Wry grins over here. That’s the price some pay for being early adopters, you have to fight the urge to be cyn­i­cal when the post-chasm mar­ket begins to come online. It’s eas­ier when you remem­ber that a lot more money enters the pic­ture, too. The mar­ket always sorts out things medium term. It’s also pretty easy to dili­gence by look­ing at experts’ sub­stan­tive thought lead­er­ship, speak­ing gigs, net­works and case stud­ies. Many come up short and dis­qual­ify them­selves. Cheers.

The thing that makes me feel so bat-shit insane about all of this, is how (as far as I can tell), there are no soci­ol­o­gists in the group. I mean, sure, some folks might know about free­bie apps because they use them, but what about the intrin­sic under­stand­ing of human inter­ac­tion in groups? That’s notably absent– not only in the analy­sis, but in the devel­op­ment of the tools as well.

Is this really all we can be? Or can we be better?

I couldn’t agree more with Christopher’s com­ment. If you’re going to call your­self a SOCIAL media mar­ket­ing expert, you’d bet­ter have a pretty good han­dle on under­stand­ing how peo­ple BEHAVE in social envi­ron­ments. Indeed, you should be able to PREDICT with some accu­racy how they’ll behave in response to a cam­paign, Web prop­erty, inter­ac­tive tool, etc. on the social Web.

As a mar­keter of 20 years, my biggest (and best) job has always been (and I hope always will be) get­ting inside other people’s heads. If your expe­ri­ence with social media con­sists of turn­ing knobs and push­ing but­tons (i.e., build­ing apps, using RSS, set­ting up pro­files, etc.), then I don’t know how that qual­i­fies you as a social media expert. That would sim­ply qual­ify you as a tech­nol­ogy expert of sorts. Which is pre­cisely what many so-called social media experts are. Many oth­ers are just huck­sters or wanna-bes who don’t yet know enough to know how much they don’t know.
@CarriBugbee

@Christopher — I have been say­ing this FOREVER…studying soci­ol­ogy is highly nec­es­sary for suc­cess in social media. Great point, glad to see oth­ers mak­ing it.

I’ve used the term social media strate­gist to describe myself as I thought it was quite accu­rate. I was even chided for it by some twit­ter­ers who have no idea what my back­ground is. In the end we are in a sim­i­lar posi­tion to where graphic design­ers were when DTP (desk top pub­lish­ing) took off and even col­lege kids who had never had any train­ing offered to do ‘a logo for you’. Any­one who pub­lshes a blog and is on twit­ter can be call them­selves a social media strate­gist, but what will really mat­ter in the long run is the results. If they get results then good for them, if they don’t they won’t get more work.

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