Social Media Consultants can’t say they exist because people get upset. But if there weren’t any, there wouldn’t be any social media. Discuss!

SMCs go into an organisation and look at how they’re using technology. One of the strongest approaches is to use social media for rapid prototyping, crowdsourcing viewpoints, product/service development. This can be more useful than social media for marketing/promotion. Social Media is a cheap way of doing prototyping/development. Wisdom of the crowd can prevent strong individuals skewing the results.

Clients want to engage in product development. They don’t necessary want marketing or press releases.

Facebook is becoming useless for business. Perhaps good for maintaining existing traffic, but bad at finding new people. Vast majority of Facebook groups run by businesses have few followers or are very inactive.

Facebook is still the biggest photo-sharing site online. MySpace still seems effective for bands.

Was the death knell of Facebook when they introduced chat? Facebook was about asynchronous communication – posting on walls, commenting, etc. With chat, this skews the interaction.

Is identica an alternative for companies? – it perhaps allows them to maintain ownership of their space.

So, Why does SMC have a bad name?

• Because if you’re doing it effectively your work speaks for itself? Surely good entrepreneurs don’t like to be called entrepreneurs, but instead CEOs, managers, etc.
• Social Media Consultancy has been “owned” by people who are jumping bandwagons…
• There are Social Media douche-bags, and we need an industry to poke fun at.

This is definitely damaging. The Industry as a whole is being tarred by some inexpert practitioners. Also, douchebags can lead naive companies into doing stuff that seriously backfires. This can undermine the industry as a whole.

How do we disassociate ourselves from the douche-bags?

Vast majority of social media people are marketeers, and it’s dumb to use social media soley as a marketing space.

We can ignore them, or we can have a good laugh at them.

Real damage can be done by the douche bags.

Social media isn’t actually a big deal, if you’ve got some experience yourself – perhaps? – so consultancy is by definition aimed at people who aren’t in the know.

Some new groups may well jump straight from no website to using social media (without buildng up through a website). Progression isn’t always linear.

Small organisations (84% who are 2-3 people) don’t have resources to protect their online brands, and really need good Social Media advice – its not something they have capacity for in-house.

How to solve?

• Not a formal trade association.
• Improving networks for referral.
• Ideally Business Link and similar, but they’re awful at recommendations.
• Big companies can have official supplier lists which can make it really hard to jump in front of the douche-bags. Some people can work around this kind of bureaucracy, but not many.
• Not just a social media problem. A general problem at finding experts.
• We’re not sure if there’s an easy answer…
• Word of mouth / referral seems the strongest way of getting work.
• We all need to be working hard to validate and demonstrate the quality in our industry.

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