Likewise, a social media expert is an illusion or he/she would know everything, which clearly is not the case.

Personally I try to spend less type hyping social media and more time popping the bubble. People need to realize that this is just plain marketing when you are talking about business. Guess what people – Twitter is not anything new and magical.

I think you have to differentiate experts in the social media industry (analysts and consultants) and experts at marketing in social media.

To me, what it takes to be an expert at marketing in social media for a given community is to have:
- domain knowledge
- passion
- great ability to built trust with peers
- marketing and strategy expertise
- great writing skills

As an example, if you want to be a great social media marketer for the “cloud computing” community, it’s better if you’re already a well connected expert from IBM with a great blog on the topic and that you know the analysts that matter and the key opinion leaders in this field.

The challenge for enterprises is not to find experts ( and yes consulting and knowledge of best practices help) but to enable their people to engage in social media according to their marketing objective.

Luckily, not too many of these experts are well versed in marketing themselves online. If that were the case, then the search results would have said as much. And they didn’t. But even then, there is a dearth, as you said, of decent results. And to a certain degree, that’s a problem for companies and businesses of all sizes looking for social media consulting services.

My guess is that those that are busy doing, are too busy to worry about what their title is; and as well have not taken the time to position themselves via search. And those that DO take the time to position themselves via SEO as social media experts, do so at their own peril. I like to repeat this often because it’s so true: If you have to tell people you are the man, you ain’t the man… Nice follow up post Dave.

on academic research on new media … a pretty solid reference for me anyways: Leysia Palen from UofColorado/Boulder and Michael Dumlao … from Booz Allen on the Beltway in DC … pretty influential …

thanks to Gerald Baron … for leading me to these two …