Expert. It’s one of those words that can get tossed around. Unlike MBA, PhD, CPA, DDS or any other kind of certification, degree or declaration, an “expert” can be self-declared without any test, without any study and without any independent verification.
Such has been the debate over the term, especially when associated with social media. I’ve gone after all the modifiers that have been appended to social media including “expert.” After my share of debate, I’ve decided the social media expert does not exist. A few others have come to similar conclusions on their own including Peter Shankman and Gary Vaynerchuk (who actually declared most experts and gurus as clowns).
Shel Holtz writes, however, that indeed social media experts exist and should be hired in a June 2 piece on Social Media Today. Why this is particularly compelling is Mr. Holtz and I actually use the same reference as a definition of “expert.”
“An expert is a person who has prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field,” Mr Holtz writes, but fails to attribute this particular line comes almost word-for-word from Wikipedia.org’s entry for expert.
Then Mr. Holtz goes on to argue his point (which you can read) but ends up discussing the attributes of an “expert in solid rocket boosters.”
To become such an expert, you’d be a rocket scientist and have a few of those three letter acronyms after your name. Even more so, rocket boosters are and ever shall be scientific in nature.
Social media, not so much.
This is a parallel that I just can’t seem to bring myself to grasp. But we’ll give Mr. Holtz a little more rope. Rockets and the space race began more than half a century ago and solid rocket boosters came into play in the early 1980s. To give a rocket scientist the “prolonged or intense experience through practice and education,” an expert in solid rocket boosters earned that here 30 years later.
Social media as we know it in business is, at most, three years old. Unless you do something extraordinary, you cannot earn a bachelor’s degree in that time.
Mr. Holtz goes on to name many people — some luminaries in marketing and communication. Others are, frankly, fauxperts (a term coined by Robert Caruso on his blog) who took advantage of the changing tides and adjusted their bios to include a few social media buzzwords to make themselves sound more relevant.
Mr. Holtz will argue — perhaps rightly so — that blogging is a part of social media. So be it. And blogging does extend beyond the three-year mark, making it the granddaddy of social media. But blogs are more public relations and earn a spot on the journalism side of the equation. It’s not like a corporate Facebook or Twitter account, where strategy must be completely different.
No, none earns the right to be an expert. I don’t. Mr. Holtz can’t. He can list every human being on the planet up to Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook and the unlikely father of social media. Not one gets to be a social media expert.
We are becoming experts. We are working at that intense knowledge to be experts. We are learning and experiencing social media. We are applying the aspects of communication and marketing effective in other parts of business to make social media effectively work for business.
That said, this is a new frontier and we have a lot to learn.
Mr. Holtz forgets that for journalism, marketing and communication as a whole, this social media thing is incredibly scary and new. Know why?
For the first time ever, the consumer, reader and viewer is talking back. Not just voting based on ratings or readership. The consumer, reader and viewer is now a friend, fan and follower. TV, writers and advertisers are accustomed to one-way conversations where the audience is told what to do — buy, vote, watch, read, believe, consume.
The power is now shifting. The conversation is two-way. If Mr. Holtz wants to pretend to be an expert and “in control” of the conversation still, he can be. But if there’s not acknowledgement that someday, the audience is going to wise up and figure out they’ve got equal power, then those companies who purchased those “experts” will soon discover a catastrophic failure. The ignition thought to launch them into the stratosphere of social media won’t lift them farther and orbit won’t be achieved.
All of the experts right now know one-way and have begun to dabble in two-way. We need a few more years to understand social media.
It took years before a solid rocket booster got a shuttle off the ground and even when we did, we still had failures — some catastrophic. Time needs to pass and we need more to get our expertise off the ground. I’m satisfied being a social media professional — knowledgeable in the strategy and workings of social media. I’m happy to be a student. I’m glad to test theories in the world laboratory and figure out ways to deliver a strong ROI.
I shall not put a company or client into danger of catastrophe because I’m somehow convinced that I have knowledge that doesn’t yet exist because we haven’t been to the moon or even orbited the planet. To pretend to be something I am not and to claim a prize that does not exist yet, I shall not let it stand.
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In the spirit of intellectual discussion — as opposed to simple arguing — I’d like to take issue with several of your conclusions (both from this post and your comment on my blog):
* “But blogs are more public relations and earn a spot on the journalism side of the equation” — Journalists would argue vehemently that PR is a business activity, as would every practitioner in the world. The use of blogs by business — whether for marketing, PR or other purposes — is a business social media activity.
* “Most businesses—if they’ve considered blogging at all—it’s been to tap into the influential bloggers.” — And there’s no expertise required to engage in effective, ethical blogger outreach? Not that I agree with your statement. Look at the list of Fortune 500 companies with blogs (https://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi) or just the list of hospitals that are blogging (http://ebennett.org/hsnl/hospital-blogs/) and you’ll see just how faulty your assumption is. “Naked Conversations” addressed corporate blogging as early as 2006.
* “It’s not like a corporate Facebook or Twitter account, where strategy must be completely different” — I would argue that all of these are tactics, not strategies. The strategy is the overall approach you take to achieving a business goal. You then set measurable objectives, then employ tactics and tools. How you use each of these tools — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Quora, you name it, depends on the objectives you’re trying to achieve.
* “If Mr. Holtz wants to pretend to be an expert and ‘in control’ of the conversation still, he can be.” — Despite the grammar problem here (be pretend?), you clearly haven’t read much of my body of work. I’ve been saying for at least two decades that companies are no longer in control of the message (if they ever have been), and that they need to transition to a culture of engagement and advocacy if they want to influence the conversation.
* “All of the experts right now know one-way and have begun to dabble in two-way.” — I hope you have some evidence to support this assertion. Public relations (as opposed to marketing and advertising) has ALWAYS been about two-way communication (I suggest you read some of the literature, like “Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management”). I don’t know a qualified expert who advises that companies apply social media to one-way, top-down communication.
* “Social media ‘experts’ usually lack the appropriate knowledge to prove solid, financial ROI that bottom-line examiners need to see.” — I’d like to see the evidence to support this assertion, as well. Brilliant people like Katie Paine have been establishing standards for analyzing the effectiveness of social media efforts and determining ROI. Companies like Radian6 are constantly updating and tweaking the analytics used to support some of those assessments. The body of literature companies can apply to their evaluation efforts continues to grow. While some of those who proclaim themselves experts do not, indeed, avail themselves of these resources, shame on companies who hire them. The true experts — those who meet the criteria for being an expert — certainly do. Companies should ask the right questions of anybody they hire to ensure they’re obtaining the best advice.
I’ve written a new post that addresses your belief that social media requires more time to mature. My key point is that the volume of knowledge accumulated to date is more than adequate for expertise to emerge. The post is here: http://holtz.com/blog/blog/has-social-media-been-around-long-enough-to-be-a-field-of-expertise/3666/
I welcome your response.