Josh

My point in saying understanding is that I think most who will start utilizing that know how on several levels. And by that I’m talking about those who look to delve in the way you do…in some sort of way for business and/or commercial purposes.

This can be vital, but it doesn’t mean that people have to hand over hours and hours and thousands or even hundreds of dollars. It could mean helping someone pick the appropriate blog platform. It could mean showing them online monitoring services such as SocialMention or higher end ones such as Radian6. It could mean helping a client with keyword analysis.

Most won’t know how to do these things or they will not have heard of different services that they can use. Many won’t even understand that they have to have some sort of strategic basis behind it all. And that strategy could be as simple as “being themselves”.

I guess I’ve seen too many try to wing it on their own and either crash and burn or flop around for a while.

Hmmm – Interesting post. I like your writing, and you have some valid points. I would like to give you a view from the $100/hr consultant.

What can a qualified consultant offer you?

–Helps define your target audience–

What are the best Social Media sites to participate in
How do you participate?
What do you say that won’t look like the common ‘Buy Me’ message?
How do you know what people really want on these sites?
What are the best secondary sites you should be on that may have more relevance than the top three or four?
What should you know about following and followers?
What is the optimum follower list your followers should have to provide you with the maximum value (i.e. retweets)?
Why 97% of all businesses jumping in social media because someone said it was free are failing, and how can they do it without making the same mistakes?

–Develops targeted and measurable objectives–

What are the important objectives do you want to uses Social Media for and what are the priorities?
Examples:
Brand or product awareness
Brand or product reputation
Increase website traffic
Improve public relations
Improve search engine rankings
Improve customer support quality
Increase lead generation
Reduce customer acquisition costs
Reduce support costs
Increase sales revenue

–Marketing strategy and tactical plan–

Roles, policies and procedures – who will tweet, how do you respond to critics and complaints, what procedures do you follow, when do you respond – daily weekly monthly, do you respond to everything,
How can you integrate Social media with other marketing strategies?
What are the priorities for setting timetables, managing deadlines?
How do you connect to your audience?
How do you funnel your audience to a landing page, and eventually convert them into customers?
Why do customers leave your funnel, what do you change to keep them in it?

–Metrics–

How do you determine what is effective and what is not?
If something is not effective, do you figure out why or just give up say it doesn’t work?
What is ROI and why is that even important?
Why do you need to track customer lifetime value?

So if a business thinks that these are dazzle words, that’s fine. Successful businesses don’t. They use them quite frequently in their business; that is why they are successful.

Yes – you can purchase a library of $20 books to get information and how-tos to figure these out, spend hundreds of hours studying the material, you can jump online and setup a profile, make tweets and blogs, blast your message out there with a fail yourself to success approach, or you find and pay a consultant that has this knowledge at his/her disposal and pay for his expertise/mentoring to assist you in fine tuning your strategies and tactics.

As far as background checking – absolutely – but comparing his/her tweets to the service a consultant offers is not always relevant or practical.

For example, I offer customized social media marketing strategies and copywriting to businesses, I don’t sell products (i.e. wine) to consumers. The phone and email is my most effective use of social media to reach my targeted audience, whereas my clients differ greatly and may use one or many Medias such as twitter, facebook, blogging, content syndication, email campaigns, video/podcasting, webinars, teleseminars and so forth. I don’t tweet for other businesses either, nor do I recommend services that do.

I do, however, provide limited content for blogs, suggestions for tweets, scripts and material for webinars, and craft quality profiles that will get a business started in the right direction, but it is the business that must develop their own social media personality that will ultimately help them become successful with their endeavors. They can either do it by trial and error, or find a qualified mentor.

Taking the attitude that there is nothing wrong with making mistakes along the way in social media can have the same impact as making mistakes with your taxes. If you think the IRS will be forgiving because it is just simple mistake, I wish you the best. In the same respect, once you make your mistakes with your audience, they will quickly go a different direction. Maybe they won’t scrutinize your mistakes like the IRS will, but once they are gone from your message funnel, they are gone. Lost revenues. Are you willing to take that chance?

Keep up the good writings – I have been passing around your blog to my clients.

Thanks for stopping by. You makes some valid points about the two client examples you mention.

I’d add a fifth point to your requirements and that is “understanding”. Meaning understanding what social media is all about. So many don’t and they then do it wrong.

Lara pointed me to this article. I do much of the same work as she does and I have to say that from my point of view you should hire someone who knows the ropes and how to do basic things the set you straight from the beginning. Perhaps once the training wheels are off, then you can handle it from there on out with perhaps an hour or two consulting per month to be kept abreast of new trends, tools, and happenings.

Consider two potential clients I’m observing right now.

One is a restaurant. They started their Twitter account about 14 months ago. Then they let it die for 13 and a half months. Now they’ve started it up again. Every day, they simply say what the lunch special is. The people behind it don’t really know whom to follow – so you’ll see that they follow the New York Times, the Onion, etc. They don’t understand about engagement. They don’t understand about interaction. They haven’t been following or at least looking at who follows them. It won’t work.

The other is a music and independent film festival. Again, Twitter. This one has apparently conducted a few searches on Twitter on whom to follow. One word they used is “indie”. Now they’re following anyone who MENTIONED he word “indie”. Same for “Gaga” and for some reason “Pink Floyd”. And they soon filled up their 2000 allotment – they can’t follow anyone else. Most of the people they follow are in any way related to independent films or music.

There are tons of stories like this. Lack of engagement. All promotional messaging. On and off again participation. Not good. Not gonna work.

Josh