Definitely, I think that SM is a good thing. Basically, what I’m saying by calling it vaporware is that it doesn’t really tangibly exist, not that it’s some kind of scam or snake oil sales. :) For instance, Social Media consulting is your concept about “Recent Visitors” lists invading privacy. That’s an idea. It’s not a product or service. It doesn’t tangibly exist… However, by selecting to follow your advice, a company might benefit in that more people would be willing to link their friends to a site that doesn’t have an opt-out indicator widget. People might visit more, since they know that their visits aren’t being visibly logged, and in chronological order. The site might look better without all those non-picture avatars there. The site might look better without a static list of people, because everyone that comes to the site logs out of mybloglog/yahoo before clicking SPECIFICALLY SO they don’t show up on the list, and the list stagnates and doesn’t honestly represent the viewership of the site anyway. Not to mention the people who have NEVER SIGNED UP for mybloglog in the first place.

So, the positive aspect of SM is that you or I or anyone else can get paid merely because we’re ahead of the game. If they don’t pay SMEs for our advice, they can waste their own time trying to figure out what we already spent the last year and a half thinking about. Meanwhile, they won’t be spending time on their own business, and they’ll probably lose more money than they would have spent on the consultant.

The negative aspect is that since it’s not a tangible skill, like carpentry, for instance, if someone gets laid off from a staff job without having their own set of clients, they’ve got a big problem. All of a sudden, they need to scramble to find people or companies that need the knowledge they’ve accumulated. I see what you mean though, and I agree that it’s ALSO an opportunity, in case someone has difficulty finding actual work, knowledge of SM CAN pay bills for you in the interim or even become a secondary career path.

re: Negative Stigma – To use “Miami Vice” again, that was an horrific film. BOOOOORING. They should have been disallowed from putting the name “Miami Vice” on it. It was a travesty. I would have rather watched two back-to-back episodes of the real thing. Anyway… You can’t look at that movie and low-grade all the funny stuff Jamie Foxx did on “In Living Color” and you can’t take away his other heralded performances. As you mention, it all goes on the resume, in the career.

The PERSON is going to be “judged” on their own merit. The SHOW is, as well. IF the show was bad because the “on-air talent” isn’t talented, then BOTH the show and the figurehead get blamed and THAT goes along with them to the next show they host. If the PERSON was good in the show, but it failed for other reasons, I don’t believe any stigma’s going to be attached to that performer.

As far as your branding issue, I had the same thing happen to me. First, I was a video editor, then I was also a website developer, then I was also a videoblogger, then I was a text blogger about video, then a text blogger about tech, then a text blogger about dating, now about going to the gym… Meanwhile, I’m on forums and social media sites and applications. What I found was that since my life is dynamic, not static, I always have different things to talk about. This isn’t useful for any type of consistent, sustainable content other than “What is Bill thinking/saying today”. This, of course, makes it impossible to build a community of people whose lives are static and they only want to read about one topic over and over.

My suggestion would be to split your blog (horrible formatting, I know. It’s because of my theme change. I don’t have time to deal with that right now. :D ) as much as possible so that the people that want to read SM can get that, and the people that are interested in other things that you post can find that as well.

Twitter’s a completely different issue, because you want to have only one account, and you can’t split whom you send your posts to. You could have two accounts, but that would misrepresent your “readership”.

On top of that, you have to look at what you want to be your legacy. Will it benefit you down the line to say “I followed what people wanted me to do at the expense of what I really WANTED to do”? or “I did what I WANTED to do and wasn’t as successful as I could have been at SM consulting”? On top of both of those issues, you have an actual FAMILY you’re raising, which puts an obvious strain on time, disallowing you from burning the candle at both ends and putting in as much time on the hobby side as you put in on the business side and rocking BOTH.

If I were in your situation, I’d give the SM side “the old college try”. :D I’d set aside, say, two months where I’d get down & dirty in SM, full bore, and see how I felt about the two months I had spent doing that. Was it worthwile? Did I gain followers? Did I get paid business? Do I have more props in the SM community? Are more people looking to me for advice?… Also, How was it, neglecting writing? What did I miss out on? Have my skills in it diminished? Has my passion for it decreased or increased?

That’s what I’d do. I’d take a trial period and simulate a permanent choice. That way, if you don’t like it, reel it back in and go the other route.

I tend to agree that negative stigma can alienate a group, from where-ever that stigma comes, but I’m sure performers can still use “failures” on their resumes. Anyone in that specific industry can look through the hype to see proven skills. It may be a bit more challenging, but stirring up passion in any direction usually gets you enough attention to get your headshot in the door.

But on branding: I feel like my “brand” is slowly getting out of my control. I’m far from well-known, but I feel pressure from the SM community to move into a more exposed social media role. I get comments about how I should be using Twitter, what I should blog about, how I should utilize SM to be seen as an expert. I am actually starting to feel guilty if I veer from that format. I get comments that I can’t be categorized easily, that people don’t know what I do for a living, that they can’t depend on me for consistent content in one subject. I have narrowed my subjects on my blog to social media and writing (my two main interests) but that isn’t good enough for either community. And Twitter, geez, don’t get me started.

The pressure to become more well-known, as an authority, is well-intentioned, surely. Just like the kid from a small town with a great voice is encouraged to head down to Nashville and give it a shot, I’d face some major challenges and I’d need a whole lotta luck to get to the level of a Scoble or a Brogan. Even then, I’d have given up fiction and poetry to settle down in SM. So here I am, a realistic kid with a voice, that can’t stay home and can’t imagine making it against all odds either.

It really does push me to choose. Which would you pick, Bill? I’d say video, because that is what you do. For me, I’d make more money in tech/SM, but writing is what I do.

The whole thing is about demonstrating proficiency and building up people’s confidence in you. The three wins are 1) building up a social/”business” rolodex, 2) becoming a SM manager for a company that doesn’t know more than you do about it, or 3) going “HA-HAAAA” and pulling back the curtain to reveal the actual product or service that you can provide to people for money, now that you have the crowd’s attention.

So, even though my site began as a way for me NOT to have to take tapes to clients in order to have them hire me, that was rarely useful. My resume’s more useful, but it’s still only utilized when someone’s Googling around, looking for editors. Meanwhile, the evolution was from there to housing my video blog to text blogging to text blogging in several different areas.

So, now, my site is a demonstration of my proficiencies. I clearly have a fantastic grasp of 90% of what companies would need to bring their group up to speed with SM, so I could market that. I’m obviously good at marketing myself, being that I’m on something like my 10th month of my Google page 1 ranking, so I could manage someone else’s internet presence for them. I can market that. Meanwhile, besides pioneering and knowing more than other people, I have an actual skill, video editing. There’s also website development, running a SM community, making music, live broadcasting, etc etc etc

So while my site seems to be strictly a loss leader, it’s actually a constant, living, breathing demonstration that I know what I’m doing, which leads people to hire me for sections of their projects that they can’t handle. Tomorrow, for instance, I’m going to digitize some tapes because a client doesn’t have an HDV camera and I do. Instead of paying to rent a deck AND wasting their own time encoding the tapes, they’re paying me to handle that for them.

In another instance, I got a call because someone couldn’t make a video out of stills and was running up against the deadline of her project. I had her send me the files, and I handled the business for her. That wouldn’t have happened without my over 300 video episodes I’ve released since 2006 that demonstrate my proficiency with video in general and internet video in particular.

This is why I stopped calling myself a Social Media Expert shortly after I started… even though that’s exactly what I am, because I do this stuff all day every day. The problem is that when everybody uses it, the term takes on the meaning of “a person who sells ideas and concepts” so that people go “ohhhhhhh… Another one of those… :/”

As you said, there’s nothing wrong with being a SME at all. It’s just going to be tougher and tougher for people to gain compensation as a) companies hire students directly out of college that are already well-versed in SM and b) the SMEs that just finished getting laid off end up in companies where they can become the “staff consultant”, as it were.

Remember how there used to be a lot of jobs for HTML coders? :D