Editor's note and update (11/10/2014): This post relates to an association that was dissolved in 2010 and has no affiliation with the International Social Media Association, due to launch in 2015.
Remember this post: Certification and the ISMA debacle?
Well ISMA have decided to shut down. Here's Mari Smith's blog post about it, (which doesn't actually explain anything). Here's a blog post which has the text of the email sent to all ISMA members. I watched part of the Ustream chat where she said, basically, that on the one hand the questions raised by the certification issues discussion (linked in my post above) made her rethink if she was personally on the right path, and on the other hand, that the massive changes made by Facebook had changed a lot of the stuff they had been teaching overnight and they didn't think they could aggregate the changes happening in social media in general fast enough to keep up and providing continuing value to people after they had been certified. I asked her to clarify and she said these were NOT the reasons for shutting down, which were instead to do with her personal ability to maintain her involvement (or something along those lines).
Members can download the existing podcasts and stuff for the next couple of weeks and then they will shut the site down. People who did their certification can, according to her, still call themselves certified, though clearly not sure that will be worth publicizing IMHO...
Note to anyone hiring a social media consultant: in my opinion, no social media certification is worth basing a hiring decision on, because you cannot certify a field that has no [government or other] standards against which to test certification applicants. And social media does not and should not have "standards" because it's a field that changes too fast. No standard-setting body can keep up. If someone says they are "social media certified" that means they probably paid for some training in various social network tactics which may have been valid at the time but are probably irrelevant now. Bottom line: do not be fooled by bogus credentials. Trust references and referrals, or even better, trust Google. Every good social media consultant's body of work is all over the web. That's what you need to be looking for.