Jaysonelliot I so get where you are coming from and I respect it, I really hate how sometimes we don't do a good job explaining where we are coming from and I did that here, I dont want to get business from this I was just referring to the issue at hand that this stuff needs to be looked at from a business sense not just saying here is "social media" I really respect your thoughts and please know if you knew me better you would know I am not coming from that direction at all!
You made good points in the interview - my comment was made more in a spirit of good-natured ribbing, although I have to admit that the tone did not convey that properly.
I'm actually quite familiar with the work you've done, and have a lot of respect for you.
It's just too tempting to tweak anyone who speaks in hyperbole.
Nothing else, he has 850k followers on Twitter. Mostly organic. I think it is safe to say, 99.5% of "Social Media Experts" do not have 500k+ followers.
How do you arrive at the conclusion that his follower list is "mostly organic?"
It's true that having over 500k followers puts you in the top 700 Twitter users.
It's equally true that having over 500k followers does not automatically make someone a "social media expert" (Donald Trump, Lindsay Lohan, & Nicole Richie are in that list - I don't think I'd hire them for social media strategy).
Is it also true that you can't be a social media expert with <500k followers? I don't know the answer to that one, probably not.
It's definitely true that Gary V's follower count alone does not confer expert status, nor deny it from anyone else.
It seems like you're not very familiar with Gary. I've been following him online since mid 2008 back when he had maybe 13,000 followers. He relentlessly hustled online to get where is today as an "internet celebrity." By putting out videos on a regular basis, responding to an insane amount of tweets, doing live video streams, TV, and keynotes, each of those built him up to a credible social media voice.
It's also not fair to compare him to celebrities like Trump or Lohan. They were already famous when they joined Twitter. Gary started at the bottom. I have no idea what he's done for clients with social media, but in terms of his own personal brand, he has crushed it (pun intended).
my follow count has no merit,the most I have is that I help build a 60 million dollar a year business ect.. again I didn't want to come at this from a bad place, I was trying to start a conversation that should be had
Is it also true that you can't be a social media expert with <500k followers? I don't know the answer to that one, probably not.
It depends on the niche and market size. I know someone who runs a social media consultancy in the rural area I live who does well out of training people on this stuff and she only has about 800 followers. She's an expert to them, although she's obviously not Gary Vaynerchuk or whatever.
Wrong. He got his 850k followers thanks to being on the twitter suggested user list. He hasn't moved at all since the list changed - have a look and see. He is also an investor in Twitter.
Moses its true I was on SUL and you bleed a lot of fake accounts, I am investor only by buying stock of Blaine Cook one of the early guys there. I hope u are super well
That's a fallacy. Vaynerchuk could really be part of that 0.5% of social media experts who actually know what they are talking about. Someone has got to and Vaynerchuk has a pretty good track record as an entrepreneur and business strategist.
Code_duck I really agree with your overall thesis on this but please know we are a small shop and I am not really looking to take over the social media world, not what i am really looking to do, but thnx for keeping it real!
That's cool Gary, hope you guys keep on keepin' it real! I was commenting from a theoretical, logical standpoint, not really about you or your company in particular. A touch of that pedantry for which Hacker News is noted. Here, the best kind of correctness is 'technically correct'.
Every moron with a social networking account and a college degree markets themselves as a "social media expert" and I take anyone with that label about as seriously as I do anyone who calls themselves a "Tech Crunch journalist" (except, of course, at least Tech Crunch doesn't pretend to be journalism).
Its not a bubble, but being a hot word, and with our horrid economy, many random walks of life and unemployed folks have started 1-2 person "shops" of Social Media consulting. Kudos to them if they add some value, the vast majority trend similar in low performance (just personal experience, nothing more).
One problem is the word 'expert'. When does one become an expert?
I had a teacher who said you can't call yourself an economist if you don't have a PhD. PhD's may work for some fields, but not for programming, for example.
PhD. is from science realm. Programming isn't a science, it is a craft. Like in any craft, you have master craftsmen who is able to and have produced masterpieces and you have apprentices and journeymen. There is also CS which is a science, and PhD is completely applicable there. And as expected and normal in any other area, the PhD in the science - CS - isn't automatically means that the holder is a master craftsmen in a somewhat related craft - in this case programming. The same way like for example PhD in economy theories vs. financial manager/CFO or just general manager/CEO - science and theory vs. craft.
This post has kind of a linkbait title, given that the actual content is pretty insightful. The 99.5% comment is really referring to the social media experts missing the bigger point.
tl;dr social media isn't just a tactic to dabble in, because it opens the floodgates for end user communication. It's potentially a revolutionary way to establish context with users, but you have to be ready to engage fully or it can do more harm than good.
I don't think there was any need for that tone or the three questions. There is a local Chinese takeaway near me. Walking distant. Before, the only way they could communicate with me is through leaflets in the door. Now I can see their updates in my newsfeed. This _is_ revolutionary.
Just because people abuse a phrase doesn't mean it is not relevant.
For a horrifying, timeless moment, I thought you were serious. I thought you were some kind of Paul Carr-level social media twat, and that you genuinely thought that a Chinese restaurant spamming you via facebook rather than via paper was a legitimate advance in technology.
Then I looked at your other comments, and realized that I had just been trolled so hard that it had more in common with a religious experience than ordinary, mortal satire. My vision went gray. I saw angels beckoning me to a bright white place. There was harp music, reasonably priced German beer, etc etc.
You are really amazingly good at this. If someone isn't already paying you to dick with people on the internet, they should be.
Facebook is now a massive company with businesses, both big and small, signing up at an incredible rate. While I believe a lot of hype surrounds "social media", I think that it can be used correctly to a businesses advantage.
See an awful lot of new college graduates hanging out the social media expert shingle. They don't understand business or the concept of ROI. I've only met one that that got it and has since built a sizeable business because she gets verifiable results.
I've referred two business friends to Gary's latest book because it has easily understood recipes of how a business such a restaurant can make social media work for them. They're actual case studies, no theory and the majority of the examples aren't even Vayner Media clients.
A good consultant needs to be a great marketer first and social media expert second.
You've just learned the dirty secret of financial modeling - it's a lot of math and statistics built on top of on possibly arbitrary guesses of prior probabilities.
Here's the story of a so called social media expert: My story. I've been working at various online projects, startups and agencies since 1998 (or 1999 I'm not sure). For the last 8 years I've mostly done consulting in the UX area and some related strategic areas (product development, focus, features...). More and more communities came to me with questions about their features , their UX issues and how to build communities. Since UX social design is pretty interesting, I was happy with that, but then something changed. In the last years more and more brands came to me and asked for social media advice, at first I resisted. I gave them advice, but I didn't see it as a strategic opportunity, by then we had grown to a small consultancy and I saw no moat or specific knowledge we could use.
Because ... well after all Social Media is easy isn't it? It's just using Facebook and Twitter and nearly everybody can do it. I'm a hacker (a nontechnical hacker who knows what lisp is and how to get a database to scale) i thought marketing is stupid, I want to work on cool stuff.
But something happened in the last 2 years, I analyzed how the behaviour of users changed. I helped building brands on social media. I saw the difficulties of people that had active and succesful twitter accounts in developing a succesful strategy for a a company.
I now see Social Media Consulting as a central part of our business and we have a moat, it's knowledge. Managing a Facebook Account with 1.000.000 likes is not easy and it has nothing to do with using Facebook as a personal tool.
The term social media ist still stupid but I no longer have a problem calling myself a social media expert. Expertise is a relative term even a local Social Media expert with 800 followers might be perfect for his clients.
Using social platforms for strategic communication purposes is not easy.
Social media reminds me of SEO — both had an initial boom with tons of snake oil hucksters. But I think both fields have matured for the most part and the dust has settled. If someone tries selling social media or SEO as a full fledged marketing program that's a mistake, but if it's part of something larger that makes sense. The clowns are the ones who sell those services as a cure all, the serious folks are those who sell the service as a measurable value add.
I feel like I know a lot about social media, but I wouldn't call myself a Social Media Expert. I think there is a strong correlation with applying that label for yourself and being ineffective.
I also think value is relative. 90%+ of social media experts can probably make a local mechanic have a better online presence.
I really love watching how people's tone change after posting a negative comment here and getting a personal response from Gary himself. The is exactly what Gary talks about doing in his books - glad to see it's effective when put into action.
He's done it to me a couple of times, but I'll get to that wino in the end. At least he practices some of what he preaches and even though I see little value in his past activities, aside from self-promotion, he's persistent enough to remain relevant to the conversation as long as you don't lose sight of the fact that he's a consultant selling you his opinion.
This is so true, especially in areas outside of the hot tech scenes. Social media is such a buzz word these days you have people coming out of the wood work to cash in on it. These "experts" take advantage of the more traditional companies who are looking to develop a social media strategy simply for the fact they they alway hear about it on traditional media. Most of these "experts" have no social proof or reason to be called experts, they just lable themselves. You can say the businesses hiring these people are to blame, but when you know absolutely nothing on a subject how do you even know if you're teacher is bad?
when you know absolutely nothing on a subject how do you even know if you're teacher is bad?
Not that this is a complete solution, but I would expect a company getting into social media to have some goals it would like to accomplish in doing so, and it can evaluate a candidate based on past history of accomplishing similar goals. Or maybe having such goals counts as knowing something?
Aw, I love experts. They keep us in the right path with marketing campaigns, stock predictions, doomsday visions. They are just something, aren't they?
I thought I needed to expand on my "social media clowns comment on Tech Crunch" here it is -> http://bit.ly/kijXTI - also gave a big shout out to this communtiy!
Before we get into a big discussion between expert/guru (I do find these names silly, I especially hate the title Guru). How do you define social media expert.
That's definitely been my experience. Even some of the more credentialed "experts" (not naming names) have a considerably shallow understanding of social networking, especially the potential political, social and economic implications.
If you look at it from the point that anyone who uses a social network, by virtue of ease of use is an expert, and only 5% of social network activity is effective for whatever purpose, then yes, Gary would be correct.
Unfortunately, I believe that the effective level is a lot lower than 5%, so Gary may be off somewhat in his clown assessment.
"Social media experts are mostly clowns! Except me. You can trust me."