Can you be a social media expert without tweeting or blogging?

I recently had a conversation with a colleague about a social media ‘expert’ who doesn’t tweet or blog, which got me thinking - How important is it for the social media ‘experts’ to actually get their hands dirty?

Tom Foremski has touched on the same issue in his post , ‘Can you advise on social media if you don’t use it?’

Foremski talks about a PR person whom he met recently, who doesn’t blog or tweet but advises clients on social media and claims that,

… she knows all about Facebook and Twitter and blogging even though she doesn’t blog or leave comments, she isn’t on Facebook, and doesn’t have a Twitter account.

It seems that just by the virtue of being in a customer-facing and/or web-related role, professionals in communication, PR, marketing, and SEO have been thrust onto the social media scene. But chances are that while their clients look to them for guidance on how to navigate this new space, these folks are also scrambling to catch up and are probably just as clueless as their clients.

I agree with Foremski that if you’re supposed to be an expert in ’social’ media, can you really be credible if you aren’t out there being..um.. social?! There are definite advantages to getting your hands dirty. It gives one more credibility with clients and helps reassure them that the advice they’re getting  is based on experience, not just theory. It also provides a good understanding about what works and what doesn’t in the social media space, without relying on someone else’s opinion. 

That being said, blogging or tweeting by itself doesn’t make one an expert in social media. There are plenty of folks who have a huge following on social media sites, but not many of them are qualified to advise anyone on social media. And lately, everyone has a blog so that’s not a great indicator of social media expertise either. This great cartoon shared by Mark Evans, strikes a chord as everyone claims to be a social media expert these days. 

I think it’s irrelevant whether these ’experts’ learn about social media tools and sites by using them or researching them. What’s more important is that folks who are responsible for advising their clients on social media aren’t married to a single tool or site. These professionals need to be objective and tool/site-agnostic so they can recommend the right tools for their clients, even if they aren’t experts in using it. There’s nothing worse than a so-called expert who recommends a specific social site or tool because that’s the only one they are familiar with.

At end of the day, clients aren’t just paying for someone’s expertise in social media but rather their expertise in how to use social media to help their business.

To blog or not to blog?

There are plenty of blogs and articles out there with advice on how to blog but not many that answer the most important question – Why should you blog? Blogs have become as ubiquitous as websites but in all the hype, blogging is losing its purpose, which is to provide a medium for two-way communication and engagement (via comments).

It’s very easy to set up a blog and therein lies the problem. If it was complex and expensive to set one up, then everyone would think long and hard about whether they should invest  resources in it. New bloggers underestimate the time and effort it takes to consistently churn out great content. Without interesting content, you can’t keep your audience engaged and if there’s no engagement, then we’re back to my original question - why have a blog? Why not just have a static website and keep it updated with content?

Here are some good reasons, why having company blog/s is valuable:
- To provide unique insights on the company and connect with external stakeholders. Ex: J&J – Interviews with employees
- Provide unique point of view that your users would find interesting. Ex: Sun Microsystems - CEO blog
- Get product feedback,  feature suggestions, and test new product ideas. Ex: Tweetdeck – Product updates and feedback
- Engage users by sharing expertise and information on some interesting and relevant topic. Ex: Intel – Software Network blogs
- Answer questions related to the company’s products and explain service disruptions. Ex: WordPress - Product blog

What I haven’t called out explicitly is that all these are also good reasons for your community to engage with you. Of course, you can start  a blog just because you want to or everyone else is doing it. While that might be a good reason for a personal blog, that’s not a valid justification for a business decision.

Before launching a new blog, start by ‘listening’ and ‘participating’ in your target community. Evaluate if your blog will add value or just add to the noise in the blogosphere. Let’s take my favorite and most commonly used analogy, say you’re at a cocktail party, do you want to join some ongoing conversation or do you want to start a new one in the corner, even if it means you end up talking to yourself? Chances are that as you start listening to your audience, you’ll know the right way to engage with them. You may soon find that some have started conversing with you directly because what you are talking about topics that are interesting and relevant to them. 

Here are some ways to listen and participate:
- Follow discussions that are relevant to your users
- Start sharing interesting content with your community
- Contribute to discussions on social aggregators and blogs
- Participate in Q&As on professional forums

These are just a few ways, but the bottomline is that there are many other ways to engage with your community without setting up a blog. Also, thanks to social networks like LinkedIn, micro-blogging sites like Twitter and social aggregators like Friendfeed, two-way engagement has become so much more easier and efficient. While you can build a sizeable Twitter community in a month, it can take years to build a loyal subscriber base  of comparable size for your blog. 

Given that there are only so many working hours in a day, do you want to spend it engaging in a meaningful discussion with your users on their preferred forum or would you rather spend that time working on a blog post that only a handful of people might actually read. A bit more introspection and some research on your target audience, you may even find that some other social channel might be a better fit for your company’s needs.

However, if you find that blogging is the way to go, then extra effort upfront will help guide your blog in the right direction and get it off to a good start.

Blogging metrics gone wild

There’s yet another Top (insert some blogging metric here) list out this week and this time it’s Techcrunch with its Top 100 tech bloggers list based on headlines in Techmeme, which Mathew Ingram has described as ‘trolling for links’ on a slow weekend. There are plenty of other top blogs lists out there and everyone has their own metrics on how to measure a blog and/or blogger’s popularity.

Some like Alexa use the same metrics to measure social media like page views and traffic rankings, which are used to measure the popularity of static websites. Rating Burner relies on number of RSS subscribers to compile its list of popular blogs, which isn’t all that different from traditional media, which uses viewership or circulation numbers to measure a network’s or print media popularity.

Technorati has its own set of metrics – ‘authority’ and ‘ranking’. Technorati Authority refers to the number of blogs linking to your website in the last six months, while Ranking is based on how far your blog is from the top. I think Technorati’s methodology stays true to the spirit of ‘fractured conversations’, which in essence is what blogging is all about.

The recent discussion on the loss of control (and revenue) to content creators, highlights the critical often-overlooked question which is – how can bloggers monetize their content across the gazillion new social aggegators that are cropping up everyday, especially ones like Friendfeed?  If blogging is all about ‘conversations’ and engaging the audience, how can a blogger track (and monetize) those ‘conversations’ when they are happening unbeknown to the blogger on a different platform?

This where I think the popularity metrics propogated by social media tools are sorely lacking. It’s still unclear how valuable are Stumbles or Diggs to a blogger’s revenue-generating potential. I mean, what impact do ‘Like’ or comments through Friendfeed have on a professional blogger’s ability to attract advertisers? There’s no easy aggregation of social ‘popularity’ metrics and that’s a huge gaping hole that the social sites and feed aggregators need to fix.

Blogging and social media in general, needs its own set of metrics and new social media tools should provide analytic support to capture those metrics within and across various platforms. I don’t think mega-blog sites like Techcrunch or GigaOM (which are eerily similar to traditional news media) have any cause to worry but the smaller professional bloggers could benefit from some much-needed changes. Especially, if the conversations they spark around the Internet are a true measure of their influence in the blogosphere.