Remember back in the days when it seemed like everyone in the world was on their way to becoming a social media guru? Blogs were filled with posts about building your tribe, and it seemed hard to find a Twitter profile that didn’t tout a person’s social media expertise, often in conjunction with their skills in “real estate investing.”
I remember that like it was yesterday. Oh wait, that’s because it was yesterday, and today as well, now that I think about it. But the heyday of the social media gurus may have reached its zenith, because there’s a new, contrary, position gaining momentum. It’s the “who the hell are these people to call themselves experts” movement, and it is spreading all over the web, in well-reasoned posts like this and this.
I place a lot of the blame for the social-media-guru-explosion, and the resulting backlash, on the rising popularity of Twitter. In the old days (something like 18 months ago), the only way to demonstrate your understanding of social media was to do something with it. You had to help companies learn how to use social media to better understand their market or improve customer service. Or you had to create tools that made it easier for people to connect with other like-minded individuals and share information. Or you had to write or teach about the use of social media and its impact on our society.But Twitter added a new, less demanding metric for proving your social media bona fides – followers. So the would-be gurus accumulated followers with a vengeance. What did they tweet about? Mostly about accumulating followers, of course, and how their large number of followers was evidence of their social media knowledge and understanding. Of course, by helping to increase Twitter’s populartity, the new experts also sowed the seeds of their own destruction, because the backlash against them seems to closely parallel Twitter’s recent emergence in mainstream society, and it’s dramatic over exposure in the traditional media.
That’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate social media experts out there. There certainly are. But in general they are the people that are experts in using social media as a means to an end, not as end in itself. Social media is a tool. Sure, it’s a powerful, multifaceted tool, but do you know what else fits that description? A hammer. And I don’t think that there are more than a handful of “hammer experts” in the world. Most people who are great with a hammer make something with it, or they teach others to make things with hammers. They don’t spend a lot of time puffing up their hammer credentials.
The positive thing to take away from all of this? Under the now-crumbling guruocracy, it was sometimes possible to fall into the trap of believing that social media was the sole province of experts and specialists. Now, as the era of widespread social media guruism comes to an end, we can get back to using social media to help achieve real-life goals, whether those goals are finding clients you want to work with, and who want to work with you; raising money for a good cause; or just finding people with similar interests. And we can feel confident that these tools are legimate parts of a well-rounded marketing or business plan, and not things things that only work if they are flogged with a single-minded intensity.
Twitter Updates
Amen! I am glad that you wrote this post. One of the most relevant take away points? End of the guru era and beginning of the time to roll up one’s sleeves and put this tool to work. At the end of the day, this is just one tool that will hopefully, yield others with even greater utility.
Thanks for this. Content is what we really need. Although experts serve a certain population, having, organizing and selling content for creatives seems to be the next obvious step. Mastery can be gleaned by being in the water of social media. Less hype and more beef, now’s the time.
You make excellent points here and I don’t want to refute them. However, another perspective needs to come into the discussion.
It looks as if Social Media experts, gurus, whatever you want to call them, are victims of their own success. They have been able to influence many organizations and individuals to adopt social media tools and practices.
However, too many of these “experts” are now whining. This is what happens as technologies spread – more people gain knowledge.
Yes, there are people who will call themselves experts with little real experience in social networking, but they actually may be equipped sufficiently to help the even less savvy learn themselves. Like in any profession, there is a hierarchy of skill and the market will help define their compensation. You already see this in other “leading” marketing activities like SEO/SEM.
Also, you don’t have to look back that far to see when “stupider” people overtook “smarter” people. During the first Internet wave, the Internet Protocol savvy people wailed and gnashed their teeth as the less savvy telco people came up to speed with knowledge of how to connect to the Internet. Before you knew it, the telcos were swallowing up the “pure ISPs” without even knowing how the protocol works.
Get used to it. And don’t think of this as a backlash. This is just the period where the market is becoming saturated and the true experts have to actually work harder to get clients. And once again, some people with less social media credentials will be able to outmaneuver the “real” social media experts simply because they are better overall marketers. Think about it.
The bubble around “social media gurus” reminds me of the old days when there were “internet gurus”.
Back then, I owned an early-stage interactive agency. When I’d go visit prospective clients I’d say “you don’t need an internet guru. What you need is someone who will learn enough about your business to help you understand what levers to push online to help move the needle.”
A big problem then, as now, is that many gurus have deep experience with the tools but scant experience in business.
Evangelism is exciting, but many gurus would be well-advised to make sure they’re listening at least twice as much as they are Twittering