Social Media - Tips for Hiring a Consultant

Was at a meeting with my friend Luanne Triolo Newman, executive director of our Carol Stream Chamber of Commerce, about an upcoming event the Chamber is hosting. A fellow member stopped by and he started telling us about his adventures in social media. He had hired a consultant to help him get started. Apparently, the consultant had set him up on several (maybe eight?) networks and was charging our friend a monthly maintenance fee as well. After chatting a bit more, I suggested that he drop all of it except for LinkedIn, at least for right now. I felt so bad for the guy. He seemed so confused and frustrated.

Does this sound like you? If so, here are some tips for hiring a social media consultant.

Determine Your Objectives – Are you looking for sales leads? Do you want to provide customer service? Looking for positive public relations? Want to use these channels as recruiting tools? It is very important that you determine what you want to accomplish by even being on the networks. It will determine who you hire as a consultant and what networks will be the most helpful for you.
Determine Your Future Involvement – Are you going to have the consultant get you set up on the networks and then you’ll take it from there? Or are you expecting this person to handle daily postings for you? Caution: You, or a designated person in your organization, need to be involved in the “conversations” on the social networks. This should not be delegated because your consultant is then speaking for your company. This could be disastrous! A consultant can handle scheduled announcements and press release type postings, as well as monitor your brand and company on the networks. But you are responsible for responding to customers, prospects, and other inquiries from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. If you do not have the time or interest in doing this, either limit your activity to the one most viable network or don’t get on social media at all. You will be harming your image if you do.
If a Consultant Wants to Get You Set Up on “All” the Networks, Run! – In all honesty, setting up a LinkedIn or Twitter profile is pretty basic. You could do it yourself! Some consultants specialize in creating pretty profile pages. Nice, but not always necessary. What a good social media consultant will do is help you determine which networks and posting/conversation activity will provide the greatest impact for you. Remember, you will be involved in some way going forward. Setting up a profile on all the networks is NOT a social media presence. Only being active on a network equals presence.
Look at Your Prospective Consultant’s Social Media Activity – I have been to many social media events and always am quite amused when I get home and check out some of the “experts” on the networks. I like the ones that have two followers on Twitter, have protected their tweets, only post about themselves, or don’t join in conversations and discussions on any of the networks. Hilarious! Granted, you may find that your consultant is very active on one network compared to others. That’s a good sign that he is an expert for that one. Hire him for that. For example, I live on Twitter, am on Facebook to a lesser degree, and post regularly to YouTube. On LinkedIn I am, well, just there and send it feeds from my other activity. So although I could make suggestions, you would not hire me as a LinkedIn expert for sure. This is still all so new that it is providing ample inroads for charlatans.

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