Jeremiah Owyang is wrong. His July 13 blog post starts with the simple declarative sentence: “Social media doesn’t scale.”

Now I’m going to give Jeremiah a little benefit of the doubt. He is a very smart guy and his blog is a welcome addition to my list of feeds. And, his overall point that CMO’s should develop an advocacy program to lessen the burden of growing a social media program is right on.

However, I do believe that his contention that social media doesn’t scale is incorrect.

Piece of mind is expensive.

If you want to dry out your basement, you could regrade the soil around the house and hope that will take care of the problem. If you want to be certain of success, you might dig up all around the house, put drains at the foundation, waterproof the sides, put drains under the interior floor and install sump pumps.

The path you take will depend on your objective. If you only have a washer and dryer in the basement and want to use them without stepping in puddles, regrading could be worth a try. If you want to install a home theater and expect to spend considerable time there, the low cost way is risky.

With all due deference to the legions of social media experts who have sprouted up across the web, this is a difficult position to define, and not just because it is new. To start with, the technology associated with social media is trivial. Many idiots have managed to create a Facebook page. Any design or differentiation for a social media project is going to come from web designers or developers, not social media specialists.

So what does the social media specialist do? In a word, communicate. If that sounds more like a task more closely related to traditional PR or marketing than technology, it is.

Too much of digital marketing is reactive.

One day the man calls up and says "I’ve been hearing a lot about jizzerat, that new social media blogging real time local video community that’s getting a lot of traction. What are we doing with that?"

You being the out front marketing person you are quickly reply you’ve been tracking the growth closely and as soon as you nail down the ROI metrics for finance, you’ll be rolling it out across all appropriate business units. Hanging up the phone you type in jizzerat.com to see what all the fuss is about. You then make a note to pull the designer off of the email newsletter that goes out to 650,000 subscribers every Tuesday and have her work up a design for your new jizzerat community page.

That all too common scenario is why we bother developing a strategy. Without one we flap around with every change of the breeze, trying this, forgetting that, and wondering why so little progress comes from all of the activity.

An SEO specialist has the detailed knowledge necessary to devise and conduct search engine optimization campaigns. Among the skills required are:

Website Analysis: Review and analyze sites for areas that need to improved, deleted, revamped, etc.; prepare detailed SEO strategy reports.

Keyword Analysis, Research & Copywriting: In-depth knowledge of keyword research. This includes knowing how to identify the least inexpensive, yet most profitable keywords.

SEO Copywriting: This includes the aforementioned keyword research, as well as SEO writing guidelines, eg where to place keywords in copy so that it gets the most SE traffic, how to write effective headlines and how to write effective call-to-action statements. SEO specialists are also responsible for creating (or overseeing the creation of) original SEO content in addition to implementing off-page SEO content strategies such as link building.

Search Engine Guidelines: Keeps abreast of white hat and black hat tactics so as not to run afoul of search engine guidelines.

One of the major benefits of digital marketing is the amount of data that is available to target, design, and analyze campaigns. The web analyst is the person with the skills to make this happen. It’s a demanding position requiring an ability to see both the forest and the trees and determine what campaign plantings or prunings may be necessary.

The analyst’s first job is to decide what needs to be measured to achieve business goals. The process will vary widely depending on the type of business involved. A company selling consumer goods online will have many more things to track and analyze than a firm offering professional services. A services business with long or vague sales processes will present its own challenges in deciding what factors will best measure web marketing effectiveness.

The first tool a web analyst must be able to use is one or more of the web analytics packages such as Omniture, Google Analytics, and Web Trends. They may also have to have advanced database and spreadsheet abilities including supporting technologies such as SQL, JavaScript, and visual basic.