PositiveWeb

.........One to Tweet it, one to create a Facebook page, one to write a blog about the whole experience, one to create an email marketing campaign, one to post to LinkedIn, one to say you could have sped up the whole process by using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck......

You get the picture!

It seems everywhere you go these days there is someone waving the "Social Media Expert" flag.

But are they experts and do you need one?

I've come across PR companies that say they will manage all your social media needs and yet I can't find them on Twitter!

I've seen some campaigns managed by "experts" and all they are is a hard sell - social media isn't about a hard sell, it's about connecting with people and establishing a dialogue and rapport. Imagine you're at a party and someone came up to you and said "Hi my name's Jo and I make hammers. Want to buy a hammer?"  Unless you were in desperate need of a hammer, you'd walk away pretty quickly. Yet this is what many people seem to think is acceptable and good behaviour on Twitter etc

I also think many of these experts are preying on the fear that the internet is a big scary place and it's all very difficult and that you have to be an IT genius to do social media. And this is what I say to that:

Yes the internet is big but you can reach it all from the comfort of your own chair and that's one to the things that's great about it.

No, it's no difficult but you do need to take baby steps sometimes and sometimes a helpful hand can be useful.

Social media is about talking - you don't need to be a linguistics expert to talk to the people around you and you don't need to be an IT genius to do social media.

Am I a social media expert? I'll let you decide. All I'll say is when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg began writing Facebook in 2004, I'd been on various modes of social networking for 10 years and many of the connections I made back then are still friends today.