When it comes to hiring a social media consultant for most businesses, it is a kind of hit and miss situation as to whether or not they are actually qualified enough to do so.

The truth of the matter is,many fail to understand the true meaning behind social media and have no idea what the potential damage is that they may be creating.

Far to often, over zealous marketers will simply place blogs, articles, advertisements and social media anywhere they can on the Internet just to get a companies "brand" out there. They sometimes do this with total disregard for how they are going about it. This can and does have adverse effects on your brand.

Many social media experts have little knowledge or understanding of group dynamics, leadership, social issues, and public relations; the basis for dealing with people in an environment such as this. In my opinion,this is something that needs to change quick.

Let me explain.

I once was searching for a photo of a missing child and was horrified by the advertisement that was located below the picture that I found. It was a picture of a child who was missing and presumably dead. Below the photo of this missing child was an advertisement that said, "Do you want to date single men in your area?"

I ask, how is this an appropriate advertisement on a child's website,let alone a missing one?" It simply is not. It is just in extremely poor taste. It makes the dating site brand look uncaring and portrays the social media expert as incompetent.

It is becoming a real issue in the world of social media today because we are opening a global marketplace with a variety of different people with a wide spectrum of political, religious and moral views.

Website owners and marketers who do not care what is behind the advertisement's message and only seem to be concerned with the financial aspects of the it are in my opinion, making a mockery of the very essence of what social media stands for. It is supposed to bring the world together in a socially responsible atmosphere. How will this happen if we continue down this path of offending people?

Would you be surprised to know that the website was Facebook? Does Facebook not verify its own advertising? Do they not know what they are doing? Do they simply leave it up to the individual advertisers and have no control over what is being advertised? When will they get control and begin to accept social responsibility for what is being placed on their site?

Many social media experts fail to understand the social responsibility behind the job that they are doing. If the experts like Facebook can not manage to do this, how can we experts others to? It is a scary reality, to say the least.

We put the power back into the hands of the individual to make sure that companies would be held accountable for their actions, products and services. We need to start to hold the social media marketing platforms accountable for theirs.

We need to re-educate people to understand that it is not always about what you say, it is how and where you say it, that truly matters.

Just because someone can post status messages and create fancy videos does not mean they understand the back bone of social media, this is a widespread misconception. In fact,many of them have no experience in anything else related to social media. Not very adequate for paying such a high price for the services offered in my opinion.

Make sure your social media manager has a good grasp of the concepts of how to deal with different cultures and groups of people and that they are socially responsible in their approach to social media. They should possess a degree similar to marketing, social services or community recreation at minimum with some online social media training. They should also have considerable knowledge of SEO, blogging and article submission.

You do not want your company to end up advertising on a site that deals with controversial issues that you do not want to be a part of.

Social media is your companies voice. It is a huge and powerful voice, do not send the wrong message!

Author's Bio: 

My name is Madeline Foster and I am co-owner of a social media company located in Montreal and Missouri. It is called http://www.seo-socialmedia.net/ and has several charitable media divisions; including sociallyresponsible.info

Our company focuses mainly on providing social media to charitable organizations and small business. Our integrity and yours is the most important part of how we approach our social media.

A degree in Community Recreation coupled with over twenty years experience in working for non profit agencies such as Boys and Girls Clubs, Sun Youth Organization, Dawson Community Center and several others has provided me with considerable expertise related to this particular topic.

Working as a social media manager for the past few years, I had often felt that something was missing both from my personal and professional life. I did not like the direction that social media was headed in and I decided to create a movement for that change, socially responsible social media is the result of those efforts.