There Are No Social Marketing Experts

There are two audiences we deal with in my niche.

1.  The people who are totally clueless and new to the social marketing, Web 2.0 thing.

2.  The know-it-alls who will grill me for even saying “Web 2.0″ because they are so advanced and over it.

Group 1 pays the bills.  Group 2 is just a pain in my ass.

Group 1 could use some insight into how to best start working with social sites to gte more traffic.  On this level, a lot of experienced people can help them a great deal.  But they are not “social marketing experts.”  None of us are.

You cannot be an “expert” in something that continues to develop at the rapid pace that social media does.  It is further complicated when you purport to be an SEO and Social Media Expert, because Google is just as purposely fickle as social media in how it determines the value of your work on social networks.

Calling yourself a social media expert is like someone who is sinking in quicksand calling themselves a “get out of quicksand” expert, while they are still trying to figure out how they are going to save themselves from it!

Reverse that from sinking in quicksand to succeeding with social media marketing and you have our current state of affairs.

There are people who know a lot about social media.  They have had one-off success stories to tell about their Twitter campaigns or a Facebook app that did well.  But they aren’t experts at something that is so new and still evolving to the point that there is no right answer to the overall question:  “How do you conduct a professional social marketing campaign?”

That’s because the answer is different for absolutely everyone.  It depends onthe amount of time and resources you have.  It depends on your niche.  It depends on whether you are going to start this month or next month what you’re best strategy might be!

There’s a big game being played right now with the thousands of people jockeying to be “THE” social media guru on the web.

Here’s how you play the fake social media expert game:

Someone announces something they did that worked really well and they’re really excited about it.  To be seen as an expert, you must digitally yawn at everything everyone else is excited about and act like you already knew about it.

You go back to your blog and publicly ridicule the person to show you were far advanced by the time they came up with their epiphany.

You must always appear to be tired of people talking about social media that’s over 5 minutes old, while scrambling to sign up for an account on the latest recommended service and fill it up with info to appear that you’ve been there since day 1.

You should name drop constantly.  The best way to be seen as a social media snob is to associate yourself with the others.

You should pretend that the whole world knows about something when, in fact, only a tiny percentage of the web knows about it.  This is especially helpful in propping up your social street cred.  Declare that Twitter will be dead in a year when it hasn’t even started yet if you want to get way ahead of the curve!

Invent a new social media service that doesn’t exist and declare it dead to win super bonus points!

No One is A Social Marketing Expert…

There are just people like me who follow social media closely, who have ideas and theories, some case studies, and who think strategically about social marketing in the context of an overall marketing plan which includes the solid, proven staples of web marketing.

So who to follow?

Follow the people who are passionate about social media and marketing.  People who seem to thrive on discovery, testing, and sharing their results freely.

Watch the people who get “yawned” on by the social elite, yet totally blow them off and keep working and sharing.  Those are the people who are actually making the most progress in their work on social media sites.  They’re the ones with disclaimers and explanations as to why what they’re doing may or may not work for you.

The “experts,” on the other hand, come off with absolutes that you must do to succeed.  There are no absolutes in social media other than being a real person and sharing before advertising.

So, look for people, like this, who are clearly enjoying their work in the social media space, who don’t claim to be the gods of social marketing, and who seem to genuinely get something out of the simple act of sharing, even if what they share is something all the “experts” knew about months ago.   It doesn’t mean you knew about it or didn’t appreciate the tip!

These are the young days of social media.  There’s a “gold rush” feel to it we should simply enjoy.  It’s far too early to act bored about the whole thing just to prop ourselves up in an industry that’s not even an industry yet!

Tagged as: social marketing experts, social marketing snobs, social media marketing