No experts, but there is plenty of use for it.....

Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A "Social Media Expert"

This is a very interesting article the week after the LinkedIn IPO. Here, Peter Shankman @ the Business Insider states:

Being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

Social media is just another facet of marketing and customer service. Say it with me. Repeat it until you know it by heart. Bind it as a sign upon your hands and upon thy gates. Social media, by itself, will not help you.

I agree with that last sentence. Having spend time at a speech technology start-up (okay I was the co-founder) in Silicon Valley, the last few weeks/months reminds me of that glorious pre-9/11 time period. However, LinkedIn HAS a business model so I really disagree with this statement:

We’re making the same mistakes that we made during the DotCom era, where everyone thought that just adding the term .com to your corporate logo made you instantly credible. It didn’t. If that’s all you did, you emphasized even more strongly how pathetic your company was. You weren’t “building a new paradigm while shifting alternate ways of focusing customers on the clicks and mortar of an organizational exchange.” No -- you were simply an idiot who’d be out of business in six months.

Well, he lost me here. My wife has grown her business through LinkedIn and she pays for the Premium Service. Why? In the old days you had to hire "cold callers" to get past the secretary to get to the CEO. Now, you can target the CEO or Marketing Director on LinkedIn and cut out the cold caller.

Is the ProActive team "Social Media Experts"?

There are no experts, they are only leaders at this point.