Blogger Peter Shankman got a lot of mileage out of a blog a couple of weeks ago called “I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You.” In it, he argues that social media is just one aspect of marketing or customer service, and that ultimately the goal of social media is to generate revenue. I found myself agreeing with some of his points and disagreeing with many—which, I suppose, was the point of the blog. He makes some great arguments about the need for brevity, transparency, relevance and knowing your customers with respect to social media. He also makes a great point about the glut of so-called “social media experts” out there these days, some of whom know what they are talking about and many who don’t. As my long time colleague and friend Ken Orr has said about other emerging sciences: we are still in that phase of social media engineering where “far more is written than is known” about the subject. But Shankman’s central thesis that you should never hire a social media expert is simply wrong.
Now, if social media is truly just “another arrow in the quiver of marketing,” as Shankman puts it, then ad agencies wouldn’t exist. There would be no need, since advertising is just another marketing arrow as well. And yet even brilliant organizations hire ad agencies to create and build marketing campaigns. (That’s not to say that even smart and successful ad agencies don’t fall flat on their faces with some campaigns from time to time—even experts can be wrong.) If one of your enterprise’s core competencies isn’t advertising, you go out and hire and hire an “expert” to help you.
Also consider Google Wave. It was an experiment in social media/social networking that—despite the full faith and force of one of the most technologically adept and socially aware companies on the planet—was an abject failure. Why was it a failure? Because there was never a value proposition (and I still hate that term) that was clear to potential users. In short, there was no easy “what’s in it for me.” Perhaps this was a failure of marketing: they didn’t get the right message to the intended audience. Perhaps it was, like a lot of social media implementations, a solution in search of a problem: something the engineers thought was worth building (because they could) but ultimately a solution without a clear problem that it was supposed to solve.
Shankman makes the case that social media is a subset of marketing, and that marketing’s purpose is to generate revenue. While the purpose of marketing is usually to increase revenue, that’s certainly not the sole purpose of social media/social networking. As he points out himself, social media may be used as an aspect of customer support, which isn’t something that necessarily raises revenue as much as it is something that decreases cost. Having users of a social networking site help other users can be a far lower cost solution than having employees or contractors help them directly. If you want to make the case that a worthwhile social media/social networking solution should have a positive return on investment, then consider this: even a project that has a *negative* return on investment may still be worth doing, if the cost is less than the alternative of doing nothing—where doing nothing may result in lost revenue and/or increased cost.
We know from painful experience that throwing a social media/social networking site up on the internet is not a guarantee of success, just as putting a marketing campaign in place is no guarantee of increased revenue (“New Coke,” anyone?). I do have some advice for people thinking about hiring a social media expert, though.
- If you are thinking about getting into social media/social networking on your own using open source tools and your existing staff: don’t. Like anything else, there is a learning curve associated with both the technology and the approach. Hire experienced people with a good track record.
- Don’t hire people that tell you that social media/social networking is just another aspect of marketing. Even if that were true (which it isn’t) there is a right way and a wrong way to do marketing using social networking. Hire someone who can help you leverage social tools to both increase revenue *and* decrease costs.
- Hire someone who can help you understand what both you *and* your customers will get out of the social media/social networking site. If you don’t both benefit, the site will fail. Always.
Shankman is dead on when he says that social media/social networking is a useful component to have in your toolbox. But having that tool doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to use it well. And that’s why you might consider hiring a “social media expert.”
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