The Evolution of a Social Media Expert

by J.S. Gilbert
advertisinginternetMarketingsocial mediatwitterUncategorized

You’re into week 67 of your unemployment. You’ve sold about as much of your possessions on eBay as you can bear and even your parents aren’t accepting calls for fear that you’re reaching out to borrow more money.

So what do you do? Well you think long and hard and you know one thing is for sure, you can’t possibly go back to working for some company. After all, there’s absolutely no job security. You could spend hundreds of hours studying new things and developing new skill sets, but why? If you do somehow miraculously manage to get a job, there’s good chances you’ll just wind up being laid off in 6 months or so. Well, that could help you in terms of stringing out your unemployment, but it just seems like too much work.

And then it dawns on you that over the past year and a quarter of unemployment, you have actually been obtaining and honing skills that could help you make big bucks by doing things you already love to do. You have become an expert at maneuvering the Social Media World. You even have a wicked cool avatar.

So, like the smart, marketing maven you are, you start checking around. Okay, disappointment number 1 sets in as you discover there isn’t really much of a market for a Farm Craft consultant and what little market there is, is already being served by 187 podcasts and online webinars.

Don’t despair. Surely your hours of updating your status on Facebook, combined with the 83 half started profile pages on various employment sites, have taught you something.

Perhaps it’s simply time to take the bull by the horns. All you need to do is sit down and send out a big bulk message to all your online friends telling them you are now available to do whatever it is that social media experts do. And since you know that your friends aren’t always on line at the same time, perhaps sending this message out 15 or 16 times will help. You should probably also go to every thread, group, chatroom and social site you can think of and make a post that will let everyone know that you are a social media expert and make sure to ask 43 or 44 times for work, referrals and other support. Oh and let’s not forget a blog. Perhaps something catchy, like “7 Reasons Why You Need to Hire me to Handle Your Social Media”. Hmmm.

Reason #1 – Hire me because I am a social media expert.

Reason #2 – You are missing out on branding opportunities.

Reason #3 – You need a virile and I can get you one.

Reason #4 – Your competitors all have social media experts

Reason#5 – Nobody watches tv or listens to the radio anymore

Reason #6 – We can promote your personal brand

Reason #7 – Where did I put my glasses? did I mention branding?

Now that you are armed with all the tools of the Social Media Expert, there’s only a few things left to do. Focus on getting your Klout score up to at least 63, which will probably entail the necessity to tweet at least 343 tweets per day. Now using that new cool app, let everyone on Digg, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Blogster, Blip, Delicious, Zoopa, WeRead, Wasabi, tumblr, flickr, Stumbleupon, Plaxo, Ning, MySpace, Google Buzz, FourSquare, Hubculture, deviant art and Classmates.com, aware that you are entering The Bed Bath and Beyond to purchase a new shower curtain. If you’re really a social media expert, you’ll also take some video of you buying the shower curtain to put up on YouTube and Vimeo.