I agree with all of your points, I’ve seen too many “packages” that are just about creating content and doing the work –which relates to your point on “tool expertise”– and not enough “we’re in this together” mentalities. Very good information.

Thank for info!

A true expert knows everything what's you're asking on your article.. does what makes a certain person an expert. Thanks for your article.

I think the part about "No, “website hits” don’t count as a metric. Ever." needs an explanation. You give some good advice it seems but never explain your basis, so reader is left wondering why we should trust you...

http://imasocialmediaexpert.wordpress.com - A parody site about social media experts

Great tips for people who are searching for an 'expert'. However a think 'ghost writting' is not as bad as you make out. Sometimes getting someone to write your blog can provide you with rich well written content. Although make sure that they only post with an official sign off from you and that you provide topics you want covered by them.

Good compilation and this question "Do you offer a guarantee?" is a worthy addition to the list above. I keep hearing "We'll get your site with 5,000 links and 10,000 hits" from these so called social-media-experts!

Great article, I need some help understanding #6. Why cannot hits tracked back to social media platforms be a metric?

I also disagree with the "Ghost Writer" point. I know a great many company executives who have a social media company/consultant write for them on Facebook and Twitter. You'd be surprised at just how many, and I don't believe you'd be able to know the difference. A good social media or marketing person typically knows the client well, and has a massive amount of information the business owner, or CEO wishes to share, but lacks the time. Also, the media/marketing person can insulate the owner, or CEO from having to respond to everyone and just notify them when there is a need to interact with someone one-to-one from a social network or their blog. Also, social media means something different to everyone, so the most important information to discuss is what the business owner hopes to gain from involving themselves in social media. Maybe Twitter isn't right for them - maybe Facebook is, maybe Facebook isn't but LinkedIn is. Maybe a blog is the right answer, or maybe their current website works as it should and just needs a supplement in another media format. Just thoughts from mom over here - Cath

love this, we know accountability is a big issue with a lot of "guru's" http://reallychill.org/comedy/breaking-news-new-government-program-to-support-social-media-expert-depression/

Question: Do you think social media is for everyone? Scammers: Yes. Expert: No.

I totally ghost write for my clients. They're technology companies from outside the U.S. for whom English is a 2nd language. I'm bi-lingual, so I take what they have written, translate it, and post it on their blog. The text is theirs, I've just put it into English in a compelling copy-written way. I'm wondering, however, if maybe the best thing to do would be to write the posts in my name...you've gotten me thinking Dave...

If you can’t discern what is what ..then maybe you should start looking for literature that is more graphic based..well, if not comic

..How about the question "How do you define transparency?" I was surprised to some extent, in which people understand or do not understand this basic principle of interaction on the Internet..

I think this is about the shittiest post I've ever read. I'll give 1/2 point for the questions, but instead of explaining anything to the asker all you did is tell him/her what NOT to look for. I would not hire you! Change your attitude!

Excellent article, and some great questions. I certainly don't consider myself an expert - far from it - I just tend to have more exposure to the kind of social media tools that a lot of small businesses are clamoring for these days. I don't think the hardest part for them is getting online -- I think the hardest part is understanding how to come up with an effective plan. As I learn I try to write on my blog, and I learn by doing (and at least trying to leverage as many mediums as possible). Believe it or not, I *just* started doing video...boy, was that an experience! The biggest problems for small businesses is that they need a targeted approach and gradual integration of different facets of social media because they have so few resources to do things the "right" way to get them the kind of exposure they're looking for. I therefore think that at least one of your questions should be, "What's your approach to getting a business started with social media?" If the answer involves anything other than a gradual adoption of different tools, starting with the highest impact tool for their business first, then they should run the other way.

Dave, you've got a great list here, and its enduring presence in Google's search results as well as the months worth of comments bears that out. I was momentarily confused by #4, "You want doers, not talkers. Choose people with a presence." That could be taken to mean that if someone is investing time in chatting it up online, they're not out there working for a living. But surely, that is not what you meant. Finding the right balance of participation in social media and active work for the benefit of clients is something we all have to work at. Not only can we review the quantity of a social media expert's social engagement, but the quality can be measured as well, and I think that over time, quality is ultimately what matters. @TimPiazza

Re: Point #5 When is corporate America ever transparent? Why on Earth should their blogs be "clearly labeled" as to who is contributing to them? Or rather, who in their right mind expects them to be labeled as such? If the corporation approves of what is being said on their blog, regardless of who actually writes it, then the blog post carries with it the weight of the corporation. Period. End of story. If you, the reader, can't discern what is what, well, then maybe you should stop reading and start looking for literature that is more graphic based....

As far as I'm concerned there are no "Experts" at social media. It is a moving target, a philosophy a temporal phenomena that can only be utilized to its full potential at a single moment in time. Once that time has passed, the rules have changed. So if Expert call yourself then we can assume you have tried every conceivable approach, method, tool, strategy, format and technology for every conceivable client and product, measured the results and then traveled in time to try them in the future version of what social media is? If not, like the rest of us, you are always a student, learning every day of a better way.

I asked our consultants #2 directly, "2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?" Their response was that they'd have to get back to me...it's been 3 days, still waiting for it. I was inspired by this post to write something similar for those asked to deal with an internal Social Media Team: http://www.benphoster.com/?p=39 Here's a summary: 1 - Will the team have access to any tool, technology, or website they want? 2 - What is your “VPV” - Visitor Value Proposition? 3 - How does the organization deal with negative feedback? 4 - What is the biggest regulatory/compliance restraint facing the social media strategy? 5 - Who does the social media team report to? 6 - What metrics are management using to measure success?

1.Is the social media space right for my organization? Because not everybody should be here. A good consultant should be able to gauge the clients needs and expectations and, if necessary, lose the client by suggesting that SM is not right for their aspirations. 2. What's a great example of blogger relations? If the consultant answers with anything immoral, questionable or just plain boring, he's not one I'd want on my side.

I wish I'd seen your post before I wrote my own on a slightly different aspect of the same quesiton last night in response to a twitter comment and a client question. I will go back and link to this one. I want my clients to see your info. One definite thing to look for is evidence of clients. From testimonials to interactions with clients on social networking sites. Also, do they have clients in your type of business/industry that they can point to, or clients the same size as your company? What works for @Zappos may not work for a mom and pop store; what works for a sole proprietor coach may not work for a sole proprietor fiction book author. Or are they versatile enough that their skills are transferable. Many who are coming on line now are claiming a large following and are info marketers - selling their ebook, ecourse or widget. For many of them, large numbers may work - as they are looking for a flash-in-the-pan quick sale, or are looking to recruit other info marketers. But for sustaining company growth, as a client of mine said on Twitter last week - 10,000 followers are just numbers, how many are paying clients, customers and partners are actually there? And I would add, how many will be repeat customers/clients. I come from a non-profit and small busines PR background - I think that has helped me, we did not have that big biz, product push the word out POV. One last point - some experts are very knowled-geable, but are not great teachers/coaches. One niche where I've been effective in is helping the non-tech types. I can easily translate the jargon down to things they can understand. There are good business people out there who still don't get what an RSS reader is and how it works, who are using LinkedIn, but say they don't know anything about social networking - they don't even know that LinkedIn is a form of social networking. Let's not forget how it felt whenever it was that we jumped in. I have grown my network on Twitter organically, over time, and it is what I teach my clients to do.

Great post Dave, and I really enjoyed reading all of the comments. I learned a lot as how not to answer questions during an interview, but wanted to see if you could read my latest post and tell me whether the answers I am giving are good or not. Thank you so much in advance for your help.

I agree that more discussion is needed on temporary ghost blogging. We help our clients get up and running on their blogs as they typically don't have the initial time it takes to be successful. We write from their research and direction, and then make them edit our copy to lend their unique voice. We're sort of like the training wheels in the first 90 days or so, and then we push them out of the nest. Do others of you do the same?

Ask the "social media expert" to show you their delicious links. When did they start tagging their saved articles "social+media" or "socmed?" Early 2009? Late 2008? Earlier? My guess is that you'll learn a lot when they open up their own social media life to you.

Dave: I saw this partly mentioned is Missy's comment but rather than interviewing someone based on activity (which most of your questions focus on) how about asking them to validate the activity with metrics and results? Any marketer worth their salt in this day and age -- whether using traditional or new media -- must be able to report on return on: INFLUENCE, INSIGHT, RELEVANCE, and INVESTMENT? How have they tracked that data? What dashboards are they using? What key metrics are most important to consider? Beth Kanter (@kanter) is doing some great work on this as well as @micah as he touches on personal brand strategies. Lois Kelly's (@loiskelly) book Beyond Buzz is a must read for anyone in this space. If your expert hasn't heard of it, then send them packing. -- David Kinard, PCM

Dave, very good list of questions to try and "out" the posers. Good job categorizing the major perps--excitable folks who got SM religion now bloviating as self-proclaimed experts and traditional communications experts jumping into the deep end of the social media pool without their water wings. The former knows the tools, the latter can build a strategy. Your "expert" should have both. But it's hard to evaluate the experts if you are not pretty facile yourself. If you've seen the truly JUNKY proposals or "strategies" that I have-- by people/agencies who either rip the copy from Wikipedia definitions or by those who wouldn't know how the work would get done other than by intimating that fairy dust was involved.... So, I would like to add another question. #9. Give me an example of when using social media didn't make sense for a client. Everyone knows that these examples abound. I would want to make sure that my consultant was giving me good advice even if that means saying my cool-tool of choice is the wrong one or that it would not fit with the broader communications/service/branding/whatever strategy. Thanks for a good post.

Excellent. I rank the term Social Media Expert with Snake Oil Salesman. I think some people think that if they have been blogging/twittering for more than a year they are an expert. I don't think so. That said, how much work is there for social media experts and where is the money flowing?

These 8 questions will haunt lot of people.

Interesting point - the annoying aspects of all those 'other' people who are messing things up. It's the 'bad twapple' syndrome. I think that twitter bird is just sitting back and letting it be what it wants. My opinion - trying to control social media is like trying to get someone to fall in love with you. Sure, some people do it, but not with their rational mind.

Many excellent comments that need no addendum, but I will add this: Transparency is where it's at, so if a CEO/executive management can't or won't write, then why not create podcast blog series - interview the darn folk each week and let their personalities shine (or pester, whatever works). Marketing and PR professionals don't control the message any longer, so we need to do what we can to get our leader's "voice" out there. And if we don't feel our leader's "voice" should be out there, then why the hell are they leading us? Twitter me @kwg4now (I'm not a big mouth)

If a company asks a potential "expert" to hire, "Where can I find you online?" is that truly a company one should work for? Shouldn't the company have already done some homework to ask a more targeted query, such as, "Why do you write about blah on twitter and not on facebook? How will you be able to talk in so-and-so-way with our Facebook clients if your specialty is Twitter?"

I read Ike's post yesterday (he DM'd me his self-professed "shot over the bow") and while I'll say I'm a TweetDeck user (having first graduated from browser, then TwitterFox), I have a few thoughts that might be useful in the screening process: 1) Why do you feel you're qualified to introduce my company to social media in general, and Twitter specifically? 2) What are your personal strategies for monitoring and tracking key topics or influentials within your own space? 3) Describe some failures, or initiatives that weren't as successful as they could have been. 4) How much time to you dedicate to nurturing your community and managing your reputation? Thanks for the opportunity! Heather

Excellent article :) Though I would ask few more question - have you run a twitter-campaign successfully, and how did you measured the success. What benefits of joining Twitter you've seen so far (any? If only answer is making new friendship, fly away :-). And as for Adrian Eden comment about principles of social networking and techonologies...of course, its nice to be important, but its more important to be nice ;-)

Dave, I'm going to go out on a limb and be a bit of a dissenter here re: #5: ghost blogging. I think Mike is generally correct in stating that when it comes to mass media, the medium indeed attempts to dictate what is considered acceptable. However, if the blogging community at large, which is truly still in it's infancy, has decided that the platform absolutely, positively HAS to be written by the head of a firm, or by a marketing person, or whoever is the apparent "face" of the company, then I would argue those dictating such policies are dead wrong. And the reason for my opinion is that because we have to remember that blogging isn't always just about a single person. Sure it might have started out that way, but as the platform has matured and gained greater adoption by an audience outside its early adopters, the guiding principles of the platform too must adapt. We're no longer writing about last night's party with friends, or how much we really dig our cat, we're writing about business, politics, religion and a host of other things that are WAY larger than the individual. Twitter, on the other hand ( which I wouldn’t call micro-blogging ), but rather public texting, IS probably the closest thing to a truly individual platform for the moment.. And I completely understand the concept of a Twtter ID being tied to a real person, as part of this concept. But blogging is different. And it's value to business, particularly small businesses without giant marketing budgets and staffs is huge from an SEO and SEM perspective. So how then, does a small business owner. . .even one bringing in 5-50 million dollars a year. . . put together a blog? She's often not a techie, or a writer, and ( some might find this hard to believe ) not in possession of a tremendous amount of time. . .so how do they do it? How can this individual, who is creating opportunities for many others to earn a livelihood and contribute to society, create a blog, if "bloggers" ( and I use this term very loosely ) are telling them they CAN'T put out a blog because they themselves aren't writing it? Hogwash. The platform has gone beyond the individual. The story, then is ALSO much larger than than the individual. To make companies accountable to a standard that requires them to have a single person with a face and a name being the only one responsible for blogging is not only unrealistic, it’s dangerous. Here are two examples that might help to put things into perspective: Some years ago, when I was a door-knockin' sales guy peddling forklifts ( go figure ), I was creating marketing collateral that helped my territory prospects remember who I was when the time came to buy a lift truck. It had my picture on it, my cell phone number. . .I even offered some sort of promotion that I was going to offer straight of of my commission. Now, from my point of view ( that of the individual sales guy ), it made sense. After all, it was a territory I built from scratch, ( my ) prospects wanted to speak with ME, a "person" not a "company", ( I thought ), and the commission was mine to give away. . . or not, right? Uh, maybe not. The dealer, a gentleman with his own business-sense, ( and a multi-million dollar company to back it up ), didn't agree. To him, it was troublesome because it was ME who was becoming the product and not the FIRM. . .the FIRM that he built from scratch, and would continue to run and brand for decades after I was gone. At the time, I thought he was a bit off, but after more reflection I understood his point. After all, I wasn't going to be around forever. . . and because he was trying to build a brand in a new market, I was effectively diluting that brand and creating my own! I was "Doc Kane, the forklift guy", not "that local rep from YALE", which is what HE needed to have his messaging say. So, it wasn't the medium, in this case that was dictating the proper behavior, because you see this sort of thing in various industries like real estate, for example, it was the larger entity that was most important. . .his business. . his brand. This is critical. Here's another example: A client of mine said off the cuff the other day that his firm really wanted to put together a blog, but couldn't find the time to do it. They're a professional services firm with a need to demonstrate thought leadership on an ongoing basis, and when competing with the big boys for dollars and eyeballs, they need to be deft in their approach. Without hesitation, I suggested we could do it for them. After all, we have a bevy of writers with a variety of expertise that do exactly this. So why not, right? I didn't even think that could be an issue, until I read this comment. But even still, I believe it is the right thing to suggest for my client, and the right thing to do for them. Small and medium businesses (SMB) need to leverage the web these days. They have to. ...and they have to do it without the backing of public or private investors, and without a large marketing and communications staff. It would be very unfortunate if we as a community were to set what I think are arbitrary rules for blogging that have little relevance to the person trying to run a business in today's day and age. Let's always keep in mind that blogging, and communicating isn't always a one-on-one conversation. On the contrary, it's often one-to-many, and if we apply our single-vision lens to the topic at hand we're almost always going to miss this critical point. Cheers, Doc @dockane

Ike (should that be @ike?) - excellent point! While I don't think that we should be holding up a throw-away post like this as the definitive way to find a trusted advisor for navigating the perilious social media, i think that this particular list would be the ultimate way to find the proverbial huckster in a sharp suit.

The several comments about #5 -- ghost blogging -- pique my interest. Yes, ideally, the claimed author of each post should actually have written it. However, if a CEO or other top exec isn't a good writer, I don't have a problem with in-house PR or other marketing communications pro editing, cleaning up, making suggestions back to the author, etc. -- as long as the points, words and focus are predominantly the author's. Of course, that gets subjective and into gray areas, but still honest, ethical practitioners will make a good faith effort to counsel and edit without taking authorship. As others have pointed out, a multi-author blog is a great idea for a company, and it relieves the pressure of the CEO or any one person to maintain it. My biggest fear is for ghost-writing. I've seen too many comments on PR discussion groups where they relate ghost blogging to speech writing, news release writing and other traditional communication work where you do ghost write. Time and time again, I say that the medium dictates the changed rules. I'm just afraid that, as social media grows, honesty and transparency will fall by the wayside. -Mike

Ed, you place a great deal of faith in the value of traditional communications experience, as you should. However, as pointed out before, there are many traditional communicators (and marketers) who are charging into this space with zero regard for any of the differences that present challenges -- and they do their clients a disservice by ignoring the differences. I know that *you* know how to tell a contender from a pretender -- but how does a non-comms executive make that call? Those are the audiences that Dave and I have been trying to address. If you don't know a Twitter from a Qwitter or a Gabcast from a Flickr, then how can you make an informed decision without being led down the primrose path by a Rasputin with a better sense of selling himself than helping you engage customers? (Dear God, I am so thankful at times there is no 140 character limit on blog comments.)

Thanks Dave, I'm pretty new to Twitter and I was amazed at the number of social network guru's with tons of followers ready to offer their help. Having been around the net for sometime, most of them I didn't recognize. Now I understand. Great post, good points. Nick Grimshawe

Dave, excellent point. A multi-faceted company blog might be one of the best solutions out there re: point #5. However, I've seen several clients and companies that have a CEO or other chief that prefer to remain the "corporate face", regardless of what might be more effective. What do you think people should recommend as a strategy if they've sold the idea of a group blog, but someone still wants to appear as the one in-charge?

Ray - why does it need to be the executive writing the blog? If they want to then great, but why not a company blog that multiple people can contribute to?

Great list. How about asking "how do you define transparency?" I've been surprised at the varying degrees to which people understand--or don't understand--this core principle of interacting online.

I absolutely agree Rob Brown's point on ghostwriting. Many high-level executives won't/can't invest the time to maintain a completely transparent presence. They depend on their staff, press people, hired communicators to represent them. Granted, it's always ideal when they maintain their own profile, and I'm seeing much more of that, but big names need much more convincing before they'll simply endorse or approve what their staff does for them.

First off, all Media is Social Media, and Social Networking hasn't changed much since the beginning of time, we just have technology that makes it a lot more fast paced and Global today. Don't over complicate things for the purpose of sounding important. Self proclaimed Social Media experts don't count. I believe you are a Social Media expert if people are talking about you outside of your circle of friends and the things you do and say impact other peoples choices and actions. Full speed ahead into 2009!

Many people will resort to telling folks what they want to hear to get the business. Telling 'em what they want to hear just doesn't work. The ideal client doesn't want to hand over the work, they just want to know how they should be spending their time. A good facilitator/guide/consultant can interpret the business needs and give them options focused on their needs. If they whip out the powerpoint to get started, head for the doors. The best social media folks are really good listeners and should spend the first meeting asking questions and taking notes. Hey Dave, side note: I'd really like to learn more from folks comments. Do you think the Twitter references are all that valuable here? Although it seems like there is lots of dialogue, it's a bit disappointing just to have to wade through RT's. of 23 "comments", there appear to be to trackbacks and 21 tweets. This is the first real comment???

Ed - talking doesn't mean you aren't doing. I think you should ideally do both.