How To: Avoid Social Media Snake Oil Salesmen

Roderick Low is a social media coach and trainer at Expeditus Media. He helps small and medium businesses make sense of the social web and equip them with the skills, tools and strategies necessary to reach out and connect to their target audience.

Mashable recently published an interesting article showing how much the social media industry has “grown”. Through Tweepsearch, it was found that there are as many as 15,740 ‘social media experts’ on Twitter; a huge jump from the 4,487 that was revealed by blogger, B.L Ochman last May.

The blog, Broadstuff pointed out that this growth would continue and by 2012, we would have as many as 30 million ‘social media experts’ plying their trade globally.

During the same period, BusinessWeek published an article warning us about social media snake oil salesmen. There are currently a lot of chatter around this topic, with many industry experts weighing in to give their own perspective.

An industry expert, Oliver Blanchard also wrote a post criticizing the work of snake oil salesmen. In his post, he doubt the credentials of those who are providing certified training via webinars. He raised questions that people should ask themselves before taking up such courses.

− What exactly is this certification program?

− Where did it come from?

− Who developed it?

− Who is teaching it?

− Why does it cost almost $3000?

My take is that the industry is not mature enough to be issuing certifications. Like Oliver said: “No piece of paper is going to validate you as a social media professional. Don’t you dare waste $3,000 on a series of webinars and a piece of paper.”

Now I am not saying that all social media professionals are snake oil salesmen. However, the research results and the negative response from industry experts have shown that the rise of Twitter and other social networks have lowered the entry barrier. Therefore, I have put together the following advice which I hope will help you make sound decisions before you throw in thousands of dollars on certifications or ‘social media gurus’.

1. Measuring ROI

Counting followers, fans and even traffic are metrics to measure social media ROI. However, they are not the most important metrics. If you are going to invest $$$ into your campaign, make sure your social media consultant is able to measure its returns. And by returns, I mean those that are not measured by CTR, CPM or some other abbreviation.