Experts-of-the-Moment

 By I.J. Hudson

Social Media experts are always facing a moving target in a few areas of their expertise.  Historians get a break by looking backward and trying to fill in blanks.  But in terms of technology, forward looking means trying to beat a ticking (analog) clock. You’re right, but something changes a week later and you’re wrong.

Take Facebook.  Do a search to figure out how to do a business page.  You’ll read about the differences between profiles and pages, then read advice from another expert who confuses the two.  You’ll find all kinds of advice by really smart people, but that great advice is undermined by comments that say Facebook’s policies have changed and the expert advice no longer applies.

I’m not trying to be critical, but I do suggest that we are moving in the direction of “change before publishing.”  Heck, it could be change before “hitting enter.”  I suggest that almost anything we write about “how to” may become outdated way quicker than we expected, and obviously that happens beyond our control.

Okay, how to sharpen a knife hasn’t changed much; neither has “speeding up your computer.”  When you go searching for solutions, the articles seem to hold up.

In the case of Facebook, I found comments that totally contradicted what the authors were saying – that Facebook policy toward “whatever” had changed in the last couple of weeks.  Let’s see, creating a business “page” is different from a personal profile, and you need to lie to Facebook about having a personal profile to protect that profile and be able to change it when the client leaves for someone else.  

It seems the way some of the major players  change the rules make experts look like, well, experts-of-the-moment.  What you wrote was useful - when you wrote it.   A week later, it was really out of date but still available online when I went looking for information. 

Perhaps that’s a great reason for twitter and links to the very latest thinking and strategies.  That why I follow people like @shashib and a few others.  If we don’t use advanced search properly we get wrong information from people who knew what they were talking about – when they wrote it.   Is coffee good or bad for you?  The answer is yes!

I sometimes wonder about conferences.  By the time the much-publicized conference rolls around, the major speakers have revised their remarks seven times and still may not be current.  How long does “current thinking” last?  People “tweeting” along may offer contradictory information they read just last night from another expert.

What do I know?   Only a little.  I’m the guy who keeps saying about Twitter, “it’s not the number of characters, but the character of the words.”  Just a few well-chosen words can lead to some great information.  Sometimes a lot of words if they aren’t really, really fresh and they leave room for a lot of guessing,  lead to frustration and disappointment.

So what do we need?  I think we need to be diligent in figuring out how to be sure we’re looking at “useful” information, whether written by an expert, or a guy like me.  And I think we need real some hand-holding articles that answer basic questions people have.  Not the questions that the gurus think beginners want answered.  I mean questions that not only take you step by step, but discuss each step.  What happens if I choose this?  What do I really have to know or have answers to BEFORE I start.  What traps await me if I fill out the form this way or that?  Many of us don't know what we don't know, and really need a patient guide.

Finally, we need the experts to revisit their suggestions to be sure what they said last month still holds true.  Social Media is about "is" -- not "was."