Social Media Experts, Gurus, Consultants & Strategists

Here’s my take on the brief history of demand for social media expertise:

• Back in late 2007, proactive organizations started frantically searching for someone to help them with all this social media “stuff”. They searched for the first thing that came to their mind, “social media expert“. “Surely, there must be an expert out there” , they though.
• Then in early 2008, the real rush came in as the field became more legitimate and the term “social media consultant” emerged.
• Mid-2009 saw a sharp rise in search for the term “social media guru” as certain powerful personal brands emerged that apparently knew everything at an almost enlightening level.
• Late 2009 witnessed a demand in search for “social media strategist” , as certain people realized that the preceding three terms were often being used (with a few exceptions) by hobbyists capitalizing on this trend.

Quick Tip – LinkedIn People Search

Whenever I give a workshop relating to social media, I often ask the following question when talking about social networks: “How many of you are currently on LinkedIn?”

In most cases about 60% of the people in the room put up their hand. I then ask those same people: ” How many of you have ever actually received any value from being on LinkedIn”?

One hand usually stays up.

What people tend to forget is that in most cases you’re not going to “receive” value simply upon signing up. This applies to all social media tools/applications. You need to be willing to put in some work (i.e. “give”) in order to receive. The truth is, the majority of people couldn’t be bothered and thus never end up using their accounts.

It is for those people that I want to provide the following simple use for LinkedIn, which involves very little time investment. It’s often overlooked and yet it’s right there front and centre. Basically, by following these steps you can find and connect with almost any person, from any industry in any city. The bigger your network, the better it works (concept of 3 degrees of separation).

1. Create a profile on LinkedIn
2. Build your network (add just me to start if you’re lazy)
3. Click on the “advanced” button
4. Type in your search criteria (limit your search to your network only, in order for introductions to work)
5. Browse the top results (they are listed in order of relevance by default)
6. Request an introduction
7. Fill in the blanks in the automated form.

This sets into motion an automatic message that will be sent to the connector from your immediate network as well as the end person that you are trying to reach. The ball is thus in their court and you will receive an answer 99.9% of the time. Just remember to limit your first degree connections to people that you have either personally met, done business with, or at least chatted via phone.

Why does this work?

Simple: When people see an introduction from a familiar contact, they feel obliged to respond. Don’t forget, 50 million users wouldn’t have signed up if this stuff didn’t work.

Have a look at my “Quick Tip” presentation below , which explains this exercise in visual form.

Finding and following a niche community in 60 seconds

One of my favourite tools for instantaneously finding and interacting with a niche community is WeFollow. I call this a tool because it is one of thousands of websites that leverage the Twitter database for a very specific purpose. In this case that purpose is to help organize Twitter users according to 3 categories that people self-classify themselves under.When you first log onto the site, this is exactly what it asks you to do. As a result, it’s essentially a categorical folksonomy of Twitter.

For example, I have classified my presence on Twitter under the following keywords/hashtags: gov20, marketingstrategy, socialmediamarketing.

Notice that if you click on any of the above 3 categories, you can see who else has classified themselves under that particular term. This list is organized by “amount” of followers, which can be a good indicator of the quality of an individuals tweets and/or their level of influence (of course, this is not always the case as there are numerous other factors involved).

Putting the self-classification aside, a quick use of WeFollow is the search function. Let’s say I wanted to stay up to date on the niche sport of “parkour“. Here are the steps I would take to instantaneously be aware of all the latest happenings in that community:

1. Create a Twitter account if you don’t already have one
2. Go to WeFollow.com
3. Type in the niche category that you are looking for where it says “type in tag” (top right hand side of the screen). It will auto populate if it exists.
4. Click on the “follow” button for the first 20 people on the list.
5. Download Tweetdeck if you don’t already have it
6. Use the “create group” feature on Tweetdeck to create a group of the 20 people you just added. Call it “parkour community influencers”. This will create a a filtered column of tweets coming from that select group of 20 people.
7. Use the “search” feature and type in the query “#parkour”. This will create a filtered column of all tweets related to “parkour” (from anyone).
8. Spend 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the afternoon looking at the tweets in the above two columns. You will quickly discover lots of relevant links being shared, as well as photos, videos, and news…all in real-time!

After a few days you will know who produces relevant content and who you can go without (i.e. by “unfollowing” them). At this point you can interact with individuals by asking your own questions, adding to their thoughts, and/or contributing your own new content.

Try it out with a personal hobby of yours at first (e.g. photography or sailing). That’s the easiest way to get a good hang of it before applying anything from an organizational perspective.

For all of you marketers out there, this is a great way to identify and interact with all of those previously hard-to-reach “long tail” target audiences.