Jimmy Wales - He Gets It.

You may get a bit nauseous when you see Jimmy Wales described as "the founder of Wikipedia".

You may throw up a bit in your mouth when you see how the author sets Jimmy Wales apart from "all the snake oil salesmen trying to tell you they understand social media".

But, you will positively hurl when you see the iconic image of a radiant lighthouse to illustrate Jimmy Wales' ability to navigate us through the "dark and stormy night of uncertainty".

I realize it's only a blog, and there are millions of blogs, but it does seem a little odd that Jimbo would get such kudos for merely stating the obvious, and that doing so somehow sets him apart from "snake oil salesmen."

I mean, what does this blogger think companies are going to do, spend "millions" to set up Twitter feeds and MySpace pages (not to mention WP articles) to sell things like coal, steel, and crude oil? Putting aside the fact that Twitter, MySpace, and WP don't cost anything (other than labor expenses), it seems fairly self-evident that social networking is only going to be appropriate for a limited range of products and services. If a company doesn't realize that, the reason is just stupid management, not management's "failure to listen" to someone like Jimbo.

Someone being paid to write a Wikipedia article on a coal company? Surely that'll never happen!

Never happened on my watch. Arch Coal was written for free, out of love.

Actually, even if it hadn't been, Arch Coal would have had precisely the right idea in that case. Writing a Wikipedia article, and perhaps even trying to maintain it, would be an ideal job for a contract employee, one with knowledge of how Wikipedia "works," i.e., how its users often do their best to screw with facts, references, links, and information in general. Hiring a full-time "social media expert," which is what the aforementioned blogger seems to be talking about, actually would be a serious waste of money and resources for a coal company.

As for business types that would benefit from having full-time social media experts, I'd say the obvious ones would be entertainment/publishing, colleges/universities, online retailers, outsourcing firms, telecommunications companies (esp. ISP's), and of course "online venture"-type companies like Wikia that appear to have no real coherent business plan. Some consumer-products manufacturers and financial services companies too, I suppose... Hardly an insubstantial list, but not all-inclusive. I'm not pretending to be an expert on this, though!