I’ve taken over a dozen Webinar’s and read 4 books trying to get up to speed with Facebook for my small business and in helping two friends.  In almost every webinar and book they talk about positioning yourself as an expert and building a client base.

My question is a lot of people think they are experts in the field and the market will sort out the experts from the pretenders but will too many claiming to be experts dilute the market.  Will this end up like the Tech Wreck for stocks in 2000?

A small business owner needs a lot of skills and Social Media should be one of them.  But isn’t it possible that with so many claiming to be experts and coaches that the market will need time to adjust?  There will need to be a standard or a real portfolio showing a persons skill level. 

And that brings my second question.  How do you measure success?  I’ve read books about ROI and the measurements on Facebook but the measurement has to be an increase in profit for the business at the end of the day, quarter, year.  To just say exposure and likes is the same as the Tech Wreck when businesses were burning more money than they took in and the banks said it was great, investors said it was great because there was exposure and customers were coming.

But in the end Warren Buffet was right and the dot.com’s disappeared and left a mess.

I realize each situation is different but Social Media Consultants with measureable results, large firms with a huge portfolio will rule the day but small businesses need to be aware of the pretenders.  The cost for no return could ruin a small business and that needs to be on every owners mind before they engage in Social Media Marketing.

I’d love to hear other peoples thoughts.

As soon as Social Media became widely known for the power of connecting people.. the experts began climbing out of the woodwork (so to speak)There are always those who will be quick to capitalize on any opportunity to earn a quick buck.You see it pretty much with every aspect of the online industry.. from marketing to copywriting, to blogging, seo, PPC etc…It was inevitable that people would jump on Social Media as their avenue to wealth.There are very few people that really should be calling themselves experts in any of these fields.. and those who REALLY deserve the title rarely DO call themselves experts. OTHER people call them that.. mostly because they are.I generally view a person with suspicion as soon as they start calling themselves an expert in Social Media.. etc.This isn’t to say that they aren’t expert in their understanding of the field.. but it’s as you’ve stated.. the field has been diluted by the many who aren’t experts.This becomes a tricky nightmare for those who are looking for real expert advice, and a person just can’t be TOO cautious when seeking out an expert to assist.The other aspect of this is also that there is a veritable wealth of information available online.. but one has to avail themselves of that info.. and work at learning it and implementing it.
So.. as a result.. it’s sometimes the case where a person is unwilling to put in that effort and are willing to pay for someone to do it for them.. that they place themselves at risk.. because the less you know.. the easier it is for a phony expert to pull a fast one on you.I really appreciated that article you presented here @michellechurch Michelle.. although I don’t entirely agree with him.. (and I’ll explain why) I also do agree with some points he makes.
Activity on Social Media channels for the purposes of Marketing is definitely an expense. It costs time.. and money.. and time is money. There are appreciable costs that will build over time.. and the more time you spend and the more you build and do to market in Social Media.. the more it costs.
Of course the hope is that you are also “investing” this time and money for a return down the road.. but it’s such a tenuous premise that it can all vanish in this air in no time at all.
And this is where I disagree with him.. because that sounds like investing in the stock market to me.The issue is that when computing ROI people are trying to get an idea of income from something that hasn’t happened yet.  Like trying to figure out the apple harvest from the seedling tree out back.A company’s Social Media investment or expense.. whatever you want to call it.. is a LONG TERM thing.
For most.. expecting an immediate return on that expense/investment will only bring disappointment and the feeling that the campaigns were a failure… when in many cases they were just looking at the sapling and wondering why there were no apples.I really like how he puts it in that article.. that marketing is like utilities or the office lease.. and how ROI is really the wrong way of looking at things.Here’s a quote from the article: snip

Marketing, including social media marketing, is about efficiency. Marketing is a process of decreasing the time, money, and resources required to communicate with customers and make it easy for them to buy products and services.

The more efficient your marketing is, the more profit you make. That’s what you want to optimize for.

By defining marketing as a function of profits, you create a new perception within your organization about the value of marketing.

Important Discussion.

I am engaged with many social media classes with different experts as supposed to be, a little bit advantage to take from each but couldn’t feel that any of them give me the jump.A Social Media Strategy organization is a good solution to classify experts versus non, an organization that gives certificates based on courses and webinars attendance supported with practical challenges or projects.

@tomk, @timsouthernwood ,@goconsultancy ,@michellechurch  let me know your feedback for this.

On claiming expertise in a complicated world:Social Media is such a huge field with so many things to know. That’s why SME has 17-segment summits with 20 expert participants on each related topic!

I am a writer/graphic designer drifting into social media. I love the content creation part of the work and have no trouble presenting myself as an “expert” in that. Gosh! I’ve been creating content for thirty years — since before it was called “content.” The blogging part of social media is a great fit!

I have more trouble embracing Facebook and Twitter, although I’m dedicated to improving. I understand its power but these media still seem to be a little sleezy to me. When I open my Twitter account and see the same Avatars hyping me 20 times a day — well, I just don’t want to be part of that. I wish the “experts” in these disciplines would use their influence to rein people in a bit on this! 

And did I hear that the government wants to officially archive “tweets”? Where’s that going?

And then there is the technical expertise — knowing all the apps and peripherals. You almost need a separate expert for these. 

I also think this is a field of “knowers” and “doers.” When I talk to college kids about studying this they answer “We don’t have to study it, we live it.” So to enter the field it seems to be more important to “do” than to “know.” (Kind of the opposite of the old educational model!) 

Learning from them, I decided to begin creating “expertise” by putting up an experimental site and practicing the techniques I learn on the various webinars. I use my experience to talk to prospective companies.

I hope that will make me an expert even if I never feel like one!

Wow, all terrific comments, Cindy and Tim, I agree 1000%!  I spoke to a group of attorney’s at a conference about building on-line trust and branding.  I was ‘questioned’ and told by one attorney that no one would take me seriously because I didn’t profess to be an ‘expert’.  I politely explained:   I have been a business owner for over 25 yrs. and 20 of those years was in the travel business. Social Media is a lot like the travel business, it changes on a daily basis and there is no way any one person can know it all!  You can be a Jack of all Trades and a Master of none, as many social media ‘experts’ can sometimes be.  I choose to focus on what I know best….small business….and I can show you how to use it in your business to increase your ROI.  I would never proclaim the arrogance of being an ‘expert’, just a collaborater in helping to build business through the amazing tool of social media.

I worked in hockey since I was 17 years old.  I was a trainer in the Alberta Junior League and the Western Hockey League, I worked for a hockey camp for 5 summers and then 15 years in management.  And in Canada everyone thinks they are a hockey expert.

Social Media Marketing is the same.  Everyone thinks they are an expert and my point was you have to be careful if you hire/outsource someone.  There is no certificate for running a hockey camp and there are some bad ones, Social Media Experts are the same.

Small business owners are stretched and need to take care in who they hire.  Money matters and so do results so the owner better define the results wanted so they can be measured and hopefully met.

Thanks for your insight.

@rich-brooks not sure I completely get the quote from Scott Monty to be honest — I’m pretty sure most of us could provide ROI of Scott’s pants, but that’s not really the point. Is he trying to say that it’s not socially accepted to not like Ford on Facebook (to pull it a bit to the extremes)? In that case we have a HUGE discussion on hand here. Otherwise it appears as sort of a vague saying to me; “the earth is spinning around the sun — deal with it”?

@bugcom Scott Monty’s quote on the ROI of social media: “I don’t know the ROI of my pants, but I still put them on every morning.”
Even though you may not be able to calculate exactly the ROI of social media on a daily basis, you should still use it to reach out and engage your audience. 
There are many metrics in social media – friends, likes, follows, comments, subscribers, traffic, etc. Determine what’s important to track and what you can ignore.  

@Rich I love that “just because something is not measurable doesn’t mean it’s not valuable and reminds me of the comment Gary Vaynerchuck said that there’s no ROI on his Mother…….

Great comments!!!! Great points @cindy-king

In working with over 100 clients this last year in web design and development, I learned that people want the results and yet they don’t have the patience, time, or skill. And, they want the results, NOW!

Unfortunately, many of those businesses have serious cash flow problems and need the money now in my experience. But marketing and advertising doesn’t generally work that way. There’s always an upfront expense and a lag time for the results. Of course, that’s different for everyone.

In my opinion, the key is to determine where the audience is at on social media, target the audience looking for your services (Hubspot refers to this as inbound marketing), and test and measure where the breakeven / profit line is at. Once you’ve done it several times, you may be able to begin aligning your expectations.

It still takes time and work as a general rule of thumb. If you leave your business to a consultant or “expert”, you are setting yourself up for failure. They don’t know your business, and they don’t have your passion or experience in your business.

Right now I agree there are a lot of people calling themselves “experts” and they are not. It’s up to the client to interview a number of companies and make the most informed decision possible so that they will be able to define the ROI when it happens, if it is even measurable.

We all do things in our business that isn’t measurable. Do we put an ROI on our smart phones? Probably not. But I bet it’s used for social media more than talking?

In my opinion, ROI isn’t everything. Each business has to decide their metrics in line with their overall vision/mission/goals/objects.

I personally think the answer is yes and no.  Yes, because there are way too many people who call themselves “consultants” and too few who really know enough to be one. 

 I feel I am in the middle somewhere.  I have used social media and do monitor and manage some for my clients.  But, I tell them Social media is always changing and I will do the best with what I know.  I am by no means an expert on the subject.  My clients seem to appreciate the truthfulness.

As a consultant myself I have found that the entire discussion around being an “expert” becomes redundant when you show results obtained with other clients. Results speak louder than words. Results will get you new clients faster than you can handle. No matter how many so-called ‘experts’ are muddying the waters for you.
As far as “are their too many or not enough” goes, I am not sure that is an issue. If there are more consultants, it simply means that they will drive up the quality for the entire group, since the customer can choose. If there are not enough, it is an opportunity to set the standard yourself. Set it high and your competition will have a hard time replacing you.

At the risk of being called an expert on “Social Media”, let me offer a measure that does allow you to keep track whether Social Media is actually helping create long term value for your brand, as well as helping you acquire and retain customers.

That measure is called “allowable cost per brand champion“. If you can create brand champions at less than your allowable cost, you are making a profit. Or at the very least, saving money while helping your business grow.

A brand champion is defined as anyone who recommends your business/brand to others without being paid to do so. (This is not the same as retweeting or sharing a post. There are more interesting ways of identifying a brand champion.)

Cost includes time spent on Social Media. You need to put a value on your hours. A good way would be to put the hour value you could have earned with that time, doing something else. Or what it would have cost you to hire and train someone to be your brand’s spokesperson. You’ll soon realize how expensive “social media” can be! It isn’t easy to find and coach someone as credible as you are for your own business! 

Amazingly, the power of using ‘Social Media’ well, still makes it very profitable for even the CEO to put in time.

Brand Champions can be existing customers as well as prospects. 

It is possible to be a brand champion and not be a customer. But Brand Champions help you acquire and retain customers, or monetize your online community . They also defend the brand when anyone attacks it. (We are probably all Brand Champions of Social Media Examiner.)

Before the phrase ‘Social Media’ became a buzzword, this process of acquiring and retaining customers used to be called Relationship Marketing.
The principle still applies. Word-of-Mouth has always been a strong medium. Word-of-Mouse just gives you an easier way to track the process of attracting prospects, befriending them, creating a brand community, making them brand champions. When they, or those in their ‘circle’, require your products and services, you get customers.

It is not unlike live business networking. Just that you can do it from the comfort of your home or office.

I do not see myself as a Social Media expert. But I have been growing people who grow brands for the last 25 years.

What I have learnt is that common sense usually applies. 

You don’t really need “Social Media” experts.

In regards to ROI, like @nichole_kelly says, it falls into brand awareness, lead generation, or customer retention. Our jobs are to figure out what data points fall into what buckets. Then we have to make sure that we have the technologies and processes to collect, calculate, analyze, and make business decisions.

For example, let’s take lead generation. Let’s say you have a goal of generating 500 leads per month from your website. You predict that 100 leads will come from seo, 100 leads from social media, and 300 leads from banner ads. You’ve invested $5k in each channel for a total of $15k. You also predict that you can close leads into customers at a rate of 50% with each sale being worth $500 (the close rate is high, I know, but this is just an example).

Let’s look at the results and the subsequent ROI for each channel:

If you take a look at the ROI for each channel, you can see that 2/3 channels are generating a negative percentage of Return. Not good overall, but never fear! This is the first month of your lead gen efforts, so you can take some quick action to stop the bleeding. First, you will need to ax the poor performing channels, or reduce spend in alignment with future predicted leads generated, then within social media, you will want to reduce spend on non-performing social media tactics or social networks, creating efficiency, and optimizing. For example, you see that Twitter drove the most leads-to-customers, so you will want to increase spend/time on Twitter activities that produced and maybe spend less time on Facebook. I would keep reviewing and optimizing for a one year period to see the total ROI for social media lead generation efforts.

Another thing to point out is that social media drove the least leads, but they were the most qualified, as they closed to sales at a much higher rate than other channels. Although,the cost per lead for social media is the highest out of all three channels, acquisition costs were the lowest out of all three. These are the types of insights that are valuable to marketing execs!

Note: This would make sense if you were attributing leads and sales on a last touch basis. If you wanted to look at it from a multi-channel approach, it gets a little murky, but it can be done.

I think a good idea would be to start a weekly thread and people can present examples like this to help us get real world exposure. Hope this helps

One of the main problems with Social Media Consultants is they may know how to use Social Media but they have no idea how to use Social Media for marketing purposes,you can have agreat looking fan page, twitter account youtube channel and your Social Media Consultant can get you a lot of fans but if you don’t market to them in the correct way then they are just not going to be customers or clients, they will just be someone who reads your content for awhile and then moves on and you have lost them as a possible new customer or client!

I prefer to see Social Media in terms of ROR  - Return on Relationships!

If you are selling a product and use a Social Media platform purely for sales then yes you can look at ROI but that isn’t the point of Social Media platforms, they are there for you to engage, get to know like and trust people, add value and visibility for yourself, and lots more – and can be compared perhaps to everyday business costs that every business has but which have no relation on ROI.

how do you calculate the ROI on

• your stationery costs
• your networking time spent
• your meetings and planning days
• your customer service 

I think the vital thing about Social Media for a business, is that if you are not out there and gaining exposure, engaging with people, managing your reputation, offering customer service and adding value, your business most likely wont be around in business in a few years time.

@stewkelly  I’m not looking for a Social Media Expert, never was, never intend too.  The question that I used to start this forum was a question to engage debate.

@caroldodsley Yes you are correct in that social media is used in relationships, but you still have to measure it in order to justify and optimize your time spent. Let’s take sales for example: sales people’s job is to create relationships with people with the hope of future business (which is recorded in a CRM database), they schedule follow ups just to stay in contact. Over time if the sales person measures how often he/she touches base with a contact, whether they are a prospective customer, vendor, or industry colleague, he/she will begin to establish an ROI for his time spent cultivating those relationships. Then he/she will also be able to put a score to the relationships that are deeper and more meaningful, which will help him/her prioritize. This holds true for social media

Now let’s take customer service: customer service is essential in any business, but the question is, how much efficiency is social media creating? Are you saving customer service money by deflecting phone calls? What is the lifetime value of customers who are served in social media versus traditional customer service?

I think it’s especially important to measure these things for small businesses, as it will help them spend budget wisely.

But I do agree with you that it is essential for businesses to be on social media, as this is where their customers are flocking. Do you agree, disagree? I’m open to discussion.

On the 1st question – so many have voiced the absolute truth, when it became apparent that there was money to be made, the “experts” came out of the woodwork. And, I agree, those who should be called an expert are many times in the background solidly building the foundations necessary & keeping up with ongoing trends.

I teach a series of classes (as a part of my business) aimed at giving small business owners the tools they need to grow their businesses to the point where they can outsource. And, for that I am constantly searching for true expert advice & knowledge. The stand out leaders like Mari & Lewis who have absolutely useful information without trying to make a quick sale are gold in my book.

How do I make the call on whether someone is an expert (I choose to utilize their info in my classes)?
1) If their advice / knowledge doesn’t include a long sales message as to why I’ve got to buy into their widget.
2) If their advice can be backed up by others in the industry [at the very least, a viable report works here]
3) And, if their information is written in “English”, not the Geek of the industry.

Absolutely agree @Nick Robinson – Social Media is a cost to a business and a very necessary cost, but I totally agree with you that many business owners have yet to understand this and embrace the costs and right now they are still very much focussed on and educated to look at ROI and nothing else, which is one of the reasons so many businesses are not yet onboard with one of the most powerful tools they can add to their business too (sadly)  

I would also love to learn more about how you correlate these figures and data points to a businesses bottom line and present this to your clients as I believe that it is important to be able to give evidence like this to people who are not yet really understanding the power of Social Media and looking purely for bottom line stats to engage them with utilising Social Media at this stage (I do strongly believe that in time this focus will wane and businesses will begin to understand that SM is a vital cost to their business, if they want to be here in the future and we will need to be less obsessed with ROI and more aware of the other important benefits of utilising Social Media)

I would love to chat with you more about this Nick and perhaps also do an interview/webinar with you in 2012 as I can see that you have a lot of very helpful information to share

@Nick Robinson – cool – let’s setup a time to chat and make some plans together?  I’m on skype if that is good for you?

Speak soon

Very interesting discussion with lots of great insights…I knew this would be a great forum for learning and discussion.

I would agree with all of those who forgo the term ‘expert’. How can anyone truly be an expert in a field that is constantly changing? Can any of us name the 12 (or was it 120?) newest social media tools introduced last week? I know I don’t have the time to evaluate all of them for my clients.

One thing I don’t remember seeing mentioned yet in this thread is that social media is not the be-all and end-all of marketing. It is one of a number of available tactics a business can use. What is very important is a company’s marketing strategy. What is their ideal customer profile(s) and do they know where their prospects/customers ‘hang out’? Do they have a marketing message they know resonates with those prospects, and does it differentiate them from their competitors? Once they get a good handle on that then they can start thinking about what tactics would be appropriate.

It really comes down to doing the fishing where the fish are. It may not be Facebook, but it might be LinkedIn or Twitter. You can’t know the answer until you understand their business. That’s where a number of so-called experts fall short, and will ultimately be weeded out.

@tomk Thanks for your added comments, especially the part about research – very good point on that. It’s research that develops the ideal client profile and helps with the language/themes used in creating a marketing message to set you apart from the competition.

@seancookceo-salyrisstudios Hi Sean.  Agree 100%.  When I started this topic my fear was a small business hiring a social media expert, tanking the budget with little results.  A small business needs to have an expert understanding of its business and all these platforms have to be learned to get the message out in a cost effective way.  There just seems to be too many people playing the expert card with other peoples money.

You are exactly right in my mind in that communication is a strategy and social media is another avenue if it fits your customer base.