by Travis Scott | June 24th, 2009

This afternoon at Starbucks, I had a great meeting with Jennifer McLeland .  Jennifer is an Independent Marketing Consultant at The McLeland Group (a CreativeXchange Partner), whose primary focus is PR consulting.

She asked me a great question today and one that I hope every one of my clients or potential clients will ask when we are going

Illustration by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig (HikingArtist.com on Flickr)

over their needs analysis:  With so many people claiming to do social media marketing consulting, how do you set yourself apart?

That was a great question and one that will likely stump many so-called social media “consultants.”  Because they have 3,000 Twitter followers  and super poke their friends all day in Facebook, they suddenly think it makes them an expert.

My answer to Jennifer was this:  As for my experience, I have a solid conceptual background and education in marketing having received my MBA specifically in marketing in 2006.  Add to that, real-world marketing experience with three different companies in three different verticals, one being a company with a presence in social media – Jobster, a social network for job seekers.

I know, I could hang my hat on an MBA all day long, but I don’t.  To me, having an MBA just shows that I have the desire to work hard, am highly organized (I had to be in order to go to school full-time, work 40 hours a week and run an internet business) and that I have an insatiable love of learning.  All of which has and will not change.

The real differentiation comes in how I approach my consulting.  I focus, first and foremost, on strategy. There are hundreds of social media channels out there right now, but not all of them are the right fit for every client.  Just because Twitter is popular doesn’t mean it will work for everyone.

It boils down to a few key questions:

• Who is your target market?
• How are you engaging and attracting this market to your products or services now?
• How is that working for you?
• What are your expectations for using social media to promote your business?
• What do you expect people to do once they get to your website?

Secondly, my goal is to put myself out of work with my clients.  Yep. You heard me right.  I’m trying to put myself out of business when I work with each client.  Why do I do this?

Well, let me clarify one thing before I answer that.  I’m not really putting myself out of business, nor do I completely go away. What I mean by this statement is that I hope to have set my clients up and trained them so well on how to use social media effectively and efficiently that they no longer need me to show them how to do it on a daily basis.

Sure, I stick around, but only from a pure consultative and numbers-crunching perspective.  Once I set my clients free, I continue to monitor their communications and pour over their website analytics and other analytics to measure the ongoing effectiveness of the strategies we have put into place.  Building a social network takes time, especially if you are strategic in how you develop and cultivate it.  My clients simply don’t have the time to, one keep up on the ever-changing world of social media and two crunch the numbers and examine the trends of what is happening with the traffic on their website.  That’s my job.

Lastly, I don’t focus solely on social media.  Although that is my “specialty,” I also incorporate onsite SEO (if needed), email marketing, website design, online advertising, along with a host of other marketing tools.  Social media alone is not going to be the answer to driving customers to your website.  Its how you incorporate social media into- get ready, here’s that word again- your overall marketing strategy.

So, there you have it.  That’s why I consider myself a social media marketing consultant and that’s how I differentiate myself from everyone else that considers themself a social media marketing consultant.