“A consultant is a person in a position to have some influence over an individual, a group, or an organization, but who has no direct power to make changes or implement programs.&#  A manager is someone who has direct responsibility over the action. I’ve been consulting on various things for around 5 years now – anything from SEO, to social media, to customer strategy, to employee engagement strategy (and probably a few other random things as well) and I’ve definitely tried quite a mix of approaches and techniques and some were far less successful than others. MORE >>

In consulting with businesses, I find that those companies looking for social media expertise from an outside consultant are either just beginning to strategically plan their social activities or have been doing so for the last several months and want to do a “reset&# or something different to try to get to the next level.  This is why the professional social media consultant exists: To allow enterprises who lack in-house expertise to utilize the knowledge of outside experts to quickly help get them to the next level with limited risk.  This is my favorite.  MORE >>

But before you can start selling yourself as a social media consultant. Tags: social media Marketing marc meyer social media consultant Below is an email response I gave to someone I did not know who is determined to reinvent themselves and reposition their very talented skills in the social media arena. Dear __, you’re right, most companies don’t understand what it takes to be engaging, and most don’t have the right staff deployed, and some are not sufficiently funded to create engaging content-but they’re getting better. love it. They need to own social. MORE >>

It’s not easy being a social media consultant these days. While some who call themselves “social media consultants” may be engaging in less consulting and more sheer “implementation&# of their client’s Facebook and Twitter accounts without any strategy in hopes of obtaining an endless retainer, I look at what I do as being less about pure marketing and more about management consulting to get an organization up to speed and to help them start thinking strategically about new media. So what does a social media consultant do? MORE >>

My answer was the end of the thought leadership dominance by consultants. What I mean by this is social media — and the conversation about its best practices — has largely been dominated by independent consultants (like me) and individuals within agencies. Increasingly, these individuals are asking tough questions of consultants, and their own experiences are deservedly becoming highlighted as leading examples. As a consultant and author that has helped many companies and organizations successfully adapt, I know how hard the cultural issues can be. MORE >>