Expert by Pete Prodoehl is a Creative Commons image.
In recent years and months the Web has been flooded by social media experts. They’re everywhere you move, you can’t escape them it seems. There is one problem though: Social media as such exist only for a few years.
How can you consider someone an expert who has just 2 or 3 years of experience or even less?
Some social media in the stricter sense like StumbleUpon exist since 2002 but most people, especially the marketers who refer to themselves as experts joined later on, somewhere around 2005+, in the case of SU more 2007+.
So are there true social media experts at all? Yes, there are. How can you spot them among the plethora of self proclaiming ones? It’s easy. True social media experts display the following 3 traits:
Social media experts don’t call themselves social media experts.
It’s like with every other discipline. You can call yourself specialist, professional, consultant or whatever but you can’t refer to yourself as an expert unless others do, or rather only other people can call you an expert. Otherwise you’re simply boasting. So true social media experts won’t tell you that they are experts actually. They will point of what they accomplished, how long they are using specific social media “channels” etc. They might cite others referring to them as experts in reviews or testimonials.
There is no social media.
Imagine someone calling himself media expert. What media is s/he an expert in? Print media? Radio? TV? “Multimedia”? There are journalists, photographers or scientists studying media but there are no sicla media experts because there are no unified social media. Social media is a huge term basically containing everything you do online communicating unless it’s email. So you can be a Twitter expert, Digg top user or Power-Stumbler but you can’t be possibly in all social media. Mastering even one of those sites or tools requires a huge amount of time and commitment, how do you imagine to master all? I’m a complete Facebook noob. After one year of Twitter, I’m an advanced user of it. After almost 2 years of StumbleUpon I still struggle with it despite more tan 15k stumbles.
Real social media experts don’t reply to emails or answer calls.
You can coment on their blog or reply to their tweets. You can follow them or subscribe to them but they won’t reply via media or phone. Not only because they use other media, the “social media” but also because they are overwhelmed with time consuming social media participation. Also due to a gigantic boom in social media marketing they have potential clients flocking to them like the gold diggers to Klondike during the gold rush. There are simply put only a few social media experts out there and the demand by an overwhelming margin surpasses the supply.
Of course I oversimplified, I might even err but I’m no social media expert myself so how can I know? ;-) This post was inspired by this rant.
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This thing has 15 Comments
I sincerely disagree. There are social media experts just like there are media experts – self proclaimed and otherwise. Don’t confuse social media with the technology used to propagate it. Blogs are considered social media technology and have been around, in their earliest form, since the 90s. My Space was founded in 2003 with Facebook following in 2005 but before that we had IM & chat rooms and forums and usenet. All early forms of social media – user driven media. Heck, social media has been around since the first chamber of commerce business mixer or Rotary session was called to order. Like everything else, technology enables you to scale relationship development and networking on a massive order but it’s only an enabler. The real trick to social media expertise is in the ability to develop relationships to some mutual benefit whether personal or professional. The technology is the easy part…
Well Tom, good point but does using mailing lists since 1997 make me a social media expert? Does it enable me to do social media work like brandng on Digg? I doubt that.
Btw. I really used mailing lists back in 1997.
No, using mailing lists (which I did in 1995, btw ;-) doesn’t make you an expert but there’s a lot of bashing of social media experts without acknowledging that there truly are experts out there – people who call themselves that and actually get results from their efforts on behalf of themselves and others.
Truth be told if you can explain to somebody how to blog and what the benefits are or how to set up a Twitter account and post in a way that adds value or use Digg or Delicious or any of the myriad social sites in a way that provides benefit to your audience then, at least for that audience, you are a (gasp) social media expert whether you acknowledge yourself as one or not. I think it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise or to dispute that title claimed by others merely because they claimed it. (By the way, thanks for the response).
Its pretty simple really. Show me your case studies. You don’t have a portfolio of successes, you are no expert regardless of what you may say.
Doesnt the tag “expert” depend on how long the field has been in existance? Someone who works in a field that has only been around for 6 months, but has been there from the start could call themselves an expert i guess. Its all subjective.
right. amateurs things they are experts and pros think they are still just learning.
It normally took people to grow in a field to be called experts. They made mistakes and learned from them.
Expert is an objective word. People may be in a field for years together and still a novice to certain things in the same field.
I could not agree more. People actually call themselves experts on certain fields when they barely know anything about it just to get the trust of their clients. It is part of the strategy.
I think it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise or to dispute that title claimed by others merely because they claimed it. (By the way, thanks for the response).
It seems that these days everyone can call themself an expert. You are absolutely right with the statement that only others can call you an expert.
The minute a new word is created relating to any kind of industry it seems that “experts” will pop up out of the woodwork. Like you stated the only way you can attempt to define whether someone is a true professional in their field is to judge them on their past experience.
You state in your article – How can you consider someone an expert who has just 2 or 3 years of experience or even less? – there is the point in one simple sentence. However, the more difficult question is how many years of experience in a particular field should a person have before someone actually calls them an expert?
Is there a specific time frame whereby others decide ok this guy has put in the time and ground work lets give him the expert title. Customer feedback and referrals are the best way I have found to try to get a so called expert in the field I am after.
You wouldn’t want the plumber with a weeks experience working on your pipes when you could have the “expert” who has been physically working at the plumbing game for over 15 years. But again… what is the required time frame for expertise. Could be that the guy who has been a plumber for 15 years has not been following the new trends or products available for the industry whereas Mr just out of plumbing school perhaps is up with the latest advancements. I think the whole “expert” question is a difficult one to get to the bottom of.
However, like I said, referrals from other people are good place to start when looking for an expert in almost any field.
Rgds
Michiel
Great post. Speaking of which, I’m looking for a “social media expert” able to drive traffic from Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and Twitter (and any other major resources you may have on hand) to quality viral content on my network of websites.
If you are well-versed/established on a number of these websites, please contact me to discuss possibilities.
editors [at] formatmag.com
I always remember the saying… “The stranger is the expert”.
Terrible really… until you find out they have not got a clue what they are talking about :-)
I just wanted to thank you for properly crediting my photo. I always appreciate people who abide by the license my work is released under. :)
Hey Pete, yeah, I always credit photograpehrs and artists. I hate content theft myself. Creative Commons is the greatest thing since slice bread if you ask me.
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