Blogger Rich Harris over at 47 Project is the latest to proclaim ain’t no party like a Scranton party there’s no such thing as a social media experts, with his post “Social Media Expert? You Have Lots to Learn, Grasshopper.”
Now that title may at first glance appear somewhat pretentious but even being someone who manages social media for a large company like myself, I have a hard time proclaiming guru or expert status.
Here’s the thing. You can’t be an expert at something that first of all has really only started culminating the last couple years, and second, changes almost every week. You can call yourself a social media ninja, bad ass, maestro, whatever the hell you wanna call it….but there’s a 96.87% chance you are no guru or expert.
… said the guy who calls himself Musician, Artist, Photographer, Web Ninja, Sarcastic Jerk.
(Personally, I don’t think anyone should call themselves a ninja unless they can hide in the darkness and kill people with their thumb, but that’s just me.)
I don’t take issue with Harris’ idea that “just because you have a Twitter account and you know how to use it, doesn’t make you a social media marketer.”
We see that a lot in our business. We’re ghost bloggers. We write blogs, and that’s all we do. We’re professional writers and communicators who understand how to a) turn a phrase, b) do it so the search engines find us, and c) it’s still pleasing to readers.
But there are plenty of people who barely passed high school English schlepping themselves on GetAFreelancer.com (I won’t even link to that place), calling themselves blog writers, offering to write blog posts for $2 apiece. That’s not writing, that’s typing.
So I’m with Rich on this one: just because you can do it, doesn’t mean your good at it.
But as I said a few weeks ago, I’ve rejected this whole notion of “No Social Media Experts” as utter bullshit.
The NSME argument usually goes something like this:
- Malcolm Gladwell says you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be an expert.
- Social media tools like Twitter are not 10,000 hours old.
- You can’t have used Twitter for 10,000 hours.
- Therefore, there are no social media experts.
However, the tools don’t make the expert. Sure, your job is easier if you have a more-than-passing understanding of the tools (and no, playing Oregon Trail or Pirate Clan on Facebook doesn’t count), but it doesn’t mean you can’t be an expert just because you’re on a brand new social network.
Social media experts do things like get paid a lot of money to speak at conferences (Chris Brogan), write widgets, plug-ins and blogging software-as-a-service (Doug Karr), or write books like Twitter Marketing for Dummies (Kyle Lacy). Experts are basically doing this for a living, making money with it, and can make bigger claims that 20,000 artificial followers on Twitter.
Harris actually agrees with me, which sort of makes me feel bad for the ninja crack, although he stops short of proclaiming himself a social media expert, even though he does social media for a large unnamed corporation.
To be a social media expert or guru, you need to understand all the tools, how they all work together and you need to have a passion for human beings and their behavior, good, bad and ugly. If you understand that stuff, have a vision, and are fascinated with human beings, you will be a social media jedi one day. I hope I get to be one too. :-)
Expertise in social media doesn’t rely on knowledge of the tools. Rather, it relies on two other things, communication and social psychology. In other words, the ability to create an effective message, and the understanding of how that message will affect/appeal to your chosen audience. If you can synthesize those two things, and use tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or the Nails For Males Yahoo discussion group to have your intended effect, you’re probably more of a social media expert than the guy who keeps sending DM after DM to tell you how to make money while you sleep.
