Constructing An Argument

If you read his article, “I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You“, then you might be able to identify with the sentiment but if you describe yourself as one of the experts, then maybe not. The problem with the article is that Shankman has not spent time considering his argument in terms of intellectual content and it ends up sounding like a slightly insane rant:

…..Being an expert in Social Media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge [...] “It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about Facebook, and fans, and followers, and engagement, and influence, and…”. Will you please shut up before you make me vomit on your shoes? [...]

The irony is that part of me that thinks the guy needs someone who deals with social media [but not a 'professional expert'] to help him write his blog article because he tends to discredit anything useful he is saying by writing what appears to be the first thing that comes into his head. However, I do think Shankman is onto something and I can see where this article could have gone with a bit more care and attention to detail [and arguments sounding less 'foaming at the mouth' shall we say]. This whole issue could be broken down into the following arguments:

• Knowledge of the way Social Media works is not necessarily going to go hand in hand with the ability to apply that knowledge respectably or effectively in business.
• Understanding marketing power and the way social media can influence this should come from a sound level of research and experience in branding and user interaction within a company rather than allowing social media to drive a process because ‘everyone is doing it these days’.
• Experience and maturity should be applied to strategy and action taken when making yourself heard online. If you have something of value to offer customers then social media should be treated with delicate care and those who access your tweets, blogs or Facebook page should be under no illusion of how they can both ‘make’ and ‘break’.

My interpretation of Shankman’s dubious ranting is that he is enraged by the tidal wave of young, inexperienced social media ‘experts’ with little or no knowledge of business methods or processes. Where the article does fall down is that he does seem to dismiss any value to having followers on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or other. In some respects he is completely wrong – blogs, Twitter and Facebook do have value but the level of importance to the business, the time allocated using social media and appropriate use or tone are the issues. Maturity, knowledge and business experience will dictate how much value is assigned to this in increasing sales or strengthening a brand but it is the knowledge beyond the hype [ie understanding the real advantages and disadvantages of these tools] that many business owners struggle to see and end up giving credit, in a respect and financial sense of the word, to those who deserve neither because there’s limited or no guidance / benchmark made accessible to them. Where business owners will also struggle when making decisions on spending time using social media is in the statistics – it is difficult to accurately assess how many of these social media tools really do or could affect the income a company or individual product could achieve and like all web based ‘booms’ for every success story there seem to be many other examples of failure or wasted effort.

You’d never give the intern permission to write the corporate press release to accompany an earnings announcement, so why the hell are you listening to the 22-year-old who says “we’re going to do this social media thing because it’s cool?”
- One of the more sane rants from Peter Shankman’s article

Characteristics Of These ‘Experts’

In my own experience I’ve often read the output of these so called experts. They do not usually last that long on Twitter [where you can prove you've little to offer the world in less than 143 characters] before they are removed – but their dross and the overall weight assigned to it seems to thrive – with the ‘icing on the disappointingly demoralising cake’ being the tragic thrill that most newsreaders on the BBC or Channel 4 news seem to get by giving Twitter or Facebook a mention during their broadcasts. Those with little to contribute easily outweigh those with valuable input and the ability to hide behind their computer along with the immediacy of the internet when commenting or blogging brings out the ‘inner stupid’ and prejudice in many. The way to identify a social media idiot is that they usually have at least two or three characteristics from the following [and you know you've met them]:

• A career in social media promotion in one form or another is all they have ever known
• They do not understand the businesses they work with and propose ideas that are short sighted and superficial
• They have an over inflated opinion of their self importance and casually mix personal with business without thought
• Their contribution is weak or limited in value and lacks mature judgement
• They make recommendations that rate ‘rating’s over user experience eg number of followers vs quality of tweets

Similar Problems in SEO

In many ways the social media industry suffers from the same problems as the search engine optimisation industry. I have had a couple of experiences where my clients have employed a ‘search engine optimisation’ expert to assist them in gaining higher rankings and Using the 4 principles above the end results involved the following:

• Changes made to the website without discussing with the client
• The changes were unexpected and actually damaged the user experience [eg names of titles changed and lost their relevance]
• The SEO companies charged an amount that involved usually involved a quick hit with a high hourly rate and zero discussion with the client themselves to resolve or prevent the sort of problems indicated above.
• The SEO companies were really just agencies who then passed on the job to an external party [often inexperienced programmer types with no understanding of business etiquette, or even social etiquette at times].

Don’t get me wrong, there are experts out there and people who can help you. However, experience tells me that those people are hidden in amongst a ‘glut’ of people wanting to cash in or live a lifestyle attending ‘workshops’ and telling others how to improve their business with little or no business sense. They are in effect, living on borrowed time and it’s down to business owners to wise up and stop handing over money to ‘too cool for school’ fools who should be in jobs that they feel are below them [but to the rest of us are 'jobs'].

ps – here’s the photo from iStockphoto I did want to use for this article [but was too expensive]

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Google Chrome web browser is an excellent choice for anyone wishing to simply and quickly browse as it is lightweight – ie does not use much of the systems resources. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles but do expect reliability and speed.

Mozilla Firefox is the browser I use the most as it comes with a variety of available extensions including two of the most important browser plugins for any web designer – the developers toolbar and firebug

Internet Explorer is the most popular of the web browsers and ships pre-installed on Windows based PCs. Known as IE, versions 7 and 8 of IE are only just becoming standards compliant. Expect many sites to cater for this popular browser and popularity with hackers, fraudsters and other such ‘experts’ – Microsoft patch security as part of the regular updates downloaded to your PC [you know the ones....the ones that keep asking you to shut down]. You can also expect frustration from your average designer who usually experience problems getting a website to look right in IE compared to the majority of other browsers!

Safari is the browser of choice for your average Mac user [though Mac users would certainly not consider themselves to be average ] and it has some great features including one of the first applications of font smoothing, making text look less angular and more attractive – though uses more system resources.

There are some other browsers not mentioned here or only viewed on specific hardware such as Opera and AOL amongst the numerous mobile phone browsers, each having their own quirks and limitations, and some of the more dubious inbuilt console browsers such as Playstation 3′s contribution!

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