Twitter gurus

This is likely to be topical, and spawned from various debates that have gone on lately on twitter among the rather excellent Irish twitter community regarding twitter “experts”, or “social media” experts. Now before I go on, I must say I’ve offered myself up as such. Not selling myself a social media or twitter expert, but using social media as a way to extend SEO (search engine optimisation) for companies or services that I’ve talked to. So no, I haven’t told people to get onto twitter to sell their products. Nor will I ever do that.

So what are these experts? Well, these are people who host seminars and power lunches with business people, usually small-medium businesses, to help them get brand awareness out there through the power of twitter. You can make business people stare in wonderment as you show your twitter timeline flash by with tweets from lots of localised users. Even ask them to say something to the business people, and as the replies pop in the business people will smile with glee as they begin to believe in the power and potential of twitter.

So, where does all of this fall to pieces? Well, first, I don’t follow businesses necessarily. I follow personalities, and while undoubtedly the CEO or someone important is running the twitter account for a company, they’re usually going to fall into the spectrum of posting endless links and not really engaging the community. Only a few businesses actually engage properly – only occasionally popping in a link or something directly related to their business. A lot of their presence is to discuss their services in a grand sense and build a community around their ability to help users with their brand. @blacknight and @komplettie are perfect examples of this idea. They interact with the community organically, not pushing their brands or products. Blacknight often host twitter/facebook-only competitions, which is always nice!

So what happens with all these business guys after discussing twitter with gurus? Well, I don’t know. I’ve never actually had a twitter conversation with someone who said they came from these seminars to start their web presence. Never. Not once, and I follow a lot of people based in Ireland. So where are they? Do they join twitter, follow Britney and other celebrities and get lost? Or do they join under their brand name and forget to interact with anyone in the community, expecting their brand to be strong enough to get hundreds of followers automatically? It doesn’t work that way. It should be organic, and should take time.

The other problem, in my mind, is that there’s a huge number of these gurus out there. Why? Why are you a guru and I’m not? Why am I not making money from my “knowledge” of twitter? It feels like a used car salesman job, or at least looks like it from the outside. Most twitter users are experts. There’s not much to it, in fairness. Your personality will sell your account for you, but if you consistently check your follow-count and use services to get 1000 followers in one-click, you’ll never build a meaningful community around you. So these gurus of twitter go out there to try and educate people in a structured manner, meaning they’re experts.

Let me tell any budding businessmen out there looking to use twitter what’s involved: 1. Join, 2. Interract, 3. Follow people back, 4. Continue interacting, 5. Interject a link to your business blog or site OCCASIONALLY, not daily, 6. Don’t go away, or ignore users, even when they attack you. A good example of number 6 is the times people have criticised @connector_ie. Conor, who runs the show there, has always directly addressed people – including myself. In a positive manner. Rather then run off and ignore any negative comments, he can turn them into positives by addressing any issues raised by the community. Using the community as an active beta test for your product should be seen as a huge win, not a massive negative point. It doesn’t take media guru marketing degree’s to know this.

@mcawilliams has taken the piss out of twitter gurus by hosting his own twitter seminars – on twitter. Advocating such idea’s as having your own mother on the service too, etc. While he is just taking the piss, the point is simple – a guru for a service who’s whole point is to be a simple interraction between community members is not a pro-active or positive re-enforcement of online communities or web2.0. Most of these gurus fester around twitter because it’s so easy, so active and is the current buzz word for web2.0 and 3.0 opportunities.

One of the things never addressed by these gurus is that your audience might never be on twitter. Maybe the age group you’re looking for don’t want to hear your bull on twitter. Maybe you should be using friendfeed, wordpress blogs, digg, linkedIn, facebook, myspace (ha!), qik, youtube or any other socially-aware web service. Maybe these social media gurus who have 5000 followers, 4,500 of which are spam bots, should stop calling themselves as such and just call themselves cash-cows after some all elusive milk from the twitter big bang period. Where will they go when twitter slows down? Hell, can they even project where twitter will be in 6 months? No one can accurately, but you can make a very educated guess based on past experience in social media. I would hedge my bets that most gurus can’t make such a guess – because they’ve never been involved with a community like this before.

I’ll end this by saying I’m not against gurus, ironically. There’s a place for everyone out there. My problem is that the vast majority of them are illegitimate swines out to grab some cash while businesses are lost and twitter is a huge buzzword.

I’m also available for hire.