What’s an expert anyway?

Apr 16 2009

Earlier this week Marketing Sherpa published an alarming statistic. It seems that 2/3 of marketers working in organizations that “have not used any form of social media marketing or PR” self-identify as experts in social media. How is this possible? Are they learning by osmosis? Do they have friends that use social media? Or perhaps they’ve just been reading and watching the increasingly frequent news reports about social media.

You know, I watched Bobby Flay make a choclate souffle on Iron Chef last week but I couldn’t do it myself… And I certainly haven’t watched enough New Yankee Workshop to start making my own furniture.

It’s obvious what’s happening here — Sherpa drew the same conclusion — companies and organizations are feeling pressured to dive into the Social Mediasphere and tapping the person in their group that has the most friends on Facebook or maybe a semi-complete LinkedIn profile to become their social media maven. That’s cool and it’s only natural that firms try to develop these initiatives internally. But that the person ordained with this role should automatically consider themselves an expert is just ludicrous.

Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time traveling in social media circles realizes very quickly that they are surrounded by an astounding number of self-proclaimed “experts.” They are everywhere and it’s sometimes difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between the people who have genuine insight and those that are just blowing smoke.

Want to know how to become an expert? USE the tools. Use them extensively for a period of months and figure out what works for you and how you can become successful — or not — using online networking.

After all, the social media community doesn’t need another self-proclaimed expert… It needs people who are actually willing to contribute to the conversation in an open, meaningful and HONEST way.

And why should you listen to me? Well, at least I use the stuff. According to TweetWasters, I have spent nearly a day of my life writing tweets so far… But I’m no expert. There aren’t many who really are.