Gary Vaynerchuk: “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns” (TCTV)

Of course Vaynerchuk would say that - he's got his own "Social Media Expert" consulting business. http://vaynermedia.com/

"Social media experts are mostly clowns! Except me. You can trust me."

Every moron with a social networking account and a college degree markets themselves as a "social media expert" and I take anyone with that label about as seriously as I do anyone who calls themselves a "Tech Crunch journalist" (except, of course, at least Tech Crunch doesn't pretend to be journalism).

I play it safe. My strategy with Social Media Experts™ is to round up and assume that 100% of them are clowns.

This post has kind of a linkbait title, given that the actual content is pretty insightful. The 99.5% comment is really referring to the social media experts missing the bigger point.

tl;dr social media isn't just a tactic to dabble in, because it opens the floodgates for end user communication. It's potentially a revolutionary way to establish context with users, but you have to be ready to engage fully or it can do more harm than good.

A "social media expert" is just another way of saying "I am on unemployment and trying to ride figure shit out before someone catches on."

See an awful lot of new college graduates hanging out the social media expert shingle. They don't understand business or the concept of ROI. I've only met one that that got it and has since built a sizeable business because she gets verifiable results.

I've referred two business friends to Gary's latest book because it has easily understood recipes of how a business such a restaurant can make social media work for them. They're actual case studies, no theory and the majority of the examples aren't even Vayner Media clients.

A good consultant needs to be a great marketer first and social media expert second.

Ah yes, but what fraction of clowns are social media experts?

Here's the story of a so called social media expert: My story. I've been working at various online projects, startups and agencies since 1998 (or 1999 I'm not sure). For the last 8 years I've mostly done consulting in the UX area and some related strategic areas (product development, focus, features...). More and more communities came to me with questions about their features , their UX issues and how to build communities. Since UX social design is pretty interesting, I was happy with that, but then something changed. In the last years more and more brands came to me and asked for social media advice, at first I resisted. I gave them advice, but I didn't see it as a strategic opportunity, by then we had grown to a small consultancy and I saw no moat or specific knowledge we could use.

Because ... well after all Social Media is easy isn't it? It's just using Facebook and Twitter and nearly everybody can do it. I'm a hacker (a nontechnical hacker who knows what lisp is and how to get a database to scale) i thought marketing is stupid, I want to work on cool stuff.

But something happened in the last 2 years, I analyzed how the behaviour of users changed. I helped building brands on social media. I saw the difficulties of people that had active and succesful twitter accounts in developing a succesful strategy for a a company.

I now see Social Media Consulting as a central part of our business and we have a moat, it's knowledge. Managing a Facebook Account with 1.000.000 likes is not easy and it has nothing to do with using Facebook as a personal tool. The term social media ist still stupid but I no longer have a problem calling myself a social media expert. Expertise is a relative term even a local Social Media expert with 800 followers might be perfect for his clients. Using social platforms for strategic communication purposes is not easy.

And 100% of those, reading this, will assume they're in the 5%.

Social media reminds me of SEO — both had an initial boom with tons of snake oil hucksters. But I think both fields have matured for the most part and the dust has settled. If someone tries selling social media or SEO as a full fledged marketing program that's a mistake, but if it's part of something larger that makes sense. The clowns are the ones who sell those services as a cure all, the serious folks are those who sell the service as a measurable value add.

99% of anyone that markets themselves as an "expert" in anything are clowns.

I feel like I know a lot about social media, but I wouldn't call myself a Social Media Expert. I think there is a strong correlation with applying that label for yourself and being ineffective.

I also think value is relative. 90%+ of social media experts can probably make a local mechanic have a better online presence.

I really love watching how people's tone change after posting a negative comment here and getting a personal response from Gary himself. The is exactly what Gary talks about doing in his books - glad to see it's effective when put into action.

This is so true, especially in areas outside of the hot tech scenes. Social media is such a buzz word these days you have people coming out of the wood work to cash in on it. These "experts" take advantage of the more traditional companies who are looking to develop a social media strategy simply for the fact they they alway hear about it on traditional media. Most of these "experts" have no social proof or reason to be called experts, they just lable themselves. You can say the businesses hiring these people are to blame, but when you know absolutely nothing on a subject how do you even know if you're teacher is bad?

Aw, I love experts. They keep us in the right path with marketing campaigns, stock predictions, doomsday visions. They are just something, aren't they?

That's because many clowns are, in fact, social media experts. Sheen, Trump, Lohan etc.

I thought I needed to expand on my "social media clowns comment on Tech Crunch" here it is -> http://bit.ly/kijXTI - also gave a big shout out to this communtiy!

Only 99.5%?

Before we get into a big discussion between expert/guru (I do find these names silly, I especially hate the title Guru). How do you define social media expert.

That's definitely been my experience. Even some of the more credentialed "experts" (not naming names) have a considerably shallow understanding of social networking, especially the potential political, social and economic implications.

Just get off the bitch train and pick one.

If you look at it from the point that anyone who uses a social network, by virtue of ease of use is an expert, and only 5% of social network activity is effective for whatever purpose, then yes, Gary would be correct.

Unfortunately, I believe that the effective level is a lot lower than 5%, so Gary may be off somewhat in his clown assessment.

99.5 percent of Gary Vaynerchuk is a clown.