There Are No Social Media Experts at Traditional Marketing Agencies: Or Anywhere Else For That Matter

So why do we so-called social media experts “eat our young” (e.g., beat-up on each other so often) if we’re so fantasticablulous?  Well, because we’re not.  Fantastic or fabulous that is.

How can anybody be an expert in something this new that changes every 24 hours?  It’s impossible.  Facebook has made more changes this year than in all of the past years combined.  See previous blog post of ours "Getting Your Business Page Seen in Someone's News Feed". 

As we geeks were editing the three-part Facebook series mentioned above, we had to continually update it multiple times just prior to publishing each segment!  This last-minute updating was necessary, simply to keep up with the on-going Facebook changes that occurred during those three weeks we were publishing it.  (The series itself is already half out-of-date at the writing of this blog article.)  Social media moves that fast and it is not just Facebook that does this.

We manage multiple social networks and they are ALL constantly changing.  Facebook accounts and analytics interface changes alone have been too multiple to count this year. 

Twitter handles and who Twitter plays with and doesn’t play with has been less than stable in 2012.  Remember when your tweets could be linked to LinkedIn?  Get the point? 

LinkedIn and its thrice-changed UI, websites, blogs, Instagram and third-party tools for our clients on a daily basis….  How well do you think we know the various social networks?  We know them extremely well.  We interact with ones you’ve never heard of that we aren’t bothering to mention here and we are not experts.  And then there’s the reading... 

We read like the uber-geeks you know us to be.  We read Wired, Search Engine Journal, SEOMoz, TechCrunch, Mashable and Forrester Research. We follow and download comScore and Experian Simmons, eConsultancy and a bunch of others.  We keep up on Social Media Explorer, GigaOm, All Facebook, Facebook Studio, LinkedIn and AdAge. 

And these are in addition to the more mainstream pubs like The Washington Post, WSJ, Business Insider, Forbes, NYT and more-- and we watch all of these every single day just to try and stay on top of social media, its impact on business, and its play-out in the real-world offline.  For real.  And we’re not experts in social media because we can’t keep up.  WE CAN’T KEEP UP.

So, what happens when you ask your traditional advertising agency or marketing firm to handle your digital for you?  Who knows exactly…we’ve seen it go a couple of different ways.  Either very experienced traditional marketing people are attempting to manage something they know little about, using strategies and tactics that are only proven to work in the print, radio or broadcast world OR your social media red-headed step-child is assigned to a newer, greener agency employee who is socially savvy (e.g. has a Facebook page) but lacks actual experience driving business performance in what is quickly becoming the most important medium in the country.

Yeah.  We’re being snarky.  So at least ask them some tough questions okay?

If your self-worth and your confidence is based on you being an expert, you’re in deep trouble, because there aren’t any experts. -- Clark Kokich Chairman, Razorfish