The technical factor I find fascinating. I love to dabble in this sector; however, I am always surprised how inept most of these fools are. I feel that the technical side of things NEEDS to be a foundations for all of them.

Brilliant one Alex,

I’m a journalist in Malaysia who’s been writing on technology for 16 years and the scope term “social networking” as popularised by these social media “gurus” gives me the creeps.

I was social networking face-to-face at a party at a friend’s place Thursday night. I was a bit late to catch social networking on newsgroups but was an avid social networker on e-mail lists, including as a member of several eGroups (now called Yahoo! Groups) back in the 1990s.

OK! Today, I’m on social networks such as Twitter, Nokia Ovi, Qik.com and MySpace (forgot the password) but stay clear of Facebook, and BTW. I totally ignore any attempts by advertisers to get at me online.

So what’s so “new” about social networking, which we’ve been doing since time immemorial, or for that matter, social media which has been around since the newsgroup days.

So what’s new

Another trendy term which gets on my nerves is “tethering” when used in relation to cellular phones.

Oh yeah! I tethered my horse to the post. I tethered my boat to the mooring. I tethered my dog with a chain.

What’s wrong with “connect”? “Connect” implies communication while “tether” implies restraint.

A computer tethered to a phone is indeed “restrained” to that phone. It can only use the internet if it is connected or in bluetooth range of the phone.

Exactly, the biggest problem with these buggers is the irrelevant and general gyan they talk about and regardless of the the fact that they are pouring out generic gyan they still think that they are adding value.
Engaging people is just wasting your time and efforts if you cant fulfill the ultimate goal of being profitable.

lol bc I agree with you @whizkids

Still, what’s the difference between being “tethered” or the older term “connected”? A printer works when it’s connected to a PC or to the network either by cable, WiFi or Bluetooth.

I’ve been using the term “connected” since I connected the toaster to the mains, the single line telephone to the wall socket, the Dataproducts line printer to the minicomputer, the Ampex 940 hard disk to the minicomputer, the Racal modem to the RS 232 port, the ribbon cable from the memory disk drive controller board to the CPU board.

It gets on my nerves now when some latter day tech user or geek, corrects me by telling me that the “correct” term is “tether.” No. “Tether” isn’t wrong but it’s not the only term. Others are “attach,” “link,” “hook up,” etc.

It’s how people get caught up with the terms, rather than their meaning.

Like I would say, “the ISP restricted the allowed bandwidth for a VoIP traffic,” and someone tells me no, the term is “shaped the bandwidth,” when they both mean the same thing.

Anyway, I’ve always believed that nothing beats face-to-face communication and online communication is good substitute but never a replacement.

Ditto with distance education, whether the gee whiz, technology-mediated for of today or the snail-mail mediated form of yesterday but still, they can’t beat actual class attendance at college or university, where it’s the whole experience which is valuable in later life.

Agreed that many governments, such as those in Canada now rely on technology-mediated distance learning to provide education, especially to small, far flung, isolated communities in territories like Nunavut to cut costs over having a flesh and blood teacher fly in but does it replace an actual teacher? I don;t think so.

Maybe I’m “old fashioned”

Glad you said it & posted it

#6. If you take these 5 examples as indicative of the social media “industry” as a whole, then you need to ask yourself how effective a business owner you are. Idiocy works both ways ;-)

What’s interesting to me is the degree to which social media “experts” and “pushers” have take words that used to have specific meaning, and stolen them and used them so they no longer have any meaning. Transparency has a specific meaning prior to social media, but its used with reference to social media usually makes no sense if you think about it. SM doesn’t increase it. Social learning is another, which was a psych. term (Bandura).

But let’s face it. If you have no steak to sell, you’d better dress up the sizzle real good and confuse people. That’s another peeve. In my attempts to dialogue with SM fanatics, I find they cannot support their claims, and will provide “data” which is either completely irrelevant, or completely misunderstood by them. There’s good stuff on SM, and it does nobody a favor to create false hopes and expectations except for the consultants and experts that get hired.

Best quote in the article, “Engaging people is useless without anchoring it to a brand and a business goal.”

Too many “Social Media Gurus” just don’t get it. They get social media, no argument there. But that’s where the honeymoon ends. The first problem is applying social media to business, without understanding business. Second, without a background in technology and how businesses use it and need it to grow, opportunities will be missed.

Thank you for your insight Alex. You nailed it!

You have to listen first, dig down and truly understand the business goals in order to properly apply technology and interactive platforms to achieve business goals.

Couple of things…

#1: I take offence to calling the self-proclaimed Social Media Gurus pony, rainbow and unicorn practitioners, but that is only because as a Professional Tarot reader I actually deal in ponies, rainbows and unicorns.

#2: I agree with @Danny Brown. The SMM Gurus of whom you speak are not EVERY SMM Guru, for sure.

#3: Let’s not ignore nor forget the underlying fact that these new-fangled Social Media Gurus you actually speak of are not in the business of marketing, but rather in the business of convincing we entrepreneurs with money to burn, that we need them. And that’s easy to do because we don’t know how to make a Facebook landing page or build a Twitter following, both of which the media tells us we need if we want to stay in business. Can you say sucker’s gambit? I agree, for the most part I’m seeing smoke and mirrors and some of it is just BAD smoke and mirrors. Regardless of how you slice it, though, they are simply trying to hitch their wagon to a star so they can pick up the coins that fall out of their clients’ overflowing money bags.

I have a friend whose business was almost destroyed because she went above and beyond trusting of the SMM Guru she hired! This isn’t the holy grail we’re talking here, and I honestly doubt that SMM in the long run is going to do anything other than simply ADD something to the real-time, real life marketing efforts of any company.

So, #7 should be added too, it’s YOUR company, make sure that you’re paying your SMM Guru to do what it is you think he should be doing; making you money. If you’re bottom line isn’t going up, point fingers at the guy who should be elephant toe-jamb and yes, stomp the sucker.

Btw, for the record… I highly doubt that most self-styled media gurus have even taken a marketing class.

Love your work, Alex. Glad to have you working with my team.

Have you seen http://www.socialmediadouchebag.net? Something tells me you’d appreciate the parody. :)

Not to mention the uncountable cognitive biases in their universal recommendations. How easy it is for them to look, cursorily from publicly available stories, at successful brands and tell the rest of the world how it is done!
-rags

“I get that these professional services are expensive and you can’t afford them. That’s because you don’t understand business and can’t charge for what you do.”

Love this line.

Your polemic reminds me of a speech by the late, great Bill Hicks on marketing professionals.

PERFECT! We’re going to break $40 million this year and I don’t have time for elephant-bait.
If they say anything remotely resembling marketing pablum, we’re done. I have got too much on my plate and far too much intelligence (humbly…) to let someone with no brick-and-mortar experience or common sense to feed me crap like that.
You have done well with this post and this former journalist applauds you!
Bravo!
Chris Moline, LEED AP
Washington DC

WOW! Where do I begin?

First, where have you been all my professional life? You’re thinking is almost in line with my thinking – at this point this could become awkward and strange, so I’ll move on.

You are spot on with your post! I’ve met some of these self-appointed Social Media ayatollah elites and to put it nicely, I am not impressed at the least. Thus lining them up for the elephants sounds like a very good idea…:)

In the real world, “engagement” does not put food on the table – Sales makes the business engine run. And in the end these pony, rainbow and unicorn SM experts really are trying to sell you something – and sometimes something you do not need. Building solid relationships with your customers will keep you in business for a very long time.

The Social Media bubble will burst, because, just like the tech bubble, there is nothing there of substance – no real business foundation; a lot of empty air. Only the super elite of the SM imams make money – the vast majority of independent so-called SM experts bring nothing of value and make nothing of value.

When the SM bubble does finally implode, only the established and structured legitimate professionals and businesses will be there to figure out what happened. I’m not trashing all SM or a real structured and strategic campaign to build a brand via SM. But these SM twits are definitely punch drunk.

I applaud your assessment and insight! I look forward to hearing more of what you have in mind.

Cheers!

You are correct that this profession “social media guru” or adviser (or agent) has not yet been completely invented. It’s a prototype. And it doesn’t work.

I went into some depth about why “social media” advertising campaigns don’t “work” to produce a bottom line of sales on this blog:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

Many people today have lost the distinction between opinion and fact — and really believe that an opinion is the same as a fact. And so they are vulnerable to the social network guru’s pitch — “I can get your product out there!” or “Make $1,000/day online, working part time.” I’ve tried to explain in my blog post why it’s not working, so social networking marketers can invent this totally new profession and get it to work.

I zinged this link over to a couple buds and they cracked… up, that is.
Cool post.
I think I’m going to put an elephant somewhere in my office.