What is a Social Media Expert these days?

There has been quite a lot of discussion in the last few days and weeks about what precisely a Social Media "Expert" is these days (or even if its wise to call oneself such a thing), and naturally this discussion came up at the Tuttle Club this morning (one of the outcomes of that is a decision to write a few posts on Social Media Economics, part 1 being here.

Anyway, I've tried to encapsulate my thoughts in the above diagram, but in essence the storyline is:

In the Beginning....Social Media (The Web 2.0 variety, that is) is not at all well known, a variety of techniques are being explored, and the emerging tools are pretty rudimentary. The Pioneers (bottom circle) in the space come from a wide variety of backgrounds and blaze the trail, inventing much of the early area from scratch. (I would also note that in this phase a lot of practitioners have an evangelical, semi-religious tone which is great for creating passion in the early stages, but lousy for the practicalities later on)

However, this very activity of blazing the trail brings two other constituents into the game, namely:

(i) Those who build the tools and techniques - the Digital Media technologists and consultancies (I'd count us as one of these) that get pulled in. For example in 2005 our first clients were asking us to build - or integrate - Social Technologies, either standalone or, with increasing frequency, to graft onto existing Web 1.0 digital assets. In 2002 you're reading Barabasi and cudgelling your braincells to recall 10 year forgotten maths, by 2005 it's "what are these social network things and can you build us a blogging platform", by 2007 it was "can you build a social network system and blog that connects to our existing systems" and by by 2009 its "how do we filter all the stuff coming off the Social Network?" (Drupal now having a social network module). Ditto the User Interface / User Experience people start to get sucked in as it becomes clear this also drives competitive advantage. And did I mention mobile, or location.....

(And of course in the course of this you delve into social network architecture theory, economics, algorithms*, system dynamics etc etc - and then to implement you dig out all those helping model, influencing, change management and program management skills that any consultant uses)

(ii) Early Day customers - typically from the Marcomms side of clients - tip off their existing suppliers by dint of their activity that this new field is emerging, so the Marcomms suppliers (PR, Marketing, Digital Media) start to build in this capability. In Social Media's case this was exacerbated as the "SocMed" industry initially believed it could fund itself from Advertising so there was even more reason to become involved (there has been little call yet for e-Commerce plays in Social Media, for example - but it will come).

As the market expands, new operation start to form at the intersections. So, for example the Systems Houses and Marcomms suppliers both find that the ROI issue is key, and that the metrics don't yet work to measure impact - and immediately start to work on this, and thus you see the emergence pf what I'd call "Social Media Strategists" - its no accident that Will McInnes (of Nixon McInness) kicks off something like MeasurementCamp, nor that those involved are mainly a mixture of Marcomms and Tech ( or MarcommTech) operations. Its no accident that you're sitting in a late night bar with Porter Novelli's Mat Morrisson arguing influence algorithms on paper napkins, or that ideas like VRM emerge from Cluetrain authors, or that the Tuttle Club's hivemind adapts Wisdom of Crowds and "Tribes" into Crowds, Tribes and Teams", or that Anthropolgists start to seriously look at the behavioural psychologies of Online communities and you find yourself mapping Maslow's laws to Social Graphs ..... these are the intersection industries emerging.

In addition, some of the PR/Marcomms companies start to look at the work the pioneers have done, sort out the promising wheat from the chaff, and then start to use their own know how to build "next generation" offerings for the clients that the Pioneers have had sole influence on to date.

This exact same process occurs from the technology side as technology system designers, consultancies etc increasingly build and integrate new tools into ever more sophisticated offerings as clients demand more automation to increase productivity. (We did our first real time social media search engine design 2 years ago, for example)

And in the middle, at the point of the convergence, it increasingly becomes clear that the endgame is a combination of strategy, technology, operations, economics, marketing, human factors etc - and it also becomes clear, like ERP, 6 Sigma, Lean Operations and other cross-company systemic fixes that have come before, it requires a whole set of cross-company activities and starts to look like good old Business Process Re-Engineering.

And this requires a whole range of new skills like program management, systems analysis etc and a new industry is born.

Also, while this is happening there are two other shifts in the market:

(i) The increasing market size attracts new entrants, many of whom are not particularly good (my favourite is a recently self declared Social Media Expert who only got on Twitter in March this year). Sadly, as is the way in all service industries, in these hectic days it is hard to tell charlatan from competent, and Akerlof's Law suggests in this case the market assumes all players are charlatans - and prices accordingly. So unless one can prove otherwise it is a time of poor margins. Proving otherwise then becomes an issue of exposing track records, customer referrals, and good old marketing - ie the cost of doing business goes up. You also get the reverse problem, as the market expands very respected players enter....when the McKinsey Quarterly drops its first articles its market validation, but its also just raised the bar several feet!

(ii) Also, as the market size increases, the tech hype machine is attracted like a moth to a candle, and so the space begins its steady progress up the hype curve until promises are being made the the current sate of the art cannot fulfil, and the aether becomes full of sillier and sillier stories. Akerlof would again point out that all sorts of Animal Spirits get involved, and a hype bubble emerges and inflates way past its pop-by size, and when it bursts the fall is a long way down, into the mud of the Slough of Despond.

At some point, all these players start to face the same strategic issue, but because of their positions on the gameboard will play it differently:

Initial pioneers face a tough choice. By and large the early skills are no longer sufficient, and in fact the body of knowledge has moved on and is expanding and fragmenting rapidly. They either need to get some depth in an area (the classic "T" shaped person - broad overview plus one area of deep skill) or move again to the next new frontier where pioneering work is required.

The other two players - Technologists and PR/Marketing - face the opposite, and need to expand from their areas of expertise to encompass more breadth so they can play systemically, holistically across the space. Not only that, but their companies need to decide if they will dedicate themselves to these new market niches - the intersections (to compete with the new startups springing up there) - or retreat back into their traditional areas for now.

This is my view of where the market is poised now, roughly. Where does it go? Well, this is my view based on the familar progress along the Hype Curve:

(i) The Hype Bubble pops, and all the buzz in the area disappears. No one invites you to cool conferences anymore. The last thing you want to be at this point is a standalone "Social Media Expert" - you need another schtick to beat clients with.

(ii) In its dive into the Slough, it doesn't go backwards to Pioneerville though - what it does is sloughs off the stuff that doesn't work (and a lot of the "religion"), adopts other stuff that does, and starts to adapt, and adopt to get to where the emerging experience says the real value lies. At some point, in a few years time it re-emerges - often re-branded with a new name - as an industry that is creating value.

Also, if I were to put my 20 year "been here before" hat on, I'd say that Social Media at the end of the day is a set of tools, not a new way of doing business, and as such those tools will be adopted and adapted to integrate with existing systems. If I may give an example. Intranets were once upon a time going to change the ways companies did business, were going to tear down the walls, create open, collaborative societies - you name the social media hype object, Intranets had them 12 years ago. Didn't work that way, they got adopted, adapted, used where they worked, rejected where they didn't and are now just part of the enterprise's knitting.

That my 2p worth anyway - this is a "straw man" so thoughts/criticisms/etc welcome.

*Social Media has been fun in that those dusty old Ops Research and System Dynamics textbooks have seen the light of day again and sit alongside Barabasi et al, along with bits of Sociobiology, Behavioural Economics and Marx (Karl and Groucho)......

Update - looks like fellow Tuttler Benjamin Ellis was also mulling over the debate, here is his post on the subject - his thoughts around the naive consumer problem (Akerlof's Law corollary) is interesting. Also, Suw Charman Anderson wrote her thoughts on the matter over here. Any others blogged the debate?