Yesterday, I posted Toby Bloomberg’s explanation of what a social media consultant is and does. I also asked PR-blogger B. L. Ochman for her take, and here’s what she had to say…

I educate companies about the tools that foster conversation and collaboration. In big companies, advertising competes with sales, sales competes with marketing. I show them that really great things cam happen when smart people within their company start talking to each other.

That may sound simplistic, but here’s what just happened with a Fortune 500 company I am working with. I did two days of workshops to bring them up to speed about how other companies use social media.

I showed them what their competitors are doing, and gave them literally a hundred examples of what works and doesn’t for a wide range of companies. My goal was to help them find ways to take advantage of the tools, both internally for better employee productivity, and externally for market outreach and for products.

I invited their head of IT and two other people from divisions within the company to describe how they were looking into or already working with blogs, wikis, etc.

Lo and behold, they found that they were often re-inventing the same quest and they realized that collaborating would help them all.

Now they have created created an in-house online community where everyone in the company can communicate about how social media is being used across the company’s many entities and who is using these tools. The site also contains many useful links to third-party sources who are involved with these technologies. Here’s a quote from their email about their project: “Our goal is to share knowledge and best practices, and learn from others — so that we can all better take advantage of these tools.”

The fact that they took what I taught to heart makes me one very happy social media marketing consultant. :>)

B. L. even blogged about this on her own blog.