By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Now, more than ever, social media experts are on notice. The days of free flowing indiscreet self-inflating webernet titles has come to an end.

And it is about time.

The Problem

These clods found their way to expert level by signing up for web services offered them the ability to communicate with their friends and long lost acquaintances. That’s it.

They aren’t the type of people that worked with the API’s, asked the hard questions or looked at creating programs to create a metric that might actually mean something. They are simply users.

Social media experts have come to prominence through their own soothsaying. Bouyed by their own hot air and the finances of those too early to know who is telling the truth and who isn’t. They are lying to themselves and clients.

This post was inspired by a voice of reason, Dave Binkowski @dbinkowski.

There are companies and individuals that can help companies get social platforms right. Unfortunately, the current lay of the land is full of posers offering nothing but lip service and buzzwords.

Fixes

If you’re hiring someone to do social media work for your company ask them questions until you are blue in the face. Ask for previous samples of work. Ask for metrics of all kinds that previous clients used to measure success of campaigns.

And once you are blue in the face from asking questions hit them up hard on how they would measure the success of your campaign based on your criteria. If they can’t measure it or tell you that they will get back to you in a 48 hours with a solution, interview the next potential social media company or agency.

If you’re a social media expert, hang it up. Get a new moniker based on something you’ve actually done. It could be as simple as product development or analyst or strategies, etc. If you haven’t actually done anything online like build a website, graphic design, information architecture, user interface work or user experience work, hang it up.

What are the trusted credentials of a social media expert? I’m not sure. But what they leave in the wake of their fouled up business dealings are companies that are hesitant to use services that could actually help client businesses.

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Tags: Application programming interface , Company , Graphic design , information architecture , Social Media , social media expert , User experience design , Web service , website