The term “social media expert” is thrown around and debated so much, it has nearly become a punchline.

Someone told me once that when the economy recovers and the bartenders and waiters get their old jobs back, the number of social media experts will be cut in half. And I keep reading lately that a lot of advertising agencies are starting to embrace digital media as one of their new offerings.

Meanwhile, there are real social media firms who have been using the product for more than a few weeks, don’t limit their Facebook time to playing Farmville and Pirate Clan, and don’t think that ROI is the name of that Canadian goalie playing for the Colorado Avalanche.

So when you go to hire your next social media consultant, ask them these questions, and pay careful attention to their answers.

1. How long have you been blogging? How often do you publish? The correct answer is anything longer than a year. People who write about a particular topic have to know something about it. And your social media expert can and should be blogging about some aspect of social media. Basically, if they’re not blogging, they’re probably not doing their job correctly.

They should also be publishing at least once a week. More is better, say, 2 – 3 times per week. But if they go for a few months without publishing anything, they’d better have a good reason why. “We’ve been executing some national campaigns for our clients, and I barely have enough time to sleep” is a pretty good excuse. A blank stare and a mumbled “I dunno” is not.

2. What blog platform do you use? The correct answer is “WordPress dot org. If they say WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, or anything else, ask them why. Anyone who has the technical knowledge to use WordPress.org will have the technical know-how to use the other tools you may need for your campaign.

I say this as someone who has different blogs on different platforms. I really like Blogspot.com for my personal blog, my favorite short blog platform is Posterous, and I will acknowledge the existence of Joomla. However, I embrace my elitism and snobbery when it comes to WordPress.org for client blogs.

3. What are some automation tools that you use? You don’t really care what they say, you just need to hear that they have an automation process. They should talk about things like Twaitter.com, Twitterfeed.com, Ping.fm, TweetDeck, and HootSuite.

If they carefully craft each blog promotion (i.e. including yours) by hand, they either don’t have enough work — which means they’re new, and they’re going to learn how to do this on your dime — or they’re inefficient — which means your work may fall through the cracks.

4. What analytics package do you use? For measuring blog or website traffic, if they say “Google Analytics,” that’s acceptable. We use Google Analytics quite a bit on our client blogs. However, better yet is “Yahoo Analytics” or “Going Up,” or one of the many other professional-level packages. For social media tracking, if they say “you can’t measure social media effectively,” thank them for their time, and ask them to leave. If they say “Google News Alerts,” give them a B– for trying.

The real social media experts will either cobble together their own system (B+/A–) or use a paid service like ScoutLabs or Radian6 (A+). Just keep in mind that those services are pricey, so if you want top-notch analytics results, that will be added to your budget.

5. What kind of ROI should I expect? Trick question: they shouldn’t be able to answer right away. Anyone who promises you a specific increase is just guessing. We’d love to tell you that you’ll see a 25% increase in sales, but we can’t. We’d love to say that you will see amazing growth in just a few months, but we can’t. The truth is there are too many variables to make an accurate prediction, just like with any marketing. We can’t predict the future, but we can measure it when it happens.

Follow up question: What kind of ROI have you gotten for other clients? While you would like to see significant numbers, what you’re more interested in is whether there are any numbers. A good social media practitioner will be able to track what business came from their campaigns.

Most of the social media poseurs will not be able to give you a good answer to most of these questions. Your true social media expert will have more than just a deep understanding of the tools, but will understand how to find your target audience and be able to create the right messages to reach them. But they should also be able to answer these five questions satisfactorily.

Photo credit: Pro Blog Service generated by Wordle.net
Yewenyi (Flickr)

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There are a lot of people betting their careers on social media. They’re granting themselves fancy titles like social media expert, social marketing gurus, or social media optimizers. SMEs and SMOs. Here’s some stark advice to most of these so-called experts.

Give up while you can.

I’m not trying to be a jerk or to get rid of the competition. I’m pointing out a reality. The career choice of most social media experts is going to be short-lived. Why? because, there’s only so much they can contribute.

Let Me Explain

Anything that you can know well enough to be an expert at in 1,000 hours or less is simply not worth pursuing as a career. For those counting, that’s the equivalent of about one year of school. That’s not very deep. In fact, most of the intern level people I interview have at least 2,000 hours of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn experience under their belt just from being in school and looking for a job. That makes most recent high school graduates bona fide social media experts (not like this guy).

Would you entrust your corporate social media campaign to an 18-year-old? Didn’t think so.

You Can’t Hire the Real Thought Leaders

For those looking at social media in a PR, marketing or brand monitoring role, here’s some advice: look for people who can get things done, and shy away from “thought leaders.” Why? Because the self-proclaimed social media experts are not the real thought leaders. The real thought leaders in social media have names like Mark Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook), Evan Williams (founder of Blogger and Twitter), and Reid Hoffman (of LinkedIn fame).

With all due respect to our local social media experts (including us), guys like Evan Williams clearly are not the ones that are showing up, hat in hand, to sell you that blogging boot camp or the “how to use” LinkedIn consulting. They’re a little busy changing the world at the moment. If a person calls themselves a thought leader, they either really are, or they have a lot of time on their hands to do lots of thinking and not a lot of working.

Here’s the second issue with most SMEs: They know enough to be able to help the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. They generally can help small business find local customers on Twitter and even set up effective profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn. But that’s about it.

But larger corporations need to move beyond the local push. They need to reach people in their industry or demographic profile. They need to be able to measure the ROI of their efforts. They need to know immediately when one tweak or tiny misstep could result in a half-point shift in their market share, because that could translate into millions of dollars.

Your run-of-the-mill SME doesn’t have the skills, tools, or wherewithal to handle that. PR professionals and marketing companies with a part-time social media intern aren’t going to be able to turn on a dime like that.

There’s a lot more to social media than setting up a couple of profiles, tossing up a blog, and twittering. You need to strategize, develop an entire campaign, and then be able to measure the results. (Hey, even TV advertising and PR can’t adequately measure their results.)

Work With a Team Instead of a Talking Head

If you should shy away from the SMEs, then who should you trust? Social media agencies. Why? Because most social media agencies have been busy working instead of talking. Nothing is new to them (blogs have been around since the 90s, MySpace started in 2000). They’re not distracted by the latest shiny object or hopping on the latest craze. And they’re able to pull from an entire staff of experts, not just whatever they read on Search Engine Watch last week.

Most of us agency types see social media for what it is: a lot of work, that, if done right, has a high return on investment. We see it as a component of a larger program, be it advertising, public relations, marketing, or even creating shifts in public opinion. And we’ve got years of experience in advertising, public relations, marketing, and creating shifts in public opinion.

The question corporations should be asking of your social media partner is simple: “Can you get us where we need to go?”

That means a lot more than, “Can you create a YouNoodle profile for my new startup?” (And if they say, “huh?”, you don’t want them anyway).

It means, “Have you ever run an online grass roots campaign before?”

It means, “Do you know how to build a reader base for my blog?”

It means, “Do you actually have a clue about marketing, sales and PR that extends beyond Twitter?”

It also means, “Do you have the right capabilities to help us get this done?” More often than not, that last question is the show stopper for SMEs. Social media is a lot of work and often is too much work for a do-it-yourself approach, especially if they have more than one client. Because this job is more than just “First, you need a Facebook page.” And if that’s all an SME is telling you, run away. Very fast.

In short, many social media initiatives fail because they’re a lot more work than anyone expected. Especially the expert.

So if you’re one of those newly-minted SMEs, ask yourself: do you have the knowledge, experience, and tools to create a professional campaign that meets your client’s expectations? Are you willing to put in the hours and hours beyond a Twitter profile? Or are you going to risk your client’s money and your professional reputation to find out the hard way that you can’t?

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Personality Type Your Blog, Metrics and Terrorists

• What Meyers-Briggs personality type is your blog? Don’t know?  Try the Typealyzer. Then see if it matches with your actual Meyers-Briggs personality type with this quick test.
• Making blogs measurable is difficult. That’s why this article on 20 Blog Analytics Tools is a must read.
• Over the last week Twitter delivered the best coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. That’s right, this Twitter.  Why? Real time commentary from people who are where the action was.  Hmm… sounds like a tagline.

Mike Seidle

Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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Yes, there are always massive discrepancies in analytics between platforms. It’s because each system measures things in different ways.

Ever wondered what what the difference was between ad servers, log analyzers & javascript based analytics tools like Google Analytics? And which one you should be using? Here is a brief primer to help you understand.

Ad Servers
An ad server reports clicks that result in a redirect to a web page. There’s no guarantee the visitor made it to the page or wasn’t further redirected.

These stats can be affected by hijacking (toolbars that redirect traffic), bots, the end user, and in some cases, performance of the ad server (I clicked and it timed out!).

Bottom Line: Ad servers accurately measure ad displays and clicks. They are not so accurate at telling you how many people visited a website.

Log Analyzers
A log analyzer report on pages served by a web server. It does not see pages served from caching proxies used by ISPs and does not see pages served from a browser’s cache.

Bottom Line: Log analyzers accurately report server activity and nothing else.

Javascript Based Metrics
All java based metrics (like Google Analytics) will report web site activity accurately if the end user has javascript and no software that blocks your tracker (7-15% of your visitor’s computers have this depending on who’s metrics you are using).

Bottom Line: Javascript based metrics tell you within 7-15% what pages have been viewed.

So, since the best we can do is within 7-15% accuracy anyway it’s best to measure actual ROI with javascript based metrics. In other words, measure the success of each campaign by the number of sales made vs. the amount of money spent to get the traffic to that particular campaign.

Do this and you are sure to get your metrics right.

Mike Seidle

Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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