Great article. The only thing you failed to mention is the SME’s office of choice is usually the local Panera Bread Company.

As usual I emphatically agree. Sometimes its like you take the words right out of my mouth.

Buzzwords like guru, expert and genius make me want to cry. They make it sound like there is some mythical trick that only some select people have access to.

Everyone should be an expert if they truly know their organization. Know yourself, and you have what you need to have an impact.

The social media people are not obsolete, however, because of the considerable amount of time you need to dedicate. There are no tricks, but someone has to do the leg work.

Kudos Spike.

I’m with Jay! The tax consultant and lawyer comparisons are spot on. You can do your own taxes, if you dare. And you can represent yourself in court, if you don’t care about the outcome. You also can hike the Grand Canyon without a guide. But why would you?

Because of confidentiality agreements, I can’t detail the many ways – before they hired me – my clients have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on social media campaigns because their inside teams didn’t know some very basic tenets. But i can guarantee that my clients aren’t the only ones with those issues.

Where I agree with you is that there are so few people out here who actually have case studies from real clients to prove their worth. That’s what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Speaking from the other side – as someone from a company who might one day hire a social media consultant (no, no, don’t call me).

Sometimes we use external consultants to reinforce and validate what we already know in order to convince people higher up.

Sad but true.

I started to write a response and then read Jay’s comment…so no need to repeat it.

Spike – Good post. Social Media consultants, like any other industry consultant, need to show they are worth the $$ by implementing strategies that provide real value to the client.

I also think there is an inherrant stigma to the word ‘consultant’.

Great post, Spike. I think a lot of the small business owners I talk to would find it reassuring to know that they can, ultimately, “get it” without having to spend money on an SM consultant.

I definitely have to agree with Marc Collier – so often when I’ve talked to these small business owners, they barely grasp the terminology, never mind the technology. One person I’ve worked with extensively really cannot get his head around the idea of the RT (yes, I’ve made the analogy to e-mail forwarding) on Twitter – and that’s just an example. Maybe I’m outing myself as a bad SM teacher, but I’m willing to take the risk to make the point!

To use social media effectively, people either need to invest the time to learn it, really immerse themselves, or to invest the dollars to hire the knowledge. And isn’t that always the argument with having the knowledge in or out of house?

I think we’re on the same page. Mostly. As usual, I might tweak the semantics just a bit in a second. I want to agree with you but I have a couple of reservations.

First, I generally agree with the sentiment of the post: This social media guru bull$h*t is completely out of control. It’s getting in the way of real discussions about how to properly use and integrate social media into an organization’s bag of tricks. It isn’t enough that everyone and their brother is a social media consultant these days, now we have to endure an endless stream of social media conferences at a rate of what… one a week now? Seriously? Like we need a twitter conference in every city now? WTF.

I promise you this isn’t a plug for my blog, but I just wrote a post in regards to the pernicious rise of Social Media conferences whose sole purpose (aside from generating money for their organizers) is to give would-be social media consultants a platform from which to present someone else’s content to the next batch of would-be social media consultants. Total fail. And people pay serious bank to attend these things and hear the same crap from the same people week after week after week. You might actually like it.

That said, I routinely run into pretty solid people who may appear to be social media consultants to outsiders because… well, they work with social media and occasionally talk about social media, even present at social media conferences, but really aren’t social media consultants at all. You guys, for example. I run into you at social media events. You speak. You present. In a way, you have contributed to the hype bubble the same way every other SM conference speaker has, myself included. Yet you aren’t social media consultants. And neither am I. But to many, it might seem that we are exactly that: Social Media consultants.

So… all this to say that the term “social media consultant” isn’t always as clear a term as you may think. Or as ugly a term as you imply at the beginning of this post. In truth, the field is much more complex than that, as are consulting roles that touch it.

Second, in terms of “doing,” I also have to throw in a word of caution. I see a good number of Social Media managers and directors out there who are technically “doing”. They work for legitimate companies, some of which are Fortune 100s. They have pretty business cards that state their Social Media awesomeness in its full Helvetica glory. Their PR firms craft pretty solid papers they sell to their bosses and stakeholders as “case studies.” They really seem to be “doing” stuff. But the reality is that many of them aren’t doing a whole lot. They’re just making noise, riding on the relative ignorance of their employers, leveraging good PR and setting themselves up for their next gig. (I’m obviously not a fan.)

On the flip side, I see a growing number of individuals who impact organizations’ ability to develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs from the outside. Technically, they aren’t doing anything aside from teaching, training, mentoring and guiding companies whose SM-touching teams aren’t completely functional yet. Sure, it may not seem like they’re doing much compared to say, a rock star community manager, but trust me, that kind of work is hard, indispensable and not to be overlooked. Just because a consultant works in the shadows doesn’t mean s/he is any less important or legit than the community manager whose role is in the spotlight 24/7. To discount these “consultants” because they don’t seem to be “doing” something recognizable is a bit naive. Sure, community engagement is an inside job that can’t be properly outsourced, but there’s more to social media “jobs” than engagement and community outreach. Some SM practitioners specialize in strategy, others in integration and others still in measurement, monitoring, and data analysis. You have to look at the broader picture. As large organizations adopt Social Media and integrate it at every level and type of function, so does the breadth of roles and (dare I say it) specialization that touch it.

Lastly:

“Before you start your search and spend your money, do a gut check and some research.”
Agreed.

“Realize that nobody has this thing all figured out. We’re all in social media grad school right now.”
Actually, a few people have this thing pretty much figured out. I know it may seem difficult to accept, but… well, dare to believe.

“And you’re probably just about as well equipped as anyone out there.”
Not sure about that one. To do what? To engage customers on Twitter? To manage a community? To integrate social media into your company’s customer service infrastructure? To develop social media guidelines for your company? See where I am going with this? From the outside, it may seem like Social Media is simple. And in a way, it is. It’s just a way for people to reach out to other people. But when you start plugging it into a business, that simplicity flies out the window pretty quickly.

Like it or not, the business world needs people who know how to build, integrate, manage and measure social media programs. The problem isn’t with the “consultants” who can actually deliver on this need, but rather on the scores of so-called experts who claim to but don’t. Let’s not batch everyone together just yet.

Good post, Spike.

I realize this article is probably talking about corporate organizations, rather than small businesses, but I’ll throw my thoughts in anyway.

I work with small businesses and it’s common that they don’t have the time or resources in house to try to figure out how to use social media to their advantage in house.

The 2 major challenges they face are:

1. A lack of understanding on how to use technology. This block means that they stumble and fumble with the tool itself and often don’t get far enough past it (or even get started) to figure out that it’s all just about communication and building relationships.

2. A lack of understanding about how to market themselves effectively. A lot of small businesses (and let’s face it, larger businesses too) market themselves ineffectively because they are trying to sell rather than build relationships. If they have used the internet in any way, because of this focus on their products and services, they did see good results.

Ultimately, companies with enough resources would benefit from putting together a Taskforce in house and capitalizing on the intellectual capital they already possess – and for many companies that is totally under utilized – larger companies could probably boast having a lot of hobbyists that are photographers, bloggers or social media enthusiasts who could play the role as a consultant.

However, in my many years in corporate environments, my experience was that often there was a lack of trust with employees – the company would often look externally for guidance rather than trusting the people they have inhouse, or there was a reluctance from management to add more responsibility from overly burdened teams. And with some companies it might just be a matter of lack of clarity to whose team this type of work would fall into – is it marketing? is it IT? is it someone else?

Ultimately, any company that hires a specialist consultant should be happy if the consultant performs and gives them results. In order to do that, they need to show a track record of success.

If you invest and it yields a greater return, then it’s been a good investment. Any company would be happy with that.

That’s nice. Close by insulting “the overwhelming majority” of the people who took the time to comment on your post. Wonderful.

Well, yeah, I think you can figure it out on your own if you’re a good communicator and are good with people and work for an organization that empowers you to do the appropriate research and get the metrics you need. You also have to be able to see how your efforts fit in with the rest of what you’re for PR and marketing. Which, for some reason, people often have trouble with. So. If you’re willing to dedicate the in-house resources, go ahead and do it in-house. If you want to ramp up faster, get some external validation for best practices that your management is skeptical about or not ready to hear about, and get more insight into the various ways of looking at ROI, then it might be worth talking to someone, even if it’s a short-term engagement. I’m not a consultant (though I suppose I could be bought ). I’m one of those “doers” @thebrandbuilder is talking about, having “done” it while learning about it for a major multinational. I think I was pretty successful, which is why I’m saying it Spike is technically right in that it can be done. But if management is assigning someone internal to figure it out without clearing their plate, it’s a sign that management doesn’t get it.

So the question of whether SM is that arcane–it’s not–or requires a strategy that can’t be managed or integrated by regular marketing folks–it doesn’t–isn’t really the question. The question is not Do you NEED a consultant, it’s Do YOU need a consultant? And if you do, choose wisely, that’s all.

All I can say is, the dude who writes @shitmydadsays probably didn’t have much of a business plan going in, but he connected in a funny, engaging way. No tricks, just great content.

The businesses I follow all do one thing well, they become part of the conversation. And they add to it. They don’t try to make the conversation all about them or their business. To me, it really is just as simple as that.

Wait, am I now a social media guru? Score!

I was pondering this post since my last reply.

I’m wondering why it matters whether companies hire a Social Media Consultant (Coach, Practitioner or whatever) to help them solve a problem?

With so many people are losing their jobs in a variety of industries (I myself decided to go into business for myself after my job was outsourced to Argentina), we should be applauding the entrepreneurial spirit of those who see an opportunity in the market place (by companies who feel like they need help no less) and offer a service that is in high demand.

As it’s already been highlighted here, social media is about building relationships, brand and quality content. The best way to do this is to get out of operations for long enough to be strategic, which when you face the challenges that come with operations, can be challenging. Having an outside perspective can really help.

As I mentioned, I think a lot of companies could take advantage of their in-house IP. I also think many companies don’t market themselves well anyway and with the change for traditional to new media are a little lost in the woods.

Sometimes it takes time to shift organizational directions and managerial mindset and the only thing that can do that can be an outsider.

At the end of the day, I don’t need a lot of the people that I give my money to for services rendered, but I do it because it makes my life and business easier. It stimulates the economy and lets me focus on what I love to do and what’s important to me.

For that matter do we really need market research? It seems like many decisions that cost a tremendous amount of money researching are just…common sense. I get the anti-SM consultant backlash given how hot social media has become, however I have to disagree wit hthe idea that SM consultants are not needed or useful. Simply because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement or have everyone wrap their head around. How do you tell a company that is very protective of their IP that they should just open up? How do you tell a company obsessed with their brand to “let go” a little and let their people engage in the social sphere? It all sounds obvious, because social networking is just an extension of networking…but there are consultants for networking too, isn’t networking advice just common sense?

I think there as much backlash around social media as there is hype. There are indeed plenty of snake oil salesmen out there but as with anything else there is also value to be found. If it was so obvious and so common sense there wouldn’t be market for SM consultants. The fact that there is means that companies need help and coaching. I agree with the taxes example and the same can be said for fixing basic computer errors or market research or customer service.