Jeremiah Owyang points out that you need to:

“recognize there’s a few different types of social media experts, those have have done it, and those that say they can … anyone who has been using social media tools for personal use could brand themselves as having social media skills and experiences for corporate –yet we know it’s often very different.”

So how do you tell who is the real deal and who is the snake oil salesman? If you’re planning on on adding social media consulting to the services you offer, what experience will you need?

First, it’s important to think about how personal use of social media technologies is different from corporate use of the same technologies.

• Thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook friends on a consultant’s personal accounts doesn’t help your company unless there is significant overlap between those people and your company’s customers.
• Having a Facebook profile is not the same as managing a company’s Facebook page and presence on Facebook.
• Writing a personal blog is very different from corporate blogging where you need to manage groups of contributors, content roadmaps, calendars, and messaging, all while training the employees to communicate in a conversational, yet professional tone.
• Monitoring, metrics, and responding to mentions across the web are part art form, part science, and many people don’t do robust monitoring or measurement of personal accounts.

Here are a few things that companies should look for in a good social media consultant:

• Past experience managing social media programs as an employee of a company or years of consulting experience and a robust portfolio.
• Get the URLs for corporate blogs where they contributed and ask them how they managed the content roadmap process.
• Ask for the names of Twitter accounts they managed, and review the tweets to see if the style is a fit for your company.
• Get an example of a monitoring dashboard they would use with a client and ask them what metrics they would measure to determine success for your company.
• Have them provide URLs for their other social media accounts and community participation.

Companies should run away quickly if:

• Their experience is based entirely on personal use.
• You don’t see past job titles that are relevant to social media.
• Their tweets and blog posts look like they were written by a four year old.

Think very carefully before adding social media consulting to your list of services if your experience doesn’t match these criteria.

What’s the worst example you have seen of a snake oil salesman posing as a social media consultant? What else can companies do to find people with the right experience?

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The problem is a familiar one. Those of us who champion the use of social media tend to be fairly zealous about its use, but trying to transmit that passion to others, especially to key decision makers, can be a trying affair. For instance, I’ve had recent experience with a Managing Director who actually didn’t use a computer, so you can just imagine how easy it was to convince him of the value of having a corporate Twitter account.

Of course, it’s to be expected that senior executives exhibit a degree of technological inertia. Luckily, they all still speak the same basic languages: Return on Investment (ROI), Brand Recognition and Corporate Image. Even if they don’t speak all three (take a small consulting firm, for example, which depends on word of mouth rather than aggressive branding), they will understand one of the above: ROI, which is what I’ll be covering in this post. Social media is a hard area in which to gather solid ROI figures, but it’s not impossible. Plus, it can be very easy to sell on the expenditure side, since most of the time the only cost involved is the labor of the resource tasked with setting up and maintaining your social network accounts. That alone is a convincing argument in a business climate which is shy with its advertising dollars but eager to maintain a public presence.

You can show ROI by gathering info on click-throughs from links posted via Twitter, or on Facebook, on profiles, groups, and pages. I find Twitter especially useful for attracting clicks, since your tagline, not the URL itself, is the seller, thanks to URL truncation. If you can write clever copy, users will click, and they won’t necessarily feel as “marketed” to if they don’t see your corporate address in the URL.

Providing the decision-maker with comparable examples of successful social media program implementations in your space is probably the best, and easiest, way to show verifiable ROI. If you can’t find any examples in your specific field, collect near misses and play up the fact that you’ll be a pioneer in your area. Mashable has a great article on establishing ROI for social media that talks about setting a success metric, and benchmarking competitors will help you do that.

If they’re not sold on the fact that online presence makes good money sense, you might want to sell them on the business card metaphor, which goes as follows: You would never leave a business meeting, lunch, coffee, etc. without exchanging business cards with the other party, would you? Even if it’s a sales call that wasn’t particularly promising, you leave the card, and hope your name comes to mind when they need something down the road.

Imagine the cumulative time your company spends doing work online as a business meeting, and then imagine that, to date, despite all that time spent with prospective clients, you’ve been leaving them with nothing but a hastily scrawled phone number on a bar napkin (your email signature, for the purposes of the metaphor). That wouldn’t fly in the real world, and it shouldn’t be allowed to suffice on the Web, either.

Of course, your boss or client could counter with the fact that you have a web site. Explain that just having a web site is like leaving a business card tacked to a public bulletin board and hoping people will take interest. Social media is the handshake, the lunch meeting, the phone call during which you ask about the family. In other words, social media brings that priceless “people” factor online.

It may seem silly at this point to still have to sell clients on the value of social media, but it only seems that way because we live inside that world every day. Impossible as it may be to believe, there are still some, like that Managing Director I mentioned before, who dictate their emails to their assistants. Talk about someone who needs the perspective of a helpful evangelist!

What strategies do you use for convincing clients of the value of social media?

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Exploratree bills itself as a resource for discovering, sharing, and creating “thinking guides.” A thinking guide is, essentially, an analytical tool you can use as an approach to problem solving. Admittedly, the thinking guides have lots of application in a school setting, but for professional consultants, who are often only as strong as the tool box they bring to bear on a client’s issues, the possibilities are endless.

For basic use, Exploratree requires no sign up, but if you want to save any changes you made or thinking guides you’ve created, you’ll have to set up an account and login. Registering also allows you to share your thinking guides with a group, which could come in handy if you’re working with a project team or collaborating with a partner.

Once you’ve signed, or if you’ve opted not to, you can either create a brand new thinking guide or use one of the built-in templates. The templates are what attracted me in the first place, so that’s where I started. First I loaded up a “Futures wheel” template set up by Futurelabs, the company behind Exploratree. The tool loads in a visual flash editor, so that you can make changes, or follow the steps already established by clicking through at the bottom of the screen.

The templates, as evidenced by the Futures wheel, are not terribly advanced or in-depth, but the customization allows you to add as much detail or specific problem-related information as possible. And even untouched, the tools offer great starting points and information gathering strategies when you’re stuck in terms of your own client solution design process.

Exploratree may offer only basic tools, but sometimes its the basic tools that get the job done, a fact which is easy to forget, especially for those who’ve been in the business a long time. This site provides a lightweight, free, and efficient reminder that the simplest, most elegant solution is often the best.

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What does a potential client want from a consultant? Well, an affordable rate, for one. But an even more basic consideration is “Can this person do the job?” If you happen to be a web developer, it’s easy to answer the question. Just point the client in the direction of previous work. If you’re offering more high level, strategic consulting services, it’s not so simple, since you probably didn’t deliver a publicly viewable product.

That’s where the case study becomes useful. Even if you’re bound by a non-disclosure agreement, you can usually produce a document outlining the basics of your past engagements (still, be sure to always check with your client first). You’ve no doubt seen them before, since every big firm offers them via their website. Lucky for us, since we have a lot of source texts to work from. Let’s look at what makes a good case study.

Format
You basically have two options when it comes to the format of your case study. You can either provide a .PDF or an HTML version, or both, if you’re feeling ambitious.

The .PDF has the advantage of being a very portable, website-independent document that can also stand as an example of your professional publishing and production skills, should that be something your clients are looking for. It’s also easier to protect a .PDF document against unwarranted use by a competitor.

An example of an HTML case study.

An HTML case study has the advantage of being easy to access for clients browsing your website. It’s also easy to change, easy to create, and changes with your website design if you’re using CSS. That said, if the client wants something to print out and show around, the .PDF is going to be much more impressive.

Design
Your cases studies should all share a common look, including font, page layout, bullets, headers, margins, logo placement, etc. Case studies are a part of your personal branding, and should be instantly recognizable.

If you’re presenting them as pages on your website, this is fairly easy to accomplish. When working with a desktop publishing program, such as Quark or InDesign, or word processing software like MS Word, you’ll want to set up a template you’re happy with before doing anything else, and use that as the basis for each case study you prepare.

A .PDF case study, with subheadings.

There are many examples of page layouts for case studies, but there are a couple basic rules you should follow. First, keep it short. It’s meant to be an easy-to-read, quick hit summary of your work. Second, break it up. No one wants looks at a solid field of text and says “I want to read that!”. Subtitles and block quotes can help give readers some breathing room.

Content
Of course, what goes into your case study will depend on what engagements you’re using, and on what services you intend to sell with the document you produce. What doesn’t change, though, is what kind of information you put in, and the kind of prose you use.

Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive overview, and that it is a marketing document, first and foremost. That means you should focus on specific deliverables and results, and ignore extraneous details. It also means you should focus on the positive, and skirt hiccups unless they illustrate challenges that you eventually overcame.

Your case study should also read like a story. It should have a contextual setup, a crisis (the client’s problem), and a resolution (your solution). Readers think in terms of plots, and will be more engaged with your case study if you present them with one.

My own, two-thirds page design with client quote.

Those are the basic elements, but there’s much more you can do to really make your case study pop for a client. You can see an example of one I prepared for a company I used to work for here [links to a .PDF document]. Note the two-thirds page design, with the rightmost third reserved for highlights and client quotes, and the footer on the second page with contact information. The key is to make use of the space so the client gets a sense of value-driven economy from your document.

Case studies are an easy way to sell your services, and they have the added benefit of giving you the opportunity to look back on and analyze the strength of past engagements. For more examples, take a look at any major firm’s website. Here’s Deloitte’s archive to get you started.

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