This was poorly worded. I’m not casting AOL and Yahoo groups as ‘original BBSes’, far from it.

I have a real hard time with johnny-come-latelies attempting to build themselves up as the original experts in ’social media’ by attempting to socialize an artificially limited personal definition of ’social media’. I would go so far as to suggest that anyone relying too heavily on a strictly ’social media’ background without a deeper IT or web background may be a bad bet as a consultant… they just don’t have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience to bring much to a client’s table. YMMV of course.

“Community” and “Social Media” are two circles on a Venn diagram that overlap quite a bit, but not completely. If you’re doing social media in business, you need to have some community skills but you also need other skills too. What I do is not just about community, it’s about business analysis, gap analysis, implementation, adoption, social functionality design. There’s a lot more to it than community, and whilst obviously some community people *also* have social media skills, the two are not like-for-like equivalents.

Of course you can easily ask someone how long their have been blogging, or using web 2.0 tools. Some of them will be stupid enough to say “more than 10 years”.

I do agree with Roxanne however, that BB’s, Forums, Usenets and Newsgroups were/are social media…in this respect: They reduce the “transaction cost” of forming a social group for whatever purpose and they use “media” such as the Web. Granted, most of those tools have been replaced by “2.0″ type tools, such is the evolution of this space. Yet they still were tools that enabled social behavior - this is where “social” comes in social media. Email too is a social media tool.

I would argue that books too are a social media; because printing reduced the transaction cost of social organization and the Christian Reformation happened and off we went into the age of so-called “enlightenment”.

Otherwise I think you’re bang on here! Great stuff and you’re reminding me of some of the client experiences I’ve had and the messes we’ve had to clean up from so-called “experts”.

I think in any sector there will be people looking to jump on the band waggon and once something seems to be getting mainstream will put themselves up as experts. Many of your points could equally apply to any self-confessed expert and would be a good list for anyone checking out a consultant.

I’d like to clarify that I don’t consider bulletin boards, forums, usenet or email to fall under the “social media” umbrella. The terms “social media”, “social tools” and “social software” were all coined to refer to a specific set of software - first blogs, now also wikis, Twitter, social networks, and several Web 2.0 tools.

This doesn’t mean that pre-social media tools weren’t social, but there wasn’t a unifying ethic and culture. It would be wrong to say that there wasn’t a bulletin board sub-culture, but boards varied widely based on who ran them and who used them. And no matter how strong those sub-cultures were, they didn’t migrate across tools. One never hears of an email culture, or a forums culture.

A very clear culture grew up around blogging, a culture that values honesty, transparency, and authenticity, and that has transferred over to other tools such as Twitter. Now, although wikis have been around since ‘94, “social media” is most strongly defined by a culture that wasn’t codified until blogs and Cluetrain in ‘99.

There are other differences too, the main one of which is the fact that there are network effects in social media that did not and do not exist on the older tools. Forums etc. exist on a specific site but social tools exist on and in a wider network, which aids both the dispersal and aggregation of identity and information over many apps and sites.

Forums etc. formed the precursor to social media, in the way that the petrol car was a precursor to the Prius. But whilst they may look pretty much the same, there are some important differences under the hood.

I also think that whilst there have been experts in community for a long time, “community” is not the same as “social media”. There are aspects to a social media business consultant’s work, such as business analysis (i.e. identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems), gap analysis (working out where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there), adoption strategy, etc., that either don’t exist in, or aren’t as an important a part of, community management.

Community management skills are essential to many social media projects, and I’ve seen more than one project that has suffered because community expertise was not present. Community management has evolved alongside social media, but the two terms are not synonymous, and the jobs require different skill sets.

I do want to emphasis that the distinctions I am drawing are not value judgements at all. It’s more a matter of trying to clarify terms, as I see them.

One thing I was going to say in my post was “look at what your expert did before”, and whilst I think it’s important to understand how webby someone is, whether or not they’ve got history with the internet, it’s too easy to get into a “I was on the internet first” pissing match. That’s not the point - the point is how someone has developed their skills over time.

That’s why I won’t ever make a blanket condemnation of people new to the job, in the same way I wouldn’t condemn new train drivers or new nurses. Being new is normal, but it’s how you handle that newness. New train drivers and new nurses don’t get to drive trains or nurse until they are appropriately qualified to do so. In our work, there is no qualification (and any qualifications there are would be out of date before you got them!), but new consultants still need to learn the ropes. That’s all there is to it.

Age is also irrelevant. I’m 37. Some of the people I most respect in the social media space are a lot older than me. Some of them are quite a bit younger. It’s not an age thing at all - it’s a mindset thing.