The difficulty of being recognised as an expert is not exclusive to social media professionals, as I’m sure you realise. Trying to sell services to a client without the benefit of a universally recognised brand is likely always to take a lot of communication about credibility and the value of the work at the end of the day.

Word of mouth work very well in this context and persistence in pitching etc. I would not be in favour of an academic hierarchy of clearly defined capabilities. I guess what I’m saying is that being a social media expert is one thing, being good at selling your services is quite another – and not dependent on knowing social media.

The fact that other technologies have promised more than they could deliver has no bearing on how well social media will live up to the hype. Truth is, sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t. And the fact that some experts may contribute to social media not living up to its promise is a failure of the expert, not a failure in the word ‘expert’ or the notion of experts. People can see themselves however they like and, indeed, I’m not advocating that anyone should use the word ‘expert’ – I’m just saying that people should be free to use the word if they want without the automatic assumption that they must be talking out of their arse if they do.

I also don’t believe that experts perforce create silos – that’s more of a cultural thing of separating out areas of expertise and not letting or encouraging the people who specialise to cross paths with more people from other fields. Most innovation happens on the edge, on the intersection between areas of expertise, but if those fields never intersect, you get silos.

I think the fact that there is emotional and operational baggage tied to the word ‘expert’ is exactly why we should go there. It’s like the word ‘social’. If we don’t unpack all that baggage it’s going to weigh us all down.

@steph. thank you for such a glowing comment! I also totally agree with the idea that constantly trying to invent new job titles – a hobby of social media types – is a pretty poor idea. That’s why I usually just grit my teeth and say ‘social media consultant’ despite all the problems I have with those three words!

@everyon, the other thing that I want to emphasise is that this is really about freedom of choice, not about whether or not I think the word expert is a good one or not. It does have its problems, but we can’t dismiss it because of that because other people, from outside of our field, don’t have the same issues we do and it’s foolish for us to project our assumptions on to them.

All good and stuff, sure thing. But if we all followed his advice, we’ll have endless number of people trying to invent fancy job titles and not lead to anything fruitful for the profession.

What would make more sense is to create groups of practitioners and start looking at educating our peers, as well as those who we influence and influence us professionally.

Through working with Suw, I actually /tell/ other people I’m working with a social media expert. My job sits somewhere between web product management, project management, UX and tech lead — I’m a generalist to the nth degree.

But someone like Suw would (and should) approach the problem of building a new application that has social aspects from a much higher level. Design concentrates on what we can build, and how we do it. Design should also consider /why/ we build. Before anything gets put on paper, bigger questions need to be ask – should we build it? Is it relevant? What does a conversation mean, what is a conversation or human interaction in a particular context? All these questions need to be asked and preliminary answers established as a starting point onto which a design process can then map, refine, build and test.

A social media expert today is a modern form of anthropologist in a specific field. There is a definite problem where our professions in the web are very vague and hard to understand, therefore hard to create proper professional certification for — it all moves too fast. But if you’re an expert in your field, it shouldn’t be all too hard to know another expert when you meet one.

@lee, This is a lot less about me wanting to self-label as an expert, or my competency, and more about my freedom to call myself an expert if I want to without ludicrous censure from the wider community.

Like most people commenting, I’m not great at turning round to the world and saying ‘Hey, I’m fricken ace as this stuff!’, which is probably more of a failing than we like to admit. After all, there are lots and lots of people quite willing to fluff themselves up despite having zero knowledge/talent/ability, so if those of us who _are_ expert don’t then we do ourselves and our knowledgeable colleagues a disservice. How many times do we see people with big gobs and no talent doing better than really smart people who are modest and restrained?

Third party recommendation, word of mouth, testimonials… these things are all nice. But I’ve become sceptical of the idea that we live in lovely meritocracy where all one needs is to be good, and from that the rest will flow. One actually needs to be good, and well connected, and able to promote oneself effectively, and that means we need to talk about what we’re good at, and we need to be able to call ourselves experts without then worrying that we’re going to get pounded on.

Ultimately I think there’s a lot more charged emotional and operational baggage in the expert word. So let’s just not go there? I’d rather see myself and other really passionate people like you do rockstar work that makes a difference without all the pomp.