Do small business owners need SMO (social media optimization) marketing consultants?
The digital age has created a number of creative marketing challenges as well as a flood of service providers eager to establish themselves as experts. SMO (Social Media Optimization), ORM (Online Reputation Management), and SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management) are just a few of the “buzz” services you may have heard of lately. Just because someone adopts a trendy acronym doesn’t necessarily mean they are right for your small business. Broken down to its most basic principle, we outsource work to service providers because they have a particular expertise that we do not. We hire an attorney because of their understanding of law, a programmer because their understanding of computer languages, and a Realtor because of their understanding of housing markets. Theoretically, their fees should be proportional to the energy and time it would take to acquire that expertise ourselves. Conversely, most of us don’t outsource the task of driving to work because we understand that the difficul
