This article was originally written in December 2009 for Plugged In Lawyer, a blog about social media for lawyers.
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Blogger B.L. Ochman has been using Tweepsearch to follow the proliferation of social media gurus on Twitter. She found 4,487 of them in May 2009. Seven months later, she found almost 16,000, leading her to write Self-Proclaimed Social Media Gurus On Twitter Multiplying Like Rabbits.
Other bloggers are having fun with her numbers, including one that projected Twitter To Be Nearly Entirely Composed Of Social Media Experts By 2013.
This video also does an amusing job of portraying social media gurus as snakeoil salesmen.
Lawyers would be fools to ignore social media for growing their digital footprint and ultimately their practices, so what is a smart lawyer who needs a little guidance to do? Turning to free sources without a sales agenda like Plugged In Lawyer is an excellent start. 
If you need more than do-it-yourself resources, Ochman recommends looking for the following characteristics in a social media consultant:
- Somebody who brings solid social media experience to the table
- Somebody who sells solutions, not formulas
- Somebody who doesn’t promise that social media will provide a quick fix for your bottom line
Still stymied? Email me at pluggedinlawyer @ gmail.com. I am an avid follower of the social media space (with a special eye toward how it impacts lawyers) and I can make suggestions regarding paid consultants.
