Thread

Greetings,

A client of mine with a small site that is up and running in EE has brought in a “social networking consultant”—the consultant said that if the website is in wordpress, it would make his work much easier, and the client’s easier in the future.

I see there are a handful of plugins at devotee for facebook integration, etc. But I haven’t got experience dealing with this before, and so I’m wondering if anyone has any comments re: a good response to this, or anything else that would be helpful for me to know in this regard.

Thanks in advance!

Tough to answer without some specifics around what the goals are.

Social Networking Consultant?  Seriously?

Sounds like the latest version of the SEO Consultant which is just a newer version of the Snake Oil Salesman.

EE’s pretty easy to sync up with Twitter (Levi has a great extension for that).  I’ve not tried any of the Facebook solutions yet because our site is now using Disqus for comments and Facebook support is built in.

My suspicion is that this consultant has never used EE and doesn’t have any experience with it.  He’s likely wishing it was a Wordpress site because that’s probably all he has any experience with.  Of course you’ll have an easier time with something you already have experience with but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the system you don’t have experience with.

In other words it sounds like an excuse on the consultant’s end.

Jamie

Social Networking Consultant?  Seriously?

Sounds like the latest version of the SEO Consultant which is just a newer version of the Snake Oil Salesman.

That’s what I was thinking. It’s funny: the website I built satisfies all the goals we had for it (search engine ranking, increased traffic, increased customers, etc.), and he’s always told me he’s very happy with the results, but this client is not so web-savvy, and I think he’s susceptible to people planting ideas. For example, I think he doesn’t know much about social media or what he would do with it, but he seems to have heard that it’s important, so in comes a consultant.

Before bringing in the “social networking consultant,” he brought in an SEO consultant(!) who has suggested a redesign that in my opinion will really degrade the site in terms of SEO, usability and the goals previously set. It hurts to take a well-functioning site and turn it into something that will probably work less well—but at least I’m hired to do the redesign.

...he brought in an SEO consultant(!) who has suggested a redesign that in my opinion will really degrade the site in terms of SEO, usability and the goals previously set.

If I had a dollar for each time I’ve heard that one 😊

It sounds as if you need to educate your client about the pitfalls on dealing with snake oil salesmen like this?

It sounds as if you need to educate your client about the pitfalls on dealing with snake oil salesmen like this?

I’ve sent him a detailed report on why I think most of the alterations this consultant wants seem like a bad idea to me, but he wants to try it out anyway. Plus, I got the idea this consultant doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

The strange thing is that I’ve gotten excellent results for the client that he has been very happy with. But even with proven results, rather than coming back to me to see if I can improve some area of the site, he brings in a consultant who is (mis)guiding a redesign. He’s the boss, so whatever. But at least if things don’t go well with the site, I have documentation to show that I discouraged it.

I had this exact same problem with a client who is thankfully no longer a client anymore. They had some ‘advice’ from a friend saying how to go about doing things on the site and I warned them that if they followed their advice it would have a very adverse affect on their conversion rates.

I explained everything very thoroughly to them as to the rights and wrongs of what the ‘SEO expert’ was telling them and even sent them lots of information online so that they could see that what I was saying wasn’t just made up.

Long story short they didn’t listen to me, ended up getting the whole site re-designed in ASP and now their site is missing half the features that I had put into it. Seems that clients always listen to everything they’re told but never believe the person who originally created their site which was working fine.

Sounds to me like you need to bring in a second 3rd party 😉 to tell them what they should do and get them to tell your client that your way is the right way.

I’ve vowed to myself though that even if this client came back on bended knee to me that I will never go near their site again. Just can’t be doing with the headaches. They still owe us money for hosting that they haven’t paid and it looks like we may well have to take them to small claims to get that back. Something which I really hate to have to do but we need the money to be able to survive so looks like it’s going that way :-(

Good luck on this and I hope the client has a brain and listens to you in the long run. I’m totally feeling you on this one.

Best wishes,

Mark

I would just stick to my role, do my work and keep my mouth shut.  I don’t get hired for SEO, Social Media and all that stuff.  I know some things about those areas, but in something that’s not so black and white as programming, who is to say that I really know any better than the snake oil salesman?

If I’m doing the design then I don’t care what CMS the site is in even though I prefer EE.  If I’m implementing the design in EE but the client wants to move to Wordpress then I bow out. 

Pretty simple. Maybe you are taking these issues personal?

If the client is already in EE2, it’s honest to present that any time and resources invested in the “social media expert” should focus on the social media content development - fresh, consistently delivered and timely in response. We have seen social media experts who started as PR experts for book authors and expanded their scope to include social media book promotion from that point of view.  For the CMS part - EE future-proofs their site for quality long term development.  Chris

It sounds as if you need to educate your client about the pitfalls on dealing with snake oil salesmen like this?

I’ve sent him a detailed report on why I think most of the alterations this consultant wants seem like a bad idea to me, but he wants to try it out anyway. Plus, I got the idea this consultant doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

The strange thing is that I’ve gotten excellent results for the client that he has been very happy with. But even with proven results, rather than coming back to me to see if I can improve some area of the site, he brings in a consultant who is (mis)guiding a redesign. He’s the boss, so whatever. But at least if things don’t go well with the site, I have documentation to show that I discouraged it.

I thought you might have sent your thoughts to the client, always a smart move 😊

You’re not alone as this sort of thing happens to all of at at some point, we all put in a lot of effort building sites and getting good results for our clients. I’ve had clients hire “SEO specialists” who butcher their sites to bits and completely screw up otherwise good content (things like keyword stuffing, huge blocks of content in H1’s, stripping out DOCTYPE’s, hidden text and the rest…).

If they come back to you asking to fix things I’d put another 50% on your hourly rate 😉

The thing that really gets me about this sort of thing is when the so called SEO genius says that SEO can’t be done in such and such a system. As we all know you can pretty much do anything in most systems and ExpressionEngine is absolutely easy to add these kinds of things in.

It really annoys me when they (the SEO wizards) say that you can’t add in meta data and what not in ExpressionEngine.

They should all be sacked if you ask me.

Best wishes,

Mark

The thing that really gets me about this sort of thing is when the so called SEO genius says that SEO can’t be done in such and such a system. As we all know you can pretty much do anything in most systems and ExpressionEngine is absolutely easy to add these kinds of things in.

Hmmm. I’m thinking that to be an SEO consultant for WordPress means this: ‘I charge a client money to install an SEO plugin. Then, every week I check the plugin and charge the client a monthly fee for what it does.’

Great work if you can find it.

It really annoys me when they (the SEO wizards) say that you can’t add in meta data and what not in ExpressionEngine.

They should all be sacked if you ask me.

What he said. They’re snake oil salesmen.

Don’t fire them yet. Give them 10 keywords and tell them you want the site to show up as #1 in Google search results for each of those keywords. If they can’t do that, then fire them.

Don’t fire them yet. Give them 10 keywords and tell them you want the site to show up as #1 in Google search results for each of those keywords. If they can’t do that, then fire them.

The problem with this is that a lot of them can get you to number 1 in Google using very naughty techniques but get them to keep you at #1 for at least 6 months and without you being blacklisted and I myself will pay them every penny I own 😊

Best wishes,

Mark