Why you shouldn’t hire a social media guru/expert/ninja!

As I have stated various times on my blog over the years, the social media gurus and even social media focused shops are worthless to your business.  A true strategist will look at the interactions and connect them to the businesses objectives. Strong statement, but fairly accurate if you spend sometime in this space. Social just didn’t happen. People have always communicated over an online medium.

With that being said, social media has allowed us to evolve how we network faster.  We can learn better. We can respond even faster. We can increase influence and thought leadership in our areas of expertise. We can even improve our business. The core essence of a business hasn’t changed over the years. Think about that.

Gary Vaynerchuk recently called it out. In essence, businesses need to better understand how to use social media and how to apply an authentic human touch while doing so. Vaynerchuk thinks current efforts are abysmal. “”99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns,” he says, continuing with “we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.”

As someone who has been building online experiences that allowed communities to grow and offered much of what is called ‘social networking’ since 1996, I cringe everytime when someone introduces themselves as one. Or me as the “Social Media” expert, however, for the sake of simplicity, I let it happen but at times,  I do correct them by pointing out that I am building a social business framework — a collaborative methodology that allows the businesses to be responsive, nimble and ‘human’.  It’s more of a organizational structure discussion. Social software has a huge play in that. Education. Change Management, Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management areas are emerging out all of this.

It allows us to represent the humans within our organizations. Human, because we buy from humans. That has changed in this game for the better.

If you are interested in reading more on this, Peter Shankman has a great post on why shouldn’t you hire a social media expert.  If he or she is mislabeled as one but they focus on the digital business strategy instead. Give them a hug instead. They are building your business in the digital era.

Dr. Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0, Social Technologies and Social Business

Dr. Andrew McAfee is truly a pioneer when it comes to the social transformation of an organization.  McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He was also named by Baseline magazine to a separate, unranked list of the 50 most influential people in business IT that year. In 2009 he was the only non-executive in the Everything Channel’s group of the 100 most influential executives in the technology industry.

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

And here’s his latest talk on the Social Business at the IBM’s Social Business Conference – Lotusphere.