OK, that was a long title. But Dan Schwabel’s reasonably interesting post on problems with trying to be an expert in social media inadvertently highlighted the ongoing issue with trying to make any kind of definitive pronouncement on the scene. One might have a degree of sympathy with most of his points but he’s way off in terms of point five questioning the earning power of social media, especially on a day when Dell attributed $3 million of revenue to Twitter. Laurel Papworth also has a formidable list of companies who’ve exploited the social in media to earn revenue and highlights Craig’s List in particular as a success story. Still, he’s highlighted an interesting issue – what are social media experts for – and generated a fair bit of soul searching in the process, though some people seem pretty confident about their expertise (and perhaps others should come clean about their actual capabilities in personal-self-publicising and power-networking rather than delivering good practice).
Of course, part of the problem with the role of the social media ‘expert’ is the ongoing conundrum of how exactly one measures the effect. The other is Dan’s point about the necessity of “everyone in the world” being forced to learn about social media, something I completely agree with. I’m not saying we’ve had universal buy-in but we’re working hard at The Careers Group to see that everyone has a degree of training in some area of social media endeavour and is willing to engage. That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is an ‘expert’ and that there isn’t a role for ‘experts’ whose specialism lies in ‘being an expert’.
Perhaps we need to rehabilitate the word ‘consultant’ – if I hire in a third party, if or someone uses our particular expertise for something, they’re buying not only knowledge but an informed second opinion – and I think it’s the informed – expert, even – outside view that’s the key. I’ve worked in plenty of situations where we could have done something ourselves but have chosen to bring in (or hire) an outside party as either a consultant or someone from a totally different culture. In either case, it’s been about ideas about seeing things in a way that isn’t always possible from the inside of something.
What’s a social media expert? Someone who has great ideas about social media, ideas you haven’t had. And I utterly agree with Benjamin Ellis when he asserts that (and I’m paraphrasing here) one key benchmark of such a person is their willingness to describe what they’ve learned from their mistakes.
Filed under: social media | Tagged: consultants, experts, ideas, social media, social media experts
