The basic issue is that the advice handed out by most “social media consultants” fails to help businesses achieve their long-run objectives and the entire notion of “social media consultation” is deemed laughable by a sizeable portion of the blogosphere as a result.

Social media consultants are painted as know-nothing technology zealots because that’s often who they are, but it’s also because so many of them replace discussions regarding crucial business issues with preachy social media sermons in their “consulting” practices. A few observations:

Many Social Media “Consultants” Are Oblivious to Obvious Business Issues

I’ve done some social media consulting work, not initially as a strategist but originally as a developer for Facebook applications. I got into the business-end of things just because I had an opportunity to get a bird’s-eye view of how various companies are trying to leverage Facebook applications to increase their bottom lines, and to be honest most companies aren’t doing it well.

I think a lot of the people who are “consultants” on social media are just expert users who one or two different social media systems - businesses who hire these sorts of people run into trouble. Expert users, while enthusiastic and sometimes knowledgeable, don’t necessarily understand how to relate specific social media technologies to the business objectives of their clients.

For instance, here’s how an “expert user” might explain social media as a marketing process to a potential new client:

Aside: I’d be surprised if an “expert user” consultant brought up the concept of “touchpoints.”

What is missing from this sample (shitty) business process explanation? Here’s a short list:

• No Budgeting;
• No Strategic Planning;
• No Goals or Milestones;
• No “Analyze and Refine” Stage;
• No Training Phase; and
• Worst of All - No Explanation of How Social Media Integrates into Existing Marketing Activity.

Expert users are experts because they are well-versed in the “execution” part of the business process, but I think they often overlook crucial parts of their clients’ overall business processes. Integration into ongoing marketing efforts is the most important - you don’t  want to waste additional marketing dollars on overlapping activities or not spend dollars on areas where social marketing and ongoing marketing can (buzzword alert) synergize each other.

Many Social Media Consultants Don’t or Can’t Determine the True Dollar Cost of Social Marketing Activities

If my time was worth $25 an hour do you know how much it has cost me to build up Marketing-Ninja’s audience to a size of roughly 400-410 readers? The dollar cost would be somewhere between $5000 and $10000 dollars (200 - 400 hours) over the span of 11 months.

Now if I were sitting down with a new client, an ultra-light air vehicle (ULAV) manufacturer, who wanted to build a blog with 2,000 readers in one year, how could I accurately project the costs of this marketing initiative assuming that the client’s goals are within reach?

If your answer was “estimate cost based on your experiences with your own blog” then you’re incorrect, and this is where “expert users” fail again - at least in some instances. In the rare case where your personal blog’s audience and your client’s desired audience overlap significantly then this answer would be reasonable. However this doesn’t work in the common case, like the example I have described.

Each area of interest or domain is going to have different time/channel/approach requirements in order to successfully build an audience, a fact that is ignored by a lot of social media consultants.

The best approach to budgeting the dollar cost of a long-term marketing project in a new or unfamiliar domain is to simply use a prototype campaign for a short period of time, measure the results, compare results to cost, try to estimate the “liftoff cost” as best as you can, and allow some room for error.

The Clients of Social Media Consultants Don’t Do the Right Things and Make Us Look Bad

I can go on all day about the things that consultants might do wrong, but the clients who hire social media consultants aren’t blameless. Social media consultants are plentiful because the demand for them is high - social media is a hot, new, unconquered marketing channel that few companies have learned to master and therein lies a lot of potential for growth.

However, many companies simply don’t know how to use a social media consultant once they have one - an experienced consultant can tell clients what they need to do in order to have a successful working relationship and subsequently successful marketing campaign, but the consultant can’t force his or her client to listen.

I’m going to write about this at length in the future, but for now let’s just leave it at what I said - you can’t tell your client what you think they need to do, but you can’t force them to do it.

Man… there’s A LOT more stuff I can cover here, but this post is getting lengthy as it is. I think I’m going to cut this off and get back to my last paper I ever have to write before I graduate.

del.icio.us Tags: Social Media Consultants,Consulting,Consulting Hazards