Beware the Guru

With so many people jumping on the Twitter and social media bandwagon, you must always be wary of the guru! So many people on social pretend to be gurus or experts, but how do you know you can trust someone? Well in reality you really can’t. I know I hate to be a complete bummer, but sure a lot of people on social media know what they’re doing, and can help you or your company implement a social media plan, and other people can just feed you a bunch on nonsense and then take your money. Let me tell you about what happened at one of the companies I used to work for.

I worked for a non-profit before the one I currently work at, I was working in the development department, and noticed that a lot of people were using twitter and facebook, so with the help of the Communications Manager we convinced the Executive Director that we needed to have presence on social media. We started off slow with a Facebook page and a Twitter account. We would post links about information which mirrored the mission of the organization. Then the Executive Director felt that we needed to bring in an outside consultant to help us manage our Twitter and Facebook profiles. Remember this was about 4 years ago when social media were not as big as it was today, so there were less people out there who really knew what they were talking about. So the organization hired someone who was supposed to help them come up with a social media plan. They paid him a large amount of money, and all he basically did was set us up with a HootSuite account, tell us how to set up search terms on it, then he vanished. He didn’t give us any information which would help us engage our Twitter followers or Facebook fans. So basically the organization paid a guy a lot of money for a lot of nothing.

I’ll always remember this guy because of how he took advantage of an organization who was looking to get into social media to increase engagement. So please let this be a lesson to you all now, beware the guru, because a lot of times they may swindle you out of a lot of money, and you’ll be left with little results to show for it.