I recently saw a television commercial for a “new service” being promoted for small business owners … Social media advice from an online marketing company that will not only build your small business website and drive local leads to you through it, but they will also build your social media profiles on all the top networks!

Sign me up.

After a little closer look, we discovered what was beneath the covers. From our perspective, it was pretty obvious that the social media advice this company was looking to offer was to offer their service to as many “one-and-done” customers as they could in a short period of time and then either disappear all together or resurface under a different identity at some point in the future.

What they do provide is this: They will in fact create a presence and a profile for you on social networking sites and then spend some more of your money to create advertising on those sites to drive followers. Sounds good on the surface but there are some pretty fundamental flaws in their service.

Your growing social media presence didn’t start out with your business goals in mind. That’s a problem. doesn’t include any conversation. That’s a problem. No research was done to determine who your social media competition is or who your influencers are. That’s a problem. You aren’t sure if your new social networking profiles are on the same social networking sites your audience is on. That’s a problem. There is nothing in place to help you determine what content to post and when to post it on which social network. That’s a problem. Certainly there is nothing said for determining how things are going from an ROI perspective.

And all this for one low rate of $995, one time payment.

We did a little research on this and discovered that the time involved in just creating profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ combined took less than 90 minutes. This equates to just under $500 an hour simple to create profiles that don’t do anything for your business.