Outing the Social Media Cosa Nostra

A colleague dashed in to my office and blurted out that other agencies are finding story leads on reporters’ Facebook pages, participating in YahooAnswer on the client’s behalf, “linking up” with editors and so on.  “Of course!” I laughed. “They’re all reading the same social media books.”

Nonetheless, this conversation threw me into high gear to follow reporters and editors on every social media vehicle known to man & woman.  Guess what?  I didn’t find a darned thing lead-wise, and for good reason.  Any hapless reporter who actually filed an “I need help with this story” tweet or Facebook post would be swamped by PR people.

That doesn’t stop clients and their agencies from spending endless hours searching.  It’s what “the experts” say to do. Those who actually follow this advice remind me of that line by 19th century French poet, Charles Baudelaire:

“His face bore the resigned look of a man condemned to hope forever.”

So, just a couple of thoughts to put social media and its gurus in perspective.

1. We’ve seen it all before. Every major new market phenom spawns swarms of evangelists.  It happened with the advent of PCs, e-mail, the Web, e-commerce, the dot.coms and the competitive local telecom industry.  To be sure, each of these innovations transformed business.   In every instance, newly-minted  “experts” arose to counsel companies on how to profit.  Businesses and investors bit hard, often spending before thinking.
2. Now it’s social media’s turn. Everywhere you look there’s an expert tweeting, blogging and wiki-ing on how to drive your business by tweeting, blogging and wiki-ing.  (They write a lot of books, too — Does anybody else see the irony in proponents of the “paperless society” using up all that paper?)  Businesses are biting hard once again.
3. There’s a distressing uniformity to much of this advice: “Create a network, follow others, build trust,” etc., etc.  Sure I beat the drum on social media, too.  My excuse: I’ve been online since 1982, have seen a lot come & go, and have some idea of what works.
4. One thing that should go: bogus “recommending.” We all know how 99% of recommendations happen on Linked In — We ourselves request them.  That’s a harmless enough form of false advertising, but it takes a more sinister turn when social media pundits — to whom we look for objective counsel — follow the same practice.  You’ve seen it, I’m sure: As soon as one expert posts a blog or authors a book, all the rest jump on-board to trumpet it.

I call members of this club the Social Media Cosa Nostra. My beef with them: sidestepping an expert’s responsibility to provide a critical appraisal of what’s worthwhile — and what isn’t. In a world where an “it’s all good” attitude prevails, usually not much is.

In the business (or any) arena, critics play an invaluable role by winnowing wheat from chaff and steering us toward ideas that guide a practical course of action.  I don’t see a lot of that happening in social media.  Let’s start right here.

If you read or follow anybody, make it Mitch Joel.  His “Six Pixels of Separation” is truly useful.  Why I like Mr. Joel: he offers sound advice and makes no bones about dissing dumb ideas.  He’s a counselor and a critic. If Joel suggested following a reporter on Twitter to hunt for story leads, I’d grimace and go ahead. . .and on Facebook — well, I’d think about it.

There: I’m a “made man” now.

Related posts:

1. Do We Need a National “No Social Media” Day? French regulators last week banned mention of Twitter or Facebook...
2. Avoiding Blog Sprawl: Toward Logical Social Media Grids In a recent attempt to navigate a company's blog site,...
3. Big Blogger is Watching: Social Media Monitoring and The Media Awaiting the news that Facebook has more users than there...
4. Getting Antisocial About Social Media A friend who manages social media for a Fortune 500...
5. Great Love Tweets of Will Shakespeare and Other Enduring Social Media London, 19 July 2011 - Archaeologists digging near the site...