+ Remove the doubt from your online marketing 

According to Huffington Post, 15,000 people in the newspaper industry lost their jobs in 2009.  According to Mashable, as of December 2009, there were 15,740 Twitter users calling themselves social media experts.

Coincidence?  I'll let you decide.

But seriously, when someone says they're an expert in Social Media, it usually means they have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles and they mash away on their iPhones all day. "I'm buying bread now. Rye or pumpernickel?".

I'm being overly harsh because there is some value in the experience gained from constant Tweeting and Facebooking (yes, it's a verb).  But I think most people in the business overplay it.

Here's where the value lies - In order to participate in Social Media, you have know how it operates. And it's not always obvious. You don't have all day to figure it out so you need to turn to someone who does.  Someone without a social life.

Enter the Social Media consultant.  

My advice is to use the Social Media consultant only as a guide. The real marketing, business and communications expertise has to come from you or someone senior enough to truly understand your business (ie. not "Mikey the Intern").

Mikey, the Social Media Expert

Here's what we do in a typical Social Media engagement:

• Education. We offer a half or full day hands-on crash course in Social Media - what it is, how it works, how best to engage.  Click on the Training link for more information
• Best Practices Guide. We'll help you develop guidelines around how, when, where and what you say in Social Media. What do you do when someone trashes your product online? We'll help you develop a policy for that. 
• Social Media Monitoring. There are dozens of these tools in the market today. They go by names like SM2, Radian6 and Sysomos. We've worked with most of the major tools and can help guide your selection. We can also help you craft the proper searches and analyze results.

What we won't do:

• Pretend we are marketing experts. We have plenty of opinions in this area. We've seen successes and we've seen failures. We can help you avoid the traps but the real expertise has to come from you.
• Tweet for you. We're not going to act as your online mouthpiece (sometimes known as a Community Co-ordinator). Better to hire someone or redeploy one of your existing resources. We can help you find and train that person.
• B.S. you about ROI. Frankly, it's usually very difficult to draw a direct line between participation in social media and sales. Most companies are participating to promote brand awareness and improve the communication channel with customers. It's hard to quantify the return in dollars and cents.

Now how would you like to:

+ End the tyranny of vendor lock-in
+ Reduce your software and support costs