New Social Media Expert
It’s been just over a year since the world was suprised to see an African American win, to become the President of the United States of America. Many people don’t know about the full scale assault that was waged online by the former Senator from Chicago and his many advisers. A campaign that started 2 years before he was victorious included, a YouTube Channel, Twitter, Facebook, and many other social profiles from one Barack Obama. Those of us who have been in the trenches trying new things with social media, learning, and expressing our inner thoughts for the world to see, saw the changes and noticed that something was going to be different. We saw how the President implored us to join the calling campaigns and going door to door looking for more people to help spread the word about who this guy was and why we should vote for him. Whether you like Barack Obama or not you can say, he had one of the best social media teams on the Internet.
While the success of the social media is still in its infancy stages, if your looking to get in this space and talk to your consumers, partners, or others you need to ask some serious questions before you hire someone. Some say that Social Media is like the wild wild west gold rush, everybody wants a piece of the pie and the stakes are high. The first mistake most people make is to look online for the first person sporting a nice profile with hundreds of thousands of friends/followers and the tagline “Social Media Expert”. While I know some of these guys personally not all people can be considered an Expert. That’s like claiming your an expert in finding gold when the gold rush was going strong, the truth of the matter is “They were lucky in the beginning” nothing more nothing less. Some social media experts were lucky and some are just damn good.
One thing I wouldn’t do is plop down $2000 to a so-called expert, and expect that they will know your customer, understand them, or truly be able to speak to them in their language. You have to know what your looking for, what are you looking to say? What do you want to say, what is the give and take relationship of this new social media? Just because it’s social media does not mean they want to talk to you about your product or service. I believe social media is like stocks and bonds. If your an investor, you invest in the things you love, the products you enjoy everyday. As the market is hot you enjoy the fruit of your passion and your ready for the long haul. If the bottom tanks many people go running and that place you noticed was open yesterday is now closed with no forwarding address.
Right now there are so many “Social Media Experts,” how are you to know if what they say to you about what your business or non profit should be doing online is right or wrong. The truth of the matter is that you will never know if it’s right or wrong, but as my friend Chris Brogan says “Tell the truth.” I am really not one for lists, but since everyone on the Internet gives out the XX reasons for whatever topic, I might as well jump on the bandwagon.
Here are my 5 questions to ask before you hire a “Social Media Expert” (while this is not the only questions to ask its a starting point)
- What online social campaigns have you run before? and what were the established outcomes?
- If they are experts they have done this before, and they have some kind of information about what happen, what influence affected, how did the community react to this new online avenue.
- Do you do everything for me, or do we come up with a plan together?
- Never let anyone decide what your social media stratigy will be, you need to follow the plan of your business, what are you goals for the year, does this fit with where my company is going?
- How long have you been doing this social media stuff online?
- It’s social media and just because you have a facebook profile, and a linkedin account does not make you and expert. To run a social media campaign you need insight, understanding, and a will desire to help people.
- Can you give me 3 online references (at least 1 colleage reference)
- If you have been in this space for sometime, you have no doubt created some friendships and should have at least one colleage from social media who can stand up for you and tell a potential business what it is about you that deems you worthy of this new business.
- When we walk away from this project, what are the concrete deliverables?
- People should be able to know when this is over, what did we accomplish? Did we reach our goal of getting the information out about our new online product, or were we able to establish new customers in the stores because of social media. These items should be easy to establish at the end of a campaign.
I listed just a few of the questions I would have for a so-called expert. While I don’t claim to be an expert, I know that whoever you choose it has to feel right. You can’t get that snake oil salesman feeling every time you talk to this person. If you do, I would turn tail and run with my money in hand. Since this is uncharted territory you should plan a little research first, look up the people online, see what they are talking about, Google them. You would be amazed at how many people don’t even Google possible business partnerships by their name online. If this is a so-called Expert, there should be a long trail of information about them that has been indexed by search engines. This step is so simple a baby could do it, but you would not believe how many people just find the first expert and drop cash at their door step. If you want to do that, I have a paypal account you can just drop money in for absolutely no reason at all other than to make me rich.
The other night I saw a sign in the local Wal-Mart, right over the employment kiosk. It stated that if you are an illegal drug user, please don’t waste our time or yours, your employment will be denied. I will leave you with this, don’t waste your time. Do some up front research to see what this expert is about, see the comments on their blog, understand what they say, and then make a decision and go with it. Just make sure they are giving you some milestones and achievements along the way.
