Beware of the Self-Proclaimed Social Media Experts

I'd rather have a dozen meaningful followers than a million total strangers. But when CEOs of some of our client organizations say they aren't into social marketing, I find that I end up forwarding your blog articles more than any other one item (with Gienna Shaw of Health Leaders Media a close second).

Joe Tye

Perhaps if you only follow the advice of established "stars" then you may miss the new thinking of up and comers.

Thanks for the recommendations! Looking forward to checking them out.

My reccommendation is not tradtional:
This woman is by no means a "social media expert" nor would she care to be, but somehow she has built (according to TIME) one of the most powerful blogs (or rather collection of blogs) in the world in just 3 years.

thepioneerwoman.com

I don't know a woman in my circle of friends who doesn't follow her. I own the knife she promotes b/c my mother saw it and got it for me. Most of her recipes are in my files. Alot of my photography I learned from her. She is THE first site I visit as a woman in the 24-35 age gap becuase she of the repore she has built with us readers. She's down right FUN. Even better, I don't feel that she has "tried" to do it.

My husband and I talk all the time about how if you want to sell to women, make friends with Ree, the pioneerwoman. She understands this part of the market but would never tell you so.

No doubt that Darren at problogger.net is helpful. I don't blog for money, but he has many helpful posts related to blogging and how social media can enhance blogging.

The Gladwell book, the Outliers, suggests that it takes something like 10,000 hours or 10 years of dedicated work experience before someone should be considered an expert at what they do. So if you agree with that suggestion then that means that in social media there is no such thing as an expert yet. Why? Because the internet itself is just a little past 10 years old. And the technology that allows us to talk like this is still very young. In fact for me, this is the first year where I feel that the tools for blogging have improved so you don't have to be technologically inclined to learn how to use it.

I think that the best we can say right now is that there are some people who have made it their job to understand the social media tools and to develop by trial and error some of the policies that we now acknowledge as best practices. At best a person could be considered an "expert student" of social media as we continue to discover what the tools can do and if the people who are our listeners will indeed listen to us in such a way.

They all have books which is very old media. I will agree that social media got them their book deals but for most a 50K+ follower account on Twitter is just not feasible or necessary if you are working in a niche. Some of these guys also built followers based on their past successes Kawasaki was on the original Macintosh team at Apple. Seth Godin is a marketing God and worked for Yahoo and has many, many books, spoke at TED, come on. Tim Ferriss, Mr. Four-Hour Workweek himself, got huge geek creed for using automation, spoke at SXSW and actually said Twitter was a bad thing when it first launched in 2007. Chris Brogan on the other hand I think has really used mostly social media to create his following so I'll give you that one.

I don't believe proof of qualifications are in the numbers/stats alone. Quite frankly social media can be and often is a popularity contest. Followers don't often equal sound advice. A good friend of mine has attended practically every conference/session of well known social media experts out there and he noted something very important — a lot of people pontificate about social media strategy and tactics. But having spoken to every speaker at every event he's attended, he found that very few actually executed or managed an actual social media campaign. My rule of thumb is if you can talk to me on a high level about your concept but be equally well versed in walking me through the tactics and metrics then you have some street cred. If not, talk to me when you've come back from the trenches.

Also there is a tendency to use certain social media vehicles because everyone out there is but how about using some basic marketing principals and mapping that strategy and outreach back to the users first? If you can't tell me why you built your program a certain way or how your approach supports the marketing/business objectives then you are wasting my time.

Last, i support Tim's comment above. It's good to follow the "stars" as a guideline but if you only follow the established players you can miss out on some amazing new thinking.

Michael,

Another great post. I have been a fan for a long while now. I use your blog constantly as an example for the way CEOs should blog.