you think that those questions would be asked by the marketing specialist WITHIN the company? I don’t know if your run-of-the-mill business owner/entrepreneur has ANY idea of what linkbuilding, SEO, linkbait and content strategy mean. They’re business owners (restaurant managers, startup owners, etc. – they’re not online/digital marketers).
Raul
linky
posted:April 25, 2011 4:40 am
Great post Paul, and an equally engaging response, Carlos!
This is a great perspective and you ask some great questions. I appreciate the thought and level of detail you put into this post, I will definitely keep these questions in mind as I continue to learn!
Cheers
@TyrellMara
Tyrell Mara
linky
posted:April 25, 2011 8:13 am
@Raul – you raise very valid points. I’m of the opinion that this knowledge gap with general business people is one of the reasons snake oil salesmen are able to survive. It’s smoke and mirrors to them, and I’m not sure if there’s an answer to the problem.
As business people continue to become familiar with what constitutes marketing online as opposed to traditional marketing, I’m confident that this will change. For anyone running a business solely online, it’s a necessity to know of the concepts I’ve addressed to compete effectively, and in essence they SHOULD know at bear minimum what they refer to.
Paul Anthony
linky
posted:April 25, 2011 8:18 pm
1. This is the greatest blog post ever. Thank you for exposing these losers for what they are.
2. If I ever get to meet you in person, I will buy you a drink just for the spacing and font size on this site. It looks awesome.
3. I will also hug you, if you let me.
Chris Kirkham
linky
posted:April 26, 2011 4:29 am
Great post! I found the first point very interesting and often overlooked. Voice is extremely important, and a lot of “social media” experts tend to be techies with some marketing experience and lack of real writing skills or talent. Worse still is when a company hasn’t even found it’s voice and the “experts” don’t do anything to help them, instead just writing and posting however they feel. I have seen more than one company whose online presence looks like it had been crafted by a fourth grader.
The company who posts all in caps comes to mind…
Brian Johnson
linky
posted:April 26, 2011 7:24 am
@Chris –
Sometimes you receive a comment that just puts a big fucking grin on your face. This was one of those times. I showed your comment to my girlfriend, she said as long as its a big manly hug thats fine ;o)
@Brian – you raise a great point about *finding* a voice, sometimes that’s not easy.
Thanks for commenting.
Paul.
Paul
linky
posted:April 26, 2011 10:08 am
Hi Paul,
Fantastic post. I have had many many conversations with people to do with this exact subject. Some of these points (particularly benchmarking, measuring and reporting) are regularly overlooked.
I think one thing people completely miss about social media, particularly (but not solely) for small businesses is that often an individual (MD, CEO, etc) is the driving force behind the company and also the real character within the company. They are what people are buying from when they meet face to face. That is one of the most interesting and unique part of the company. How can you as a third party engage with people acting as that individual? Not easy!
It is often better to educate and encourage them to communicate their character and philosophies online.
Phil Stephens
linky
posted:April 27, 2011 8:59 pm
Thanks for this post. It’s amazing how many “social media experts” and “gurus” we have out there. You’ve posed such great questions here, and I know I’m certainly not in the category of “expert.”
Nancy Cawley Jean
linky
posted:April 27, 2011 10:28 pm
I agree with your post, its fantastic.
claudia
linky
posted:April 27, 2011 10:46 pm
Hey man great word. I completely agree with you, lately I get a little weary when people start to proclaim themselves as “Gurus” or “Ninjas” for a certain niche. It is almost an indicator of a lack of integrity and has black hat connotations to it. Those who are truly knowledgable in these areas don’t go around proclaiming they have mastered a certain type of marketing or stating the claim that they have a cure all because they know that it is impossible to master due to the ever changing environment of the web.
Anyway just wanted to say this was a well written post, you nailed it.
Take Care
Craig Desmarais
linky
posted:April 29, 2011 3:28 am
I can’t decide if I want to tweet this post out every day, several times a day. Or simply use it as a strategy template for every single client that I deal with.
It’s true in almost any field. UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS PROBLEM FIRST. Then create your strategy and find the right tool to implement it.
Well said.
Fadra Nally
linky
posted:May 6, 2011 4:23 pm
You are officially my newest hero.
K
linky
posted:May 8, 2011 1:43 am
♥ You are right …
I did it …
Anyone can …
~Love and Light …
~Debbie:)
Deborah A. Sullivan
linky
posted:May 8, 2011 12:36 pm
Paul,
Rather than repeat what has already been said, I’ll just enthusiastically agree with Chris’s post.
All of it.
Except #3.
Replace his #3 with K’s post. Yep, that should do it.
Jon J. Heller
linky
posted:May 13, 2011 2:59 pm
Paul, where is the ‘tweet’ button for this post??
(Hopefully I am not just being blind).
Jordan McClements
linky
posted:May 13, 2011 4:46 pm
Jordan,
I’ve removed all social sharing buttons on the site for a while for two reasons
1) I’m curious to watch if sharing decreases, and might run a blog post on it.
2) The lag of some of these services is atrocious. Working on a native solution for WordPress.
There may be a return of them at some stage whilst I get my plan together with the latter.
Paul.
Paul Anthony
linky
posted:May 13, 2011 5:13 pm
I think AddThis is pretty damn good…
Jordan McClements
linky
posted:May 13, 2011 6:38 pm
Love the 12 points
FIN
linky
posted:May 13, 2011 7:33 pm
This is a great article and extremely useful! I recently graduated and looking for a job in Social Media and Marketing. For a short period of time, my twitter profile stated “social media guru” and I realized that I’m just a rookie so I just changed it really fast (how embarrassing!!) Thanks for the great tips. This will definitely help me prepare for interviews in the social media field.
Shannon Callarman
linky
posted:May 24, 2011 9:41 am
Thanks – Love it! Especially the title caught my eye and made me wanna read it ;-) I didnt want to be another schmuck! :-)
Reinette
linky
posted:December 5, 2011 9:26 pm
My stomach churns when someone introduces themselves as a self proclaimed social media expert. Hey until you are referenced by an actual expert, you are a nobody. Can’t stand it when someone who has less experience than I and knows less, tries to sell me something? and no I don’t claim to be an expert, just a neophite.
I even had a guy one time try to tell me that I was missing the boat if I did not have social media in my marketing plan but he must have forgotten that I did an interview with him that I put on YouTube 3 years earlier?
Anyway, I just hate it when someone tries to get on the bandwagon with very little experience and just because they swallowed one nugget, thinks they are an expert?
Boise Idaho