Why does this bother me? I subscribe to Brian Clark’s Copyblogger and Follow Chris Brogan , Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk and other truly talented people who have implemented social media and developed enviable communities around their blogs (blogs packed with need to know, interesting information for people like me want to learn more about… well, everything, but especially marketing, social media and blogging) If there was a certification course, I should surely have known about it.

Curiosity peeked, I immediately googled “social media certification”, huh… interesting. It seems there is a variety of web sites where you can plop down 900.00 – 2995.00 to take an online seminar and get a certification.

None of these certification courses seem to be associated with anyone I would think of as an expert in social media. What gives them the authority to certify anyone?

This reminds me of the old days back in 1998, 99? When I received emails daily from “Certified SEO Experts”. (you know the black hat, keyword stuffing, doorway page making creeps who contact web sites that are already ranked high for their keywords) I knew it was spam and deleted accordingly but many web owners did not & fell for it. Turning over money to “experts” who at best did nothing and at worst got them banned from Google. Not to mention giving the SEO industry a bad overall reputation.

I’m not saying everyone with a certification in social media is a bad person. I’m just suggesting you use some due diligence and don’t take the claim at face value. The web is a wonderfully transparent medium that allows you to do a little digging. So I did.

Using WMTIPS to check out the website of the “Certified Social Media Expert” here is what I found:
(i crossed out the domain name as this is not a personal attack, just an example)

• Zero ranking
• 1 Subscriber
• No links, bookmarks, diggs
• Site created December 7, 2009 (explains the 1st 3 items – the site is brand new)
• The site is registered to “Domains by Proxy” (I always find this weird – hiding your identity when trying to promote yourself)
• Googled the experts name: no go
• Checked twitter page …

OK, so there you go. I did the same inquiry with the web site where this “expert” received “certification”. Would you be surprised if I told you the results were similar?