What exactly *IS* a Social Media Expert?……

Over the last year or two, the terms Social Media Expert and Social Media Consultant and Social Media Strategist blah blah blah has become a staple in people’s bios. I had SME on my Linkedin profile for a while and then I removed it.

I removed it because too many people were using it and it didn’t mean anything anymore. I decided that I’d rather have people recognize me as a video editor, which is a concretely-defined craft, instead of one of the millions of SMEs that suddenly permeated the online world.

Recently, there have been a couple of situations that have caused people in the Social Media community to band together and point fingers at people and say “You’re a bad SME!” :D Unfortunately… In order to call someone out for doing the wrong thing, you have to have a DEFINITION of a Social Media Expert to begin with.

Vaporware

The problem with nailing down a definition for SMEs is that it’s actually an umbrella term. What I mean is, if I say I’m a video editor, and then you think to yourself “What does Bill Cammack do?”, your mind returns “He edits video”. If I say I’m a SME, your mind returns “…………………” because that term by itself doesn’t mean JACK.

Now there are A LOT of ACTUAL EXPERTS whom occupy a SUBSET of SMEs. These people have actual jobs that they actually do and are actually good at. Aside from those [relatively few] people, the rest of the SME field is selling vaporware. Not by the STRICT definition, which, according to Wikipedia is:

Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product. The term implies unwarranted optimism, an as yet unannounced abandonment of a project, or sometimes even deception; that is, it may imply that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility. However, most vaporware would not be considered a hoax since the makers have a genuine intention to create their product, even if it ultimately never materializes. Products with unspecified release dates or long development times that outwardly demonstrate regular, verifiable progress in production are not normally labelled vaporware.

The reason I consider it vaporware is because SMEs are selling you “nothing”. They have no product. Their product is ideas. Most of them don’t actually DO *anything*. There is no TEST to become a SME. You don’t have to pass the bar. You don’t have to agree to ethics… In fact, the recent situations have brought to light that there ARE. NO. AGREED. UPON. ETHICS. when it comes to SM. You don’t have to graduate college with a degree in SM. All you have to do is add a comma and three words to your title, and *POOF*… You’re a Social Media Expert.

What SMEs are selling you happens to be valuable, though… :)

The reason why the IDEAS that SMEs sell you are valuable is because otherwise, you’d have to waste your own time and energy figuring these things out yourself… IF you’re that smart to begin with and IF your business can stand for you to take time away from putting bread on the table to research progressive concepts. This is why it’s better for YOU to pay a SME to tell you what to do. It’s better for your bottom line and time is spent more efficiently.

So this is why it’s been tough for people to define what a SME actually is. The field ranges from people with actual products and services down to vaporware salesmen and saleswomen. The only way to define the entire group is to point out the lowest common denominator across the board, which is:

A Social Media Expert is *ANYONE* that knows more than *YOU* about Social Media

That’s right. SME is a RELATIVE term, not ABSOLUTE. The reason people make money as SMEs is that they (we) pioneered the space while you were sitting in your office doing cold calls and setting up business lunches. Now, we know more than you do so you can either pay us for what we know OR use up your own staff’s time reinventing the wheel. Also… By the time you reinvent that wheel (if you’re successful at all), the game will have changed and you’ll STILL be out of position.

If you go to a conference, or even watch a video from a conference that shows the crowd, you’ll see A FEW people on stage, kickin’ knowledge, and you’ll see A LOT OF PEOPLE in the crowd, perfectly silent, amazed at what they’re hearing. The thing is that ALL of those people have SME in their titles. This is what makes them SMEs TO. YOU. :)

You can also see this in some of the work that’s produced from people hiring these so-called SMEs. You might see a video and go “Man. That was absolutely GARBAGE!”, and that video was created by someone who was an SME… ACCORDING TO whomever hired them to handle the business. That’s one of the funny things about this whole thing. Since the people doing the hiring know LESS than the SMEs they’re hiring, they can’t possibly be CRITICS of those SMEs. They can tell “This person knows more than I do”, but they can’t tell how up-to-date they are or whether the person they’re hiring is well-regarded and respected in the field. That’s why I got rid of the title… There’s no way to separate the wheat from the chaff. hahaha Somebody go make SME-RATINGS.COM! :D

Is Bill Cammack A Social Media Expert?

Odds are, compared to whomever’s reading this right now, yes I am, If you’re willing to accept the definition I’ve proposed in this post. If not, feel free to offer YOUR definition of a SME in the comments. Compared to YOU, I’m a SME because:

I have a better Google ranking than you: Bill
I’ve been doing this longer than you: May 27, 2006
I have more twitter followers than you: ~1,700
I have more facebook friends than you: ~1,100
I have TWO myspace accounts with more friends than you: ~600 each
I’ve produced more videos for the web than you: ~350 for my own site, not counting work for clients
I’ve created more social sites than you
I’ve maintained more social sites than you
I’ve been IN more videos and participated in more projects than you
I’ve done more live broadcasts and logged way more hours than you
I’ve contributed literally YEARS worth of advice & feedback on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group
I’ve studied, and learned DIRECTLY from more successful internet show creators than you

etc etc etc… All of which doesn’t amount to a hill of beans… EXCEPT for the fact that through my trial and error, I’ve amassed knowledge that you don’t have. Meanwhile, there are people that have done 100x what I’ve done in the space, and *I* consider THEM Social Media Experts. Even people that haven’t done more than I have, but are experts in CSS or Social Media Site building or making sponsorship deals or WHATEVER I haven’t specialized in are experts to me.

Original vs Derivative

Besides separating the multitude of SMEs into people with tangible skills and vaporware peddlers, you also need to separate the original from the derivative. Of course, this is impossible to do when people either fail to or refuse to reference where they got their ideas from.

Before someone came up with the courtesy of identifying in twitter posts where they saw the information, I was guilty of this myself. I would see that someone I was following made an announcement that, say, Joost released a new version. I would then take the link, make my own post on twitter or my blog and send out the announcement myself. Of course, this gives the impression [unintentionally, in this case] that *I* somehow had this knowledge and shared it. At this point, we put “via @whomever” or “RT @whomever” to give the appropriate credit to the person we received the information from.

You might be wondering “What difference does it make?”. I mean, knowledge is knowledge, right? The problem with hiring derivative SMEs is that they’re actually working of of other people’s information and don’t have ANY in-depth knowledge of the subjects they post about. For instance, going back to my Joost example… By not RTing my source, if someone contacts me and wants more information about Joost, I. can’t. give. them. any. because I’m not a part of the company and I’m not the person who directly received the information and first broadcast it. So I might LOOK like I’m “in the know” because I’m actually aggregating other people’s comments and “taking credit for their thoughts and concepts” by omission.

That will work for your company as long as you don’t need anything other than the information that’s on the surface. They can tell you to build a Ning site, but they can’t tell you WHY. They can tell you to add such and such widgets or modules, but they can’t tell you WHERE to place them or tell you anything about how the community of that particular site interacts with each other. They can tell you you need to live stream, but they don’t know how to rawk Ustream, Mogulus or BlogTV. They can tell you you need to be on youtube, but they can’t tell you how to interact and build friends and communities. They can tell you you need to have a blog, but they can’t tweak the theme themselves. They can tell you to put a mybloglog widget on your site, but they can’t tell you how to build interest inside their community for your site. They can make a video, but they can’t make the mouths sync with the audio. They can make an audio podcast, but they can’t patch in more than one guest. They can write a post, but they can’t comment intelligently about it so you never see them commenting on THEIR OWN MATERIAL!!!??? :/

Meanwhile, with ORIGINAL SMEs, who actually THINK UP their own material instead of regurgitating what they read from other people, the “live show” is the same as what you read on the blog or the microblog. The conversations are more in-depth and they don’t lose an iota of functionality if Twitter goes down (disabling their support system like a game show life-line).

Quality Assurance?

Again, some sort of sanctioned, agreed-upon rating system would help here. What would also help is some kind of concrete definition of what the E’s supposed to mean in SME. Until that happens, we will continue to have people with MINIMAL skills in Social Media running around claiming to be experts, merely because nobody’s authorized to say that they can’t. So, until the time where ANYTHING gets defined in this field, let’s stop OOOHing and AAAHing when a so-called Social Media EXPERT makes a misstep. Adding words to your title doesn’t make you ANY smarter, ANY more original or any more PROFICIENT in working on projects for clients OR maintaining your own internet presence.

You can’t add MD at the end of your name and claim to be a doctor. I mean, you CAN, but nobody will let you operate on them without seeing your degrees and reading or hearing testimonials from your references. You can’t put on a Giants jersey and get admitted into the stadium, onto the field and into the game, unless you’re an actual, currently-active member of the team. What’s the barrier of admission to calling yourself a Social Media Expert?…

As long as the SME you hire does your company good, and you see ROI in terms of your company making more money or building and maintaining a new customer/user community or less of your hours being wasted trying to figure out what someone else already knows, good for you. However, since there is ZERO QUALITY ASSURANCE in the field of Social Media “Experts”, it’s not exactly “the blind leading the blind’… but in most cases, it’s “the LESS blind leading the MORE blind”.

~Bill Cammack

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Roxanne & Shane, founders & owners of Bare Feet Studios & Beachwalks.tv have been consulting and in the internet industry a lot longer than I have and I was fortunate enough to receive some vital coaching from both of them concerning Time, specifically relating to being a freelancer.

I physically met Roxanne Darling two years ago in November 2006, but I knew her already from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. We had some great and important conversations and I knew she had her finger on the pulse of what was going on in this new “New Media” world I was diving into from my Corporate and Broadcast video background.

Rox & Shane did their own show, Beachwalks.tv, but what I didn’t know at the time was that they were also very, very, VERY busy with their consulting business where they have 12 years of experience working in internet technology, streaming media, audio & video podcasting, new media creation and consulting, content management systems, event production, and public speaking.

Fast Forward to March 2007, and I accompanied Rox to NYC’s BlogHerBiz ’07 conference. We were filming or attending discussions all day, which probably amounted to 6 or 8 hours, tops, before we shut the productions down and got ready to socialize for the rest of the evening.

When Rox turned her computer on, she said something about having 80 emails since she had last checked this morning. I remember laughing at that, thinking “ha ha, you have all this spam/bacn to get rid of, hahaha” To my shock & horror, I found out she had 80 actual legitimate BUSINESS emails, with more coming in.

At the time, I was probably only getting 30 emails a day… like, meaning in a 24-hour period… and those were mostly garbage. There was something about Rox’s email situation that told me to pay attention, because I was looking at my future. We headed to the socializing events with both of us knowing that by the time she returned from having a good time (and, less importantly, business networking at the same time), even MORE email would be stacking up…

Vaporware & Future Money

I became bored of the Broadcast/Corporate video world and found out about putting video on the internet/iPod from my good friend & colleague, Athina Krikeli one day when she showed me a commercial she created, one day after a session of Emmy Award judging.

Athina Krikeli & Bill Cammack

As soon as I watched Athina’s work and saw how clear it looked on this little box-thing, and how the stereo sound was perfect, my mind instantly expanded as I considered an entirely new form of self-expression.

It was suddenly clear to me that I didn’t have to put my work on television and watch it disappear. My news articles showing for an hour or two, then disappearing. My commercials playing until they rotated them out for the next big thing in the focus groups, never to be seen again. My segments disappearing forever once they cancelled Studio-Y or GameFace or changed the focus of a channel from Youth to Sports and then to Fashion. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to do good work, put it “on the air” and have it STAY THERE. Also, I was no longer restricted by local or even national broadcast limitations. People could watch my videos in France or Japan, anytime they wanted to and as many times as they wanted to! Amazing! :D

This is how I became involved in the world of vaporware & future money.

In the real world (IRL, in real life) budget comes before production. If you don’t have any money… you don’t get anything done. Period. If you have a little bit of money, you can get your job done poorly and slowly by someone that doesn’t really know what they’re doing. In the internet world, people come up with ideas and then try to figure out how cheaply they can make that idea a reality. This is because (which I didn’t realize for a loooooong time) we’re living in a “startup culture”. Everybody’s always working. It’s never enough. You don’t get paid NOW, you get paid when your company gets funded and eventually gets bought. It’s all about the bottom line, because everyone’s scrambling for funds and then scrambling to prove that they deserve ANOTHER round of funding. Meanwhile, everybody knows this is all “future money” and could collapse at any time, so every dime needs to be accounted for in terms of ROI.

That’s all well and good, except a) like I’ve been saying for two years already (“Monetizing Digital Video” February, 2007), there’s no revenue stream for monetizing internet video because you can’t prove demographics, and b) video, as far as internet communications are concerned, is only ONE of SEVERAL formats in which you can get your point across. You can use SMS, email, RSS subscriptions, text blogging, audio recordings, static websites… If you want to put something on television, there’s only one way to do it. You HAVE TO make a video. On the net, the question is “Why should I spend the money to make a video when I could just type some words and get the same number of hits to show to my advertisers?”.

This is why professionals avoid web video. There’s normally no budget at all, and if there is, it’s whatever allowance was afforded that group by a sponsor or they’re hoping to make their money back via CPM (= impossible). Of course, there’s money in doing Corporate Video that just happens to be on the internet, or, at least, inTRAnet, but that’s the same-old same-old for me *yawn* and I wanted to pioneer something like JetSetShow or SomethingToBeDesired.

So basically, instead of having an actual REASON to do videos which would cause them to have an actual BUDGET to do videos, you have a lot of people and groups that know that internet video is hot and only getting more and more popular, and they want to be involved, but they really have ZERO idea of what they’re doing because it’s only another business concept to them. They’re not actual artists. They’re not actually media makers. They have no idea AT ALL about what it takes to bring a project from concept to completion. This would seem to be a good thing, but it isn’t hahaha.

Handout-Based Environment

This combination of lack of funding, lack of ROI on video projects and this “We’re all trying to make it with a startup” mentality has created this weird, handout-based environment. I was introduced to a woman at a party (so what’s new about THAT? ;) haha) and literally RIGHT AFTER she was told what I do, she goes “Oh… if you have some free time, blah blah my project!” I don’t remember her exact wording, because I go to networking events to hang out with my friends, not to field sporadic questions & comments about business in the middle of the night when I obviously have a drink in my hand and I’m tryin’na chat with the ladies.

Chrissie, Leora, Flo & Bill

So anyway… I exchanged contact information with her… Meaning that I took her business card and told her to Google “Bill”… I sent her an email the next day, and her response had nothing about budgeting in it. ????

That’s when I accessed my visual/audio memory to try to figure out EXACTLY what she had said to me. I believe she had said “If you have free time, maybe you can help me with my project!”. I’m assuming the operative word was “help”, which, to me, implies “I can’t do this, so I need someone to help me”, as in “My car isn’t running. I need someone to help me fix it”, which would be the MECHANIC, who is going to BILL YOU for the time he spent working on your car and the materials he utilized in the process. It was clear from her correspondence that she meant “do it for free”.

I had another situation where I had just come from a REAL job out of town and I went to a party. At the time of my arrival, I had nothing planned for the entire rest of the week. A friend of mine asked me, in the course of conversation “What are you doing tomorrow?” to which I replied “nothing”, which meant to me “Nobody’s offered me my day rate to do anything tomorrow other than EXACTLY. WHAT. *I*. WANT. TO. DO, so I might do ANYTHING or NOTHING AT ALL tomorrow, and that’s the way I like it”. His response to finding out that I had nothing to do the next day was “Oh.. I’m doing blah blah event tomorrow. Could you come to the event and film it? :) ” After I finished sipping my brew, I said something to the effect of “Nah”. He looked incredibly perplexed by my answer… Almost as perplexed as this guy.

I attempted to explain the situation to him by saying “I just worked three days in a row. I’m not doing [jack] tomorrow”. Of course, this only confused him EVEN MORE because of this startup mentality that we all have of “everybody’s always working” and “everybody’s always scraping to get out of the barrel” and “if you’re not working on something that makes you money, you may as well spend YOUR time on something that improves MY life”. I’m not saying that’s what HE was thinking. It’s pervasive. Every time I ask someone what’s new or how they’re doing, I get some kind of report about their business endeavors. Meanwhile, people are hiding “Significant Others” left and right and either don’t want to talk about them AT ALL or will bring them up while specifically avoiding saying even their FIRST names!…. “the person I’m seeing, blah blah blah”.

It’s not just individuals either. Companies… Like actual well-known companies that have tens if not hundreds of employees that are all drawing salaries… want handouts. The reason they need guidance is that they JUST found out what I knew in 2006 and people like Jay Dedman & Kenyatta Cheese knew in 2004 if not earlier, that internet video is the wave of the future.

Because nobody seemed to notice this while we’ve all been putting hundreds and hundreds of episodes on the net for years already and handing out entirely free information that entire time to the entire world in the Yahoo Videoblogging Group, NOW, companies are scrambling to try to get on the bandwagon and nobody that they’ve already hired knows what they’re doing AT. ALL.

So it took me a LONG TIME to figure out what was really going on in the space, because I didn’t imagine it was going to take them this long to figure out how to monetize digital video to the degree that they could afford to pay professionals to handle the business. In the meantime, I watched my daily email count rise and rise towards Rox’s level and I stopped using my phone entirely. I literally did. not. have. the. time. to. waste. listening to the long-version of what people wanted from me. Put it in an email and I’ll get to it when & if I get to it.

Time

Rox & Bill

At some time during this period, I ended up speaking with Rox & Shane individually about TIME, because I knew that they had already been living the life I was now living for years. I needed AT LEAST a starting point or some kind of foundation that I could build my own concept of TIME on.

People with staff jobs have it easy. :) You go to work when they tell you to. You come home when they tell you to. You go back to work when they tell you to. You get a check every other week.

Freelancers in the real world have it easy. Here’s my rate. You can afford it or you can’t. You have my money or you don’t.

Freelancers in an handout-based society have to work with the lowball budgets presented to them or pass on the project entirely (as not worth spending the time to even THINK about) while constantly fielding ?deflecting? ?deleting? all kinds of RFCs (hahaha I made a funny! hahaha Requests For Charity! hahaha) from acquaintances AND NON-ACQUAINTANCES!

Just 11 days ago, on January 01, 2009, my ideas about TIME completely solidified for me, and that’s what this series of posts is going to be about. How do you efficiently organize your time so that you can do the REAL work, do what YOU want and/or need to do, accommodate lowballers and hand out charity all at the same time? :D

~Bill Cammack, January 12, 2009

Continued in “Time, Part 02″

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