Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

I really couldn’t agree more with this.

Lately it seems I can’t go anywhere without running into a gaggle of social media consultants bloviating about the wonders of social network marketing. Sure, you’ve seen ‘em, too. Slick shake-and-bake “experts” promising to help you leverage the power of Twitter and Facebook to raise your profile and, inexplicably, boost your profits. But scratch the surface on most of these claims and they instantly crumble. Meanwhile, it seems the only people making any money in social media are the consultants themselves.

For anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand bucks, you can hire a social media consultant to come to your office and put on a training seminar for your staff. They’ll spend an hour or two pontificating about the power of social media to raise awareness of your brand and the magical benefits of building closer relationships with your customers in 140 characters or less. They’ll probably even offer you a few “insider tips” based on their “deep expertise” in the field. The only problem? It’s a load of bull.

Unless you define success by the sort of loosey-goosey standards that might make your horoscope appear to actually predict the future, the real measure of any business undertaking is that it increases your profits. But in the vast majority of use cases, neither Twitter nor Facebook stands any significant chance of doing that for business users. And if you’re a small business that depends on, say, actually selling real products and services to actual paying customers, wistfully tweeting about your daily specials is almost certainly a waste of resources.

But time spent typing 140-character updates about your company is nowhere near as frivolous as time and money spent listening to a self-styled guru blather about how to do it.

I’ve seen so many of these people floating around on Twitter. It’s “social media” this and “social media” that over and over and over again. It’s one of the worse cases of jumping on a bandwagon and spewing buzzwords over and over again.

What real value do most of these people bring to a company? Can they actually build and manage a community? Is Twitter or Facebook or any other “social media” platform really that difficult for businesses to understand that they need to hire these people? I’m not trying to knock anybody making a buck but I don’t really see the value of this kind of consulting.

And I have to say that, while I find some virtues in social networking and social media, it can also be a huge waste of time and an unending stream of inane babble! Seriously, I have to simply avoid Facebook and especially Twitter sometimes because I don’t really have the bandwidth to wade through a non-stop flood of insignificant babble.

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