It's a shame that Terry Carter from How I Changed Careers and I don't live in the same city. 

People like him are hard to find and I could spend hours picking his brain.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Terry for his blog and we had a nice phone interview. It was one of those rare meetings where, despite having never the person on the other end of the phone, I felt like we had known each other for years and were totally on the same page. This doesn't happen often enough and it's refreshing to talk to a like-minded entrepreneur.

What I appreciate most about Terry, and I try to do the same as much as possible, is that he didn't view my age as a detriment. He didn't talk down to me and he didn't drop my interview when he found out I was in my mid-twenties and not "experienced enough". This drove me crazy at my last job and I still encounter it all the time.  I try to do the same with people like Josh Goler and it's nice to be treated as an equal.

This is far too rare these days. If you work with recent college grads, get their opinion on Twitter. Have them put together a presentation on how they think your company can use it to improve business. Believe it or not, they have skills you don't. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it's dumb.


Even better, talk to your 12 year old cousin about how he uses Ustream. You might learn something.
 
 
Malcolm is a very smart and respected guy.  He is also a best-selling author.

His book, Outliers, read something like this:

It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert.  In anything.  Makes sense to me.  Case studies include the Beatles playing 6 hour concerts in Liverpool every night, and Bill Gates living in his high school's computer lab.  While this isn't a profound observation, it's hard to argue.


Peyton Manning is an expert at the quarterback position.  Maybe the best ever.  Call it a hunch, but he didn't show up at Tennessee as a freshman and decided he wanted to play football on a whim.  He had been doing it all his life.  He father even played in the NFL.


Being an expert takes a lot of time.  Even online.  No matter what anyone says.

If you are a 23 year old 'social media guru' you might want to change 'guru' to 'fan'.  


For a few reasons.  

1)  You probably haven't been a 'social media guru' very long because....

2)  Social media hasn't been around very long.  You weren't 'tweeting' in 2007.

3)  Ease of entry.  Anyone can get a Twitter account and slap up a custom background full of vague business credentials.  Anyone can be a consultant. It's black hat personal branding at its finest.
 
 
Great post from Mashable regarding social media experts:  

http://mashable.com/2009/12/27/social-media-experts-twitter/

My generation is painfully responsible for this nonsense.  And I apologize for that.


Solution:  Show prospective clients what you have done.  In plain English.  If you take this job title seriously, if you actually pay the bills with Twitter, it should be very easy to rise above the crap.  

What makes you a 'social media expert'? If you instinctively point out the number of people following you, stop.  Unless it has like, 2 commas in it, that's pretty cool.

Produce a case study on how social media has DIRECTLY helped your career as a social media expert.  With dollar signs.  If you cannot produce dollar signs, stop.

If the only thing you have done to call yourself a social media expert is tweet about being a social media expert and abuse programs like Twollow, say it with me, stop.  

If your 20,000+ followers have contributed exactly $0 to your bank account, you get the idea.

So please, stop it.  Besides, you are making the other 15,739 of us look bad ;)