Have you finally caved to the pressure and signed-up on facebook? How about twitter? Let me assure you social media can be much more than receiving farmville updates or tweets from your colleague about the great panini sandwich they had for lunch.
Social media can be much more than nuisance narcissistic posts if you choose to leverage it for your business — we’ll save that for another discussion but today, I want to rant a bit about this new market of (so-called) social media experts. First, let’s just be fair and say that my teenager (and/or yours) is probably more qualified to call themselves social media “expert” than most trying to sell this service. It’s not that mystical – really. Make sure any person/company provides you with clear, tangible goals. And get it in writing.
I love how brutal Zach Dunn is in his article “Social Media Bull$*#t” — a small snippet:
… let’s see an example of this. Suppose a client says they need to find a new way to survey customers. How could you respond?
- The Vague Answer: We’ll use social media.
- The Concrete Answer: We can set up a polling contest across Facebook and Twitter. Fans and followers can respond to the survey. Once a week three people will be randomly selected and given the featured prize.
Even though the concrete solution isn’t the most innovative, you hopefully get the point. Instead of offering a pseudo-answer by way of buzzword, a tangible example is given. Notice how the term “social media” doesn’t even need to appear.