Social Media Headhunter

Jim Durbin On DriveThru HR With Brian Wempen And William Tincup

Had a good time today on DriveThru HR, walking through what keeps me up at night about recruiting and HR.  

I covered Google Plus, Social Recruiting VS Recruiting in a Social Company, and a recent experience as a hiring manager. 

 

Listen to internet radio with Wempen and Tincup on Blog Talk Radio

The full embed is there, and you can download the full event to listen on ITunes as well.  30 minutes long.  Two smart guys with a pretty decent radio following. 

 The comments about Google Plus got me thinking, so I checked in with my friend, Recruiting Animal, and we're tentatively booked for February 15th to talk about Google Plus and Recruiting. 

There's a lot of audience participation, and Google Plus is going to encounter a lot of skeptics on Animal's show, so be prepared for a lot of yelling and a lot of dissension.   

 

Social Media Headhunter Now Writing For Social MatchBox

My buddy Bob Neelbauer has been in the online recruiting space for as long as I have. He's out in D.C., running a series of ever more impressive events and companies, now officially called Social Matchbox. 

I trust Bob instincts, so when he told me that he's writing about technology trends in social media, and that he was interested in me contributing, of course I said yes.  My first effort was on the History of Social Hiring:

Social created mini-celebrities out of anyone who wrote for six months on a topic and stayed with it.  This wasn’t just in business.  Mom blogs, pet blogs, sports blogs, news blogs, and every other topic under the sun had their own mini-celebrities.  Early adoption of blogs, Twitter, and then Facebook (Facebook wasn’t big in that way until after Twitter was) led to a significant advantage in terms of  conference speaking, news mentions, and online buzz.  This was great for the burgeoning class of Social Consultants, but it was a bubble.  Celebrity inside a digital tribe was fun, but it didn’t make you money, and companies quickly found that early success at branding yourself didn’t translate into successful hiring.

The difficulty in finding someone with social business experience was inevitable.  And so was the response.  Internal employees, unable to tap into “experts,” started practicing on their own.  There were a lot of missteps, but internal employees by and large learned how social would impact their business units.  This was more true in some industries and some divisions.  Recruiting and Customer Service learned how to use LinkedIn and Twitter, while Marketing dabbled in Facebook and Sales ignored the wave.  As executives started to pay more attention, more departments joined in, and budgets started to be applied.

Head over and add it to your RSS feed, but as we go on, I'll be interested in talking more about the Dallas Startup Scene there as I do more.

 

 

 

How Can You Build Credibility In A Social World?

Robert Hernandez asks this question about journalism, and it's a great one. 

I left my comment on the site, but I want to apply it to your career.   It was an answer on how journalists can build credibility, but it applies to you as well.  In a social world, we are all self-publishers.  We can write our opinions, and people like the flowery language, and sometimes they like agreeing with us or being challenged.  That's how you build friendships.  It's how you build readership. 

But credibility?  That's a different story.  Credibility suggests trust built on some aspect of your work.  That could be your employer's brand - it could be your school - it could be your portfolio.  Or it could be your writing. 

Links to your original sources make a difference.  Even if people don't click the link, they know who you're linking. 

Corrections on a page show you're not afraid to admit mistakes.  Remember the old marketing story about the company that deliberately messed up so it could fix problems quickly?  It's told because it illustrates a point that people want the truth more than they want perfection. 

Don't make it all about you.  Even if you have impeccable credentials, the real story isn't about your experience.  It's about what you learned in your career. 

We have Ivy League credentialed elites who couldn't see the 2008 crash coming.  We have brand name executives whose companies crash and burn.  We have venerated institutions whose public  images are tarnished by scandal.  We live in an age that rejects authority - an age when credibility has to be earned, instead of assumed. 

If you want credibility, back up your writing and statements.  Engage in discussions.  Publish data.  Post pictures.  All of this shows that you walk the walk.

Here's an example:

You're an IT manager for a small business with 250 million in revenue.  If you were at a larger company, you would be listed as a Director or a Vice President, but your firm isn't big on titles.  How do you show credibility?  How do you differentiate yourself as more than network tech with two direct reports?  

You talk about budgets.  You upload presentations on enterprise software.  You attend conferences and post photos of your appearances.  You comment in industry publications about budgets and large software purchases and you link to hard data.  In short, you demonstrate your expertise as you live it.  

Another example:

You're a social media manager for a large advertising firm.  You are not allowed to post your work, and you can't discuss your clients.  You're not really even supposed to tell people what you do or where you work.  how do you differentiate yourself from the entry level copywriter who interned one summer at a rival ad agency? 

You talk about other people.  You engage in discussions where your expertise details experience in working with clients, budgets, and co-workers, while discussing landmines and political problems that prevent success.  You link the discussions to your writing. Your link your writing to the discussions.  Your credibility is that you're involved - even if you can't upload your portfolio into slideshare (oh by the way - upload something to slideshare, because it's great SEO and visibility). 

Credibility is earned. So earn it.  More from Quora on the credibility issue, a link I saw in the comments of the original story (and yes, i copied this answer into Quora, to take my own advice). 

 

hattip:  @PRNewsWire

10 Reasons Surfing LinkedIn Profiles Is Like Panning For Gold

I love sifting through my LinkedIn account.  There's so much rich data in the system, and so much to learn, that a casual glance at a profile leads me to hours of contacts and websites. 

It helps that I'm a social media headhunter, but it's not just the search.  For every business I work with, LinkedIn remains my go-to application.  There's always something I can do to show off to a prospect that they hadn't thought of, or can't do with their own accounts. 

If this sounds a bit like a love song, it's because I've had a lot of occasion to be on LinkedIn in the last week, and even though the changes are frustrating to some recruiters, there really isn't anything like it out there.  A business database that is updated by the contacts. It allows you to contact them.  The expectations are that you are supposed to do business with others on the site.  And most important, all that is needed is the curiosity to explore. 

How do you use it? 

1) Identify companies to sell your products, hire you, or hire from. 

2) Learn market terminology from titles to jargon. 

3) Understand career paths from those who have gone before you, to better understand what led to their current titles. 

4) Find out what technologies partners and competitors are using, and how long they've been using them. 

5) Find out what alumni of your school are doing, or find out what alumni of the school you want to attend are doing. 

6) Find out if that MBA or Law Degree is worth it, by looking at profiles of recent graduates.

7) Use LinkedIn as a springboard to research a company and its microsites.

8) Find out when people leave jobs or start new ones, and where a company hires most, both geographically and from what companies.

9) Research a company to see if they're really engaged in social media, or if they are just posting a profile because others told them to. 

10) Find out who is looking at your profile, and reach out to them to see if they're looking to hire. 

All of these are free services that can be used with just a little creativity and a healthy dose of curiousity.  All of these are actually enjoyable for researchers. And if you dig long enough, no matter what you are looking for, you always find something that will be useful to you, from a remembered name to a lost contact to a company you should have known was there, but was not. 

And don't forget serendipity. Two weeks ago, I was giving an Advanced LinkedIn Webinar.  A friend of mine from college was asked to view it with the HR manager.  Imagine his surprise when he sees my name and hears my voice!  We just had a great dinner with his family, reconnecting after what must have been 7 years.

There's some good science behind why this occurs.  What matters to you is that you get curious about these social networks, and do some of your old exploring.  It may take patience, but do you think finding gold was easy?  You know it's there.  You just have to find it.  That's how LinkedIn is today.  I can't swear to it five years from now, but it's been a major contributor to my success, more than Facebook, more than Twitter.  Heck, more than blogs, if you want to tie a dollar figure to it.

Get curious.  Get a pan.  Head down to the LinkedIn River and figure out what you're missing. 

Social Media Isn't Changing As Much As We Say It Does

One of the "outs" we give ourselves in social media is the complaint that so much is new, it's impossible to keep up. 

Is it really?  Is it social media that is moving fast, or is that just something we use to explain away why we can't give concrete results as quickly as others want. 

It's  a sop to our ego.  It's an excuse.  Social media is often referred to as common sense, but if that's the case, than what about common sense is changing so fast?  For most of us, there's no difference in the real world between the speed of social media and the speed of any other discipline.  From doctors to customer service to physicists, the pace of change has little to do with the companies that rise and fall, and much more to do with our recognition of what we've been avoiding for years.

Videoblog: 

 

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing, and keep it in mind the next time someone says, Social Media is moving too fast.  They don't mean it.  They mean, "we're going to be making some huge mistakes and our predictions could be way off, but don't blame us because we're cutting edge."

 

Five Lies I'm Tired Of Hearing About In Social Media

Mikal Belicove writes a thoroughly banal post at Enterpreneur Magazine on the Five Lies About Social Media Marketing, and after reading through it, I just can't hold my tongue.  The column lists five of the most common complaints about social media, without actually digging into them at all.  And while Mikal applies the "absolutes" argument as cover, no one I've ever read or heard has ever made the claim that these "lies" are absolutes.   

I'll give him kudos for writing a numbered list that plays well on Twitter, but his post deserves a response.  His five lies, with my responses below. 

1) Size matters.

 From the number of connections on linkedin (allowing you to see more full profiles) to comparing conversions against email and PPC, Size can absolutely matter in social media.  It matters as least as much as other channels, like television or email lists or calling lists. This is one of those feel good statements with no analysis behind it. 

2) The medium is the message

 Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Ning, Forums, email lists and television have different community expectations.  You can't be successful if you don't know those expectations and work with your community.  And it's another general comment with nothing on it.  Here's an example of how it's wrong.  Customers looking to get answers now look for Twitter and Facebook for company responses.  Prospects will often surf to a home page and click on links to social sites.  In both cases, the message is the medium.  They want to talk to you on those mediums.  The message is not important. 

And btw - young people weren't the first to use Twitter.  They also weren't the first in blogs, which really kick-started this whole thing 10 years ago.

  

3.) Social Media Gurus Do Exist.

This is one of those really bad statements that is never backed up. Name a fraud in social media.  No one wants to, so they go vague.  Better yet, name a guru in any field, outside social media, and we'll show you how they're not, really.  There is plenty of experience in using social media successfully.  Social media has no more problem with experts than SEO, marketing, PR, TV, politics, science (yeah, you heard me), or child raising. 

4) Social Media is "new media"

Social media started out being called new media because we differentiated blogs and social networking sites from "digital," which itself was differentiated from "Creative."  Aside from that, there's the truth that social media represented many-to-many communication, as opposed to one-to-many communication.  It was new because it enabled an audience to talk back, and to each other.  

5) Social Media can be effectively outsourced to a PR firm.  

On what basis is this considered a lie?  Successful PR firms don't brag about their work when they have confidentiality agreements, but it happens all the time.  What is needed is full client access, but outsourcing works fine in many cases.  It works better than internal work if you're being brutally honest.  It doesn't work for everyone, but this is another example of a general statement that is nonsense, unsupported by fact, and generally harmful.  Mikal knows this, which is wh he backtracks in the comments, but if you have to clarify yourself, it's because your column was poorly written.  

Mikal is no goofball, but he deserves to have his nose smacked on this one.  The column has no value, and instead is counterproductive in that it rehashes general arguments without an ounce of specificity and a number of arguments divorced from their historical context. 

We'd have been better off if he tossed this first draft, and instead published his comments defending his work.  

Location Based Services Alter Behavior, And It's Time To Pay Attention

Twitter was quite silly the first time I signed up.  A client of mine I was training in social media started swearing by it, and I reluctantly signed up to make sure I knew about it (ironic that someone I trained found it - either a good trainee or good training).  As I played with it, my numbers started growing, and over the first year, it became a useful tool for marketing, branding and recruiting. 

Yes I thought it was silly.  Many people still do.  Many more use it to drive information and report on stories long before any news organization or company can react. 

When I started using Facebook, I was annoyed.  The walls and restrictions made it useless for recruiting anyone but college kids, and even once the search was operative, the information was paltry.  That all changed pretty fast, and I'm confident in saying that Facebook will be the most important platform in the 2012 election, not because of what the campaigns will do, but because Facebook is now an information sharing platform built of weak links.

Which brings me to Foursquare. I signed on to Foursquare reluctantly when Craig Fisher talked about it at a DFW-TRN meeting in February. My second check-in didn't happen until SXSW.  I've played with Gowalla and Whrrl and SCVNGR, but Foursquare is my main focus.  I check in and post the results to Facebook and Twitter, first to get mayorships, but also to tell people where I think I've been that's cool. 

I especially relish it as small businesses, believing I might bring a customer or two to the location, but something weird has been happening.  The more I use it, the more I want to tell the world about my experiences.  The act of checking-in has led me to want to do more, which includes leaving tips, reading tips, suggesting food and beverage, complimenting waiters, and recently, talking about service. 

Last night, I was buying shelving at Home Depot.  As I stood in the lumber aisle, looking around for someone to help me, I inwardly started complaining how Home Depot just isn't as friendly as it used to be.  My first thought, was to share it, on Foursquare.  The connections that were made were organic - I had noticed that Best Buy Locations had lots of complaints for the Geek Squad, and it made sense that tagging it to the location was a useful way of creating a database of information for other people.  So when a specific location failed me at customer service, it made sense to penalize that location, and not the entire brand. 

That, my friends, is when I realized that location based marketing is just like Facebook and Twitter.  Continued use of the platform alters our expectations, gives us a voice, and leads to new behaviors.  While recent research (I read on Twitter, can't find it now) shows that social media is used far more for expressing positive information then negative, what's more important is the idea that we are actively expressing our emotions about what we're doing, while we're doing it.  Twitter is good for that to some extent, but tying it through a location based service allows companies to track that information to the source. 

And my friends, from past experience, I can tell you that what early adopters are doing now, the rest of the public will be doing soon.  

So what can you do? One, is to figure out how to use the service yourself.  If you have privacy concerns, consider checking in to places as you leave, or putting up a name that doesn't have identifying information (so for me, it shouldn't say smheadhunter or jim durbin).  Practive checking in and start reading what other people say.  Think about what checking in wants to make you do, in addition to thinking about what it makes you fearful of doing (and how that changes over time).  You don't have to build a location based marketing program to do that, but if you can learn how the services work, you'll be able to understand their effect on your business (think hiring, retail, customer retention, and small business sales leads). 

Like Twitter and Facebook, location based marketing seemed foolish when it started. I'm now starting to understand its applications.  Isn't it about time you did the same? 

 

Back In My Day, We Didn't Have Experts, Just Moderately Experienced Marketers

Is it bad to call yourself a social media expert?  There sure seems to be a lot of anger about it. Hard to tell if the knee-jerk response to snort at a social media expert is honest derision, or a superstitious attempt to to ward off evil, the 21st century version of "There but for the grace of Google go I."

Given how big an area the definition of social media can cover, one can either throw up their hands and say it's not possible to be an expert, or one can accept that social media is a preference layer that has more to do with our target audiences than the discipline itself. 

And make no mistake, social media is a discipline.  It's not enough to call it a tool in a tool box.  It's a skill set that is distinct from marketing, PR, and customer service.  Do you know how we can tell?  Experts with decades of experience in marketing, PR, customer service, and sales are often completely clueless when it comes to using social media to bring value. 

If social media is as easy as taking a piece of bread out of a refrigerator, why do so many people foul it up on their own?  Why are there so few true examples of social media success, if it's so easy?

It's because it's not easy, and we're not driving it.  Social media is the public's way of learning. The mass communication and connectedness of our audiences is driving change that companies cannot keep up with, and they know it.  It's simple math. There are more of them, than of us.  Because there are more of them, they learn faster.  So why do they need someone who is an "expert" in social media?  it's the same reason they need a recruiter. 

Here's a dirty little secret about the recruiting industry. We're not that much better than internal Human Resource departments.  But we don't have to be.  We just have to be a little better, a little faster, than internal departments.  And we are, because we have structural advantages, from representing multiple clients to being sales-oriented to spending more time searching and calling candidates and less time on paperwork.

Some people hate recruiters, but the industry continues to do well, because the marketing of the industry says we're experts in hiring.  Some of use are, some aren't, but the industry has a reputation of solving problems a little faster and with less hassle than internal departments (on average).

Do you know what you don't say as a recruiter to a client?  You don't say, "I'm slightly better than your internal people." You say, "I'll do the job, with my massive database, and I'll be accountable solely to you because I'm an expert."

That's mostly true, but it's still marketing.  We're marketing ourselves to sell our services, just like every other industry.  Do you know what we call ourselves?   Headhunters.  Staffing experts.  Talent acquisition experts. National Account Executives.  It's title inflation, common to everyone from teachers (educators), to Senior Digital Communication Vice Presidents for Advertising and Messaging, International Markets. 

Thus, the social media expert, or whatever they call themselves, from consultant, to strategist, to connector, to integrated marketers, to social business analyst, is engaging in a form of marketing called personal branding. Everyone does it.  Everyone does it. 

Calling yourself an expert in an area is an attempt to convey the idea that you are worth paying for your advice.  It's a rookie move, when you can call yourself better terms like Digital Integrated Director, Social Business Communicator, but it's all the same.  And mocking it is disingenuous.  

There is no difference between calling yourself a "social media expert," and describing a product you sell as a "revolutionary step forward in household disinfectants."  It's just marketing.  We can complain about it, we can mock it, we can judge it, but let's not lie to ourselves that making fun of someone for marketing themselves is authentic criticism, if we ourselves do any form of marketing, or if others do it for us (so no ducking if your job is help desk.  Someone markets your services for you).  

We have nonsense titles in most companies.  We have training programs that have little value to anyone not sorting resumes.  We have college degrees for people who can't write or speak in public.  We have Master's and Doctorate programs for 2nd grade teachers who now call themselves "educators," but whose children can't read when they leave the classroom.  We all market, from fake hair and nails to car leases we can't afford in neighborhoods where are house payments are based on no interest loans.  

Social Media Experts don't get special passes because of their titles, but do we really think they're horrible people?  They tend to be small fish trying to sell (and often failing), but sometimes they are people who recognize that social media is sexy, and thus it gets attention.  When attacking social media experts, why is there so much venom?  Is it because we're mad about title inflation?  Or is there something else? 

 

Social Media Is More Than Marketing

Social media is a new word.  Yes, we have people trying to drag it back to early 2000 or the earlier days of the internet, but as a concept, you really have to start looking at it around 2006 before it caught on.  At that point, you could begin to say there was such a thing as social media marketing, and it was awful.  I know because I was there, and the only metrics we had at the time were SEO and PR metrics.

That's why everyone used to complain, and why "engagement" and "authenticity" was talked about at conferences.  It's also why so few people made money at it. 

Social media marketing, as we know it today, is an extension of digital marketing, which is to say the branding, promotion, and sales funnel activity of a product or service.  If you're in social media marketing, by necessity, you need to understand marketing.  That's because you're judged by the metrics of marketing - leads, conversions, and branding. 

That is not the full range of social media, and those who pretend it is do so because it's all they know. 

Here are some business aspects of social media that need their own definitions: 

• Social Media Recruiting: The use of social media to find, connect with and hire employees. 
• Social Media Sales: The use of social media in researching, understanding, connecting with, and closing a client based on their Social CRM profile
• Social Media Politics: The use of social media to build coalitions and messaging across likely voter populations.  Activities include fundraising, organizing rallies and protests, driving stories for reporters to cover and opposition research. 
• Social Media Public Relations: The use of social media to replace reporters with other voices that carry influence in a subject, as well as attraction of reporters to topics through proving their interest to the public.  This can include philanthropic efforts.  
• Social Media Customer Service: The use of social media to create an alternate channel for customers to offer positive and negative feedback.  Used to cut traditional infrastructure and personnel costs. 
• Social Media Training:  The use of social principles in internal organizational development that include communication, knowledge transfer,reward programs, and legal compliance. 
• Social Media Education: The use of social media for educational purposes, from schools to self-learning to target populations.
• Social Media Advertising: The use of social media in buying, selling, placing, tracking, and measuring ads on social sites, in addition to magnifying company creative through new social channels (pictures on Flickr). 
• Social Media Market and Product Research: The use of social media tools to improve the knowledge base of a company, from surverys, user groups, reputation management, and competitor research. 

To add to this, there is the social media of the public, which includes hobbies, personal connections, social networking, reviews, check-ins, social selling, interest groups, grassroots political activities, discussion, education, training, and anything else humans do. 

The metrics for each of these areas of social media are easy to find.  Take away the social media and use the metrics of the underlying discipline.  That's always been the case, even in the days before we called it social media.

 

Social Media Experts Come Under Attack By Social Media Mean Girls

I was going to title this, Attacking Social Media Experts without naming them is bullshit, but I didn't want to be so mean. 

A spiking trend in the social media world is for pundits, authors, speakers, and people whose careers have been elevated by social media to lash out at self-proclaimed "social media gurus" or some other version of the word rockstar, ninja, expert... giving the latest regurgitated hash about social media really being about solving problems/making money/learning to listen. 

It isn't new. Jason Falls writes about the bashing trend way back in 2009.

"While the harsh tone then and now will be interpreted incorrectly by some, I still feel that way. However, my frustration has turned more toward those whining about the 20-something trying to make his or her way in the social media world, hoping to ride the wave like other digital natives and put food on their table. I don’t fault the uninformed for claiming to be something they aren’t. We’ve all spit-shined our resume a bit much at one point in time, I’d bet. I hope brands and companies are smart enough to see through that."

So why is it still happening? It's a form of status elevation every teenage girl would recognize.

You attack a defenseless person with a strawman argument designed to show what you wouldn't do.

 "I may let a boy feel me up, but I don't tell everyone.  Only a slut would do such a thing."

 And then all her friends nod their head and talk about how awful, "those girls" are. Maybe it's my high school reunion coming up and maybe it's watching too many Glee clips on Hulu, but I'm hard pressed to come up with a defense of how bashing someone for what they call themselves isn't high school one-upmanship worthy of a Mean Girls 3 script. 

Trashing your industry, or better yet, trashing a skill set that has boosted your ability to make money is not speaking truth to power.  It doesn't gain you credibility, keep you real, or make your voice authentic. 

Especially when you talk about a problem that doesn't exist. 

One of the hallmarks of Mean Girls is they don't attack others in their social circle.  They don't attack peers, for fear of backlash.  They attack those lower on the social chain.  This is why you don't see social media pundits attacking each other by name.  They attack faceless, "self-proclaimed social media experts," and to prove I'm not a Mean Girl, I'll be specific.

I'm talking to you, Peter Shankman.     

Peter's website announces he's on Bloomberg radio discussing a post he wanted to title, "All Social Media Experts should go die in a fire."

"I was going to call this article “All “Social Media Experts” need to go die in a fire,” but I figured I should be nicer than that.

But my title stands. If you call yourself a “Social Media Expert,” don’t even bother sending me your resume.

No business in the world should want a “Social Media Expert” on their team. They shouldn’t want a guru, rock-star, or savant, either. If you have a “Social Media Expert” on your payroll, you’re wasting your money."

That's a very clever piece of writing, but it's not particularly helpful to anyone, from job candidates who put "social media expert" on their resumes to clients who supposedly are out hiring "social media experts" to their detriment. 

Let me go ahead and ask.  Does Peter Shankman have that many Fortune 1000 clients whose biggest problem in social media is they're so stupid they are tricked by people who put "social media expert" on their resume but actually have no experience?  That's a real question, because Peter felt the need to go out and write a bunch of words describing how stupid you have to be to put social media expert on your resume.  How many resumes is he getting that have this in their title?  Is it really that big a problem?  I get resumes with embellishments on them all the time.  It's fun to make fun of them, but it's not an industry wide trend that deserves some kind of special recognition.  

At the time of this post, Peter's post has been Liked 1000 times on Facebook, Shared almost 1000 times on Twitter, and has attracted 175 comments.  Did Peter write something groundshaking here, or are people piling on, Liking, Sharing, and whooping it up because they want to make sure they're with the cool kid? 

Are there hordes of companies spending millions of dollars wasting money on "social media experts?"  Or was this just an attempt to gain credibility stating the obvious?  And just who in the corporate world has someone with the title "social media expert" working for them?  

They're not of course.  The problem most social media consultants face is they're broke, and trying desperately to find some way to pay the bills.  Most of the people I speak to haven't taken a check for any consulting, and their experience in-house is limited to creating profiles online without any backup from their company.  These are not threats to the social media industry. They are just folks trying to make a living - marketing themselves.   

The problem companies have is the public is taking social media seriously for their own purposes, severely altering the balance of power between seller and buyer.  Companies know they have to do something, but they won't do it without proof it works.  Companies are dipping their toes into the water, but that means they don't have the budget to pay what Peter Shankman charges.  If someone calls themselves a social media expert to get their foot in the door, and that gives them access to a company that knows nothing about social media but wants to, how is that a bad thing?  Companies get what they pay for.   

What's worse is that Peter is on record talking about trying something new in social media as the secret to its success.  Who does he think is going to do that?  I've seen a lot of dumb ideas from small practitioners, but I've seen massive failures from major brands backed by million dollar a year agencies.  Maybe the companies should be spending $1000 for some local social media expert to brainstorm instead of paying $100,000 to a highly-sought after integrated digital and creative corporate marketing consultant, speaker, entrepeneur, and investor, as well as thought-leader, trusted friend, bacon and dog-lover. How is the second title any different than the first? 

You know what Peter calls himself?  A worldwide connector.  What exactly is that?  Is there a degree for that?  A course in the MBA curriculum?  Let me go ahead and say this.  If you're going to put worldwide connector on your resume, go ahead and don't send me a resume.

We know what the word means. It's a semantic device you use to elevate yourself above those nameless, faceless "social media experts" who never had a chance of selling your clients in the first place. 

You know the worst part of this?  Peter is right.  Companies should be asking how they can run campaigns that make them money, and most of the experience out there in social media lacks the ability to run integrated campaigns.  Oops, what I meant to say is that most of the peoplee in social media marketing lack the experience of running a campaign, the heft to drive solutions through a company over the objections of the employees, and the ability to then charge a fair market rate for it.  Maybe we should be doing more to hire and train young people, instead of simply insulting them and suggesting they practice self-immolation.