Social Media Experts: Real Experts or Complete Frauds?

I firmly believe that Social Media "Experts" are quite like psychics. People either believe what they do and say, or they think it's all a load of crap.

Needless to say, I'm skeptical of these self-proclaimed "experts" and here's why: (generally speaking) what have these "experts" done in the world of social media other than gather 10,376 Twitter followers and collect 23,432 friends and start 21.5 fan pages on Facebook? And with all their social media expertise and knowledge, they may have even figured out how to connect them, so when they Tweet, their Facebook status updates. Neat-O!

Maybe these "experts" stay connected to friends and contacts with their SmartPhones using Loopt or FourSquare while blogging about the rules of social media and filming YouTube videos of their child mashing chocolate birthday cake into a mushy paste which soon likens to a primitive cave drawing or facial war paint, while some sort of banal top 40's pop song plays in the background. (NOTE: This brings up the notion of what people now call 'multi-tasking', and which is something I will save for another time/post)

Perhaps they're "experts" because they've been on-board with social media since they had that Friendster profile "ages ago" or they lay claim to being the first person to send an informative and purposeful Tweet. (They're not, I did it first.)

If that's the case, if that's all it takes to be a social media expert...my 6 year-old mentally handicapped cousin and my 87 year-old luddite-turned-tech-junky grandmother have the same resume as any social media "expert" out there and everyone over the age of 8, who uses the internet and has at least two social media platform accounts, should be allowed to claim "Social Media Expert" on their resume. Hell, you may as well add a "social media expert" degree to the long list of at-home-degrees which Sally Struthers used to pimp on daytime TV.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "If this job is so easy, if so little brain activity and knowledge are involved, why aren't you doing it?" It's a valid question and I'm happy to answer it.

For my career, I aspire to something more than the corporate marketing equivalent of scratching my own ass. Personally, I don't want to spend any amount of time sitting in some office cubicle (or even at home) Tweeting about the untold virtues of Arm & Hammer's "Do-it-Yourself At Home Colonic" or Mr. Sticky's "All-Natural Peanut Butter" and uploading pictures of actual customers using these products to a Facebook Fan page.

I like to think that my knowledge of social media is only one of many skills which can be used to formulate an extensive and appropriate creative/marketing solution. And I personally believe that marketing yourself as a social media expert is about as useless as a degree in sanskrit; because as soon as this social media marketing trend blows over (and it will...something "better" will come along or people will just abandon the whole social media microcosm due to excessive sponsorship and corporate overload) you're going to be s*** out of luck and I, for one, don't really want to get laughed out of an interview because I have "Social Media Expert: 2008-2010" listed as a job on my resume.

Now with all that said, I do believe that Social Media Experts exist. They aren't these brash, self-indulgent, quick-talking sales people who convince a Board of Marketing Directors full of old white dudes that they need some hip, in-the-know, surfer, brandishing their corporate banner, to ride the social media tsunami. No, it's the inventors of social media themselves. It's people like Jonathan Abrams (creator of Friendster), Mark Zuckerburg (creator of Facebook) or the creators of FourSquare, Twitter, Amplify, YouTube or any other software platform that allows people to connect, network, stay in-touch, and communicate online and in the digital realm.

These are your social media experts! The inventors, the creators...the rest of us are just users, grateful users, but users. And while users can manipulate these social media behemoths and even use them in new and creative ways (because the true experts were gracious enough to bestow upon us gifts like open APIs), I just don't believe that makes them experts.