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The worn out and trite epitome of simple marketing suggests that “People buy from People”, although a quick google for this phrase suggests it may not have a single author to its credit.

Rarely has anyone ever said to me “Google tells me this is an excellent product”, instead recommendations come in the form of ‘I’s and ‘they’s  and often the qualification of a single show or celebrity to add to its endorsement.

So it came to pass that search engine marketing , a now bloated and waddling exercise in flagulation by phrases, has peaked and the overflow of eager and frankly ill informed <QUOTE>consultants</QUOTE> seek a new revenue stream and opportuntiy.

Enter the Social Media Guru, the Social Media Manager and the Social Media Expert. Consultants and salespersons whose core skill sets is to hear the jingle jangle of the bandwagon passing and leap unabashed onto the jockey box to proclaim their skills and expertise in guidance and direction.

They have a distinctive characteristic and it is one you would do well to look closely for lest P.T.Barnum be proved right yet again. The characteristics to be wary of are often at an inverse to your expectations; Lets look at a few classic examples.

Twitterers

On Twitter they appear with profiles exclaiming ‘Social Media Expert or Guru’ and when you look closely you see that despite Twitter's lifespan they have only been using Twitter for the last few months. Quite possibly they have a large amount of people they follow and few following back. Although their conversations tend to be self promotional they find a network of similar thinking “professionals” with whom they self promote and congratulate. Often they link to their own blogs ( see bloggers ) where they repeat many trite and obvious idioms all the while encouraging you to call their number and get their advice.

Facebook

Indeed as with twitter so with they have just arrived ( how long has Facebook been going ? ) and they have friends ( who suspiciously also attended the same ‘how to be a social media schill’ course ) who also post and ‘like’ and share the same articles and tripe that they keep churning in the hope they gain credibility.

Bloggers

Similar to their twitter histories these experts have blogs which go back only months. quite possibly with incomplete "about me" pages or just as possibly with incomplete blogs created as tacked on afterthoughts to their own website, which no doubt has a 20 second Flash Splash page intro, possibly with kittens. Rarely do you see any examples of ‘media’ usage beyond the desire to overpopulate their sidebars with plugin after plugin after plugin.

And thats about it.

You are unlikely to see these ‘Social Media’ experts with posterous accounts running alongside their projects or flickr and instagram accounts highlighting conferences, tweetups and events they have experienced. You wont see them curating and collating content in Youtube or Vimeo and as for podcasts or Audioboos? Suffice to say you might start seeing them from today since they have seen this post but until then it simply has not occured to them to use and promote these tools for themselves or their clients.

Put simply these "bandwagon jumpers"  these gurus, experts and ‘professionals’ are not going to help your business or your projects. They do not know how to take risks. They do not know how to go out and explore the internet and live on the frontiers of change and live as the outriders of  opportunity. They are sharks and buzzards feeding only where the shoals and masses congregate and picking at the flesh of business the chunks they can get away with.

Do not rely on them to take you places where your customers maybe or for them to climb the mountains of competition to view ahead into new pastures for your business.

For more on the humanity of good social media take a listen to the first half of 'Social Media White Noise' Episode #62 Cloud Trouble where Nik Butler rants about the tendency of these experts to use tools over experience to appear professional.

About the author

Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) was on twitter in 2006 and has been blogging since 2004. He makes no claims to being an expert, guru or professional but likes to be known as 'A Digital Roadie'. He has tremendous expertise in getting things done and has the client testimonial page to prove it.

Related blog posts

• Social media science will kill our creativity
• Social media suicide - @LStacey is dead, long live @LStacey
• A Twitter follower is for life, not just for Christmas
• Twitblock - winning the battle against spam on Twitter
• Actually you're probably all wrong
• How to get retweeted

Anyone can write a blog these days.  It's easy.  There are so many different blogging platforms available and the good news is that a lot of them are free.

Find your topic

Before you even think about how or where you're going to blog, it's helpful to know what you're going to blog about.  Will it be a purely personal blog about your day to day thoughts and musings or will it be related to a specific topic?  Will it be a mixture of both?  Will it have multiple topics?  It really doesn't matter which road you go down but it will make life a lot easier if you stick to that path so thinking ahead is fairly important.  If you start a blog about programming computers and you write a post about your love life, chances are that you're going to lose readers whereas a personal blog that features occasional posts about programming is probably OK.

The big difference there is that topical blogs are mostly followed and read by people interested in the topic and personal blogs are read by those interested in the person.  Yes there are exceptions but successful examples are rare.

Set your goals

Even with a personal blog it's good to have goals.  What do you want to get out of your blog?  Are you trying to improve your writing skills?  Maybe you are blogging for a cause or an organisation and want to increase awareness.  Maybe you're looking for feedback on something you are doing.  Setting goals will kelp you keep your blog on track.

Writing for your readers

A lot of blogging "how to" guides tell you to write for your readers.  In some cases this is important.  A professional blogger for instance will probably need to keep the numbers up and growing but that's not actually the case for most.  For personal blogs the numbers don't really matter.  This of course depends on your goals.  For personal blogs it's almost certainly best to write your way and gain readers that like your way of doing it.

Find your platform

This is quite daunting for most people that have never blogged before.  There are almost too many choices but in my opinion you can't go too far wrong with a personal blog by using something simple like Posterous or Wordpress.  I use Posterous for almost everything I post online these days because it's just so easy.  Wordpress is a little more powerful out of the box but can be a little confusing for someone with no previous blogging experience.

Get blogging

Hopefully you've now got a better idea of how to get started.  There's no definitive right or wrong way to go about it, just do what suits you best.  That's all I do and it seems to work for me!

1) Create a blog post about generating traffic by doing very little.

Make your own @ http://www.wordle.net/

So you've got a business, you're on Twitter and you're auto adding people based on keyword searches in the hope that they will follow back.  Some do, some don't.  When they follow back you hit their DM inbox with a link to your product/service and you can tweet all day about your awesome things, right into their stream.  Perfect, right?

It's not often I write a blog about a blog but today I read one of the most amazing stories ever.  The story is of one Bernadette Brice or @Trumpette1 as she is known on Twitter who is a trumpet playing mother and former heroin addict.  Her blog tells the tale of how she got into and out of the drug scene; going in is pretty easy but getting out is something so few people manage.

Posterous is without a doubt the best blogging platform I've ever used and if you're reading this, you're looking at a Posterous blog right now.  Nice, isn't it?

That said, it isn't perfect.  For me it lacks a few features and needs a few tweaks:

1. Import from Wordpress - I like Posterous so much that I want to get all my historic blog entries over here too.
2. Posterous Pro - I don't care what features they add for pro accounts.  I just want to give them my money!
3. Less down time - It may be pure coincedence but the site seems to go down for maintenance quite often.  It would be nice if they could do mantenance without killing my blog each time.
4. Integration with ping services - like weblogs.com & ping-o-matic.
5. Categories/Channels - It would be nice to be able to point a web domain at a specific category or channel within a blog.  Also handy for podcast channels.

The best thing is that I know the developers at Posterous will see this and take note of it.  They're good guys like that.  Their level of support and communication with the members of their community is just another thing that makes the service so good.

How about it guys?