Via http://zygote.egg-co.com/social-media-roi/

I snagged this slide from one of the most valuable presentations about social media I’ve read online. Read it. Right now. It’s long-ish, but worth it. Thanks to Dave McClure for sharing it.

Here’s the deal: teaching people how to tweet on twitter.com, blog on blogger.com, or belch on belcher.com, makes not an effective social media campaign.

There is no silver bullet.

You need to evaluate business problems.

You have to know the right solutions to solve those problems, relevantly to the business in question.

And you need to design and execute against metrics to measure the success of your decisions.

It’s not simple. It’s not quick.

Which is why I find it so hard to believe how many “social media experts” are out there.

My sincere hope it that people read at this really well constructed deck and presentation content, and take it to heart, and put their “social media consultant” cards in a drawer for a day when you actually can provide value to the people paying them money. (And maybe use those spare “SEO consultant” cards you’ve got laying around in the mean time so you don’t have to waste money on new ones).

Shit moves way too fast for anyone to be an authority on anything long enough to be “expert”.

By the time you’re “expert”, the thing you’re expert in is no longer relevant. Deal with it.

We’re all students. Every single one of us. We’re students of each other, and students of the collective. That’s what’s magical and different about the internet; it’s not hierarchical.

Instead of a classroom where the teacher hands lessons down to the students, everyone is encouraged to be a teacher, sharing knowledge and experiences.

And everyone is encouraged to be a student, gaining knowledge and experiences.

Admittedly, in the “classroom” scene we’ve painted, I’m that pain in the ass kid in the back always questioning the teacher. But somebody needs to keep the teachers on their toes, and I hope that people are out there trying to keep me in check as well.

So, “social media experts”, I call your bluff.

There aren’t any social media experts, at least not yet.

And you (yes, you) certainly won’t be the first one.