'Doing social media' isn't necessarily bullshit. For example, it could be useful for a large company to know what's being said about them on Twitter -- maybe even to respond -- and it's not necessarily clear whose job that would be... except for the person who does social media?
So the same kind of thing one could do with an irc bot in your dev chat room that monitors social media for mentions of your name? That would actually be useful if you didn't know how to do the above I think.
I have karma to burn so mod me down as much as you please, but for the record this was not intended as a sarcastic comment either, I was trying to see exactly what this "monitoring of social media" actually implies beyond my stated example.
What you described is essentially grep. Hiring someone to give you an executive summary of your image on the internet is different.
Honestly, I don't know if this is really the most important function of a social media consultant. They are really a domain expert. Like any consultant, their job is as not just to perform tasks in the domain, but to offer expertise and help make decisions as well. Knowledge of effectively using Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc can be leveraged for shareholder value. This could be marketing campaigns, coupons, contests, tech support, retweeting when relevent or almost any other use of social media.
Now, not every company needs this. But for big companies with large support and customer relations staffs, it's not unreasonable that a few social media experts can save enough money to make it worth their while.
