Putting the expertise back into ‘social media expert’

I like almost everything James Cherkoff writes anyway; I like his thinking. But this time he really has caught the mood and hit the nail right on the head.

The point about expertise is that it involves knowledge, experience, trial and error and good old fashioned hard thinking. If, in addition, that expertise is in something that is new and rapidly changing – something really annoying can happen when the pursuing pack catches up and starts repeating (what wasn’t then but has now become) the obvious as though it were something genuinely insightful. They may temporarily exploit the fact that there are plenty of people who haven’t heard anything about their ‘discovery’ yet – but they do this at the expense of the reputation of the genuine experts.

There’s nothing new in this – I always describe it to colleagues as the feeling the ‘mountain men’ must have had in north America when the railroad arrived from the east, along with the rest of ‘civilisation’, and they were forced to move even further west to escape it.

What can social media experts do today?

1. Proclaim, without embarrassment, that this is what they have been going on about for (insert number of years) .
2. Keep pushing on with that good old fashioned hard thinking. Be motivated to debunk the oversimplifications, slack terminology and over hype.
3. Demonstrate, as James has done, that what the thinking and experience reveals is not slick/glib solutions but fuzzy, glimpsed possibilities… more questions… and the ability to revise some of our own past definitions and convictions.

So (I am not Spartacus but) – “I am a social media expert and I’m, still, proud of it”.

Thank you James!