Another Whack at Social Media and Search Experts

January 22, 2009

Michael Pinto’s “Social Media Experts Are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)” here made us quack merrily. The service that social media experts have discovered is Twitter. Our Beyond Search geese have Twittered and find that it works for our cousins defacing automobiles and the occassional hairdo in the area between San Jose, California, and San Francisco, California. The Twitterholics are an “in” crowd, and the Kentucky geese can’t take full advantage of Twitter’s micro-micro blogging functions. When we sit at lunch using Twinkle on an iPhone, a full 30 minutes can go by without one substantive Harrod’s Creek tweets. Sad. So sad. Mr. Pinto’s article goes into considerable detail about the woes the outsiders–in this case, self appointed social media and social search wizards–inflict on the more wired Twitterific users. For me, the most interesting point in his write up was:

Like drugs, social media can be a good thing in the right hands. But there are too many people out there who don’t know what they’re doing and just get carried away. Sadly most people just lack the good old fashioned discipline to keep their worse instincts in check. On a related note there’s also a related clan of zombies which are the SEO “experts” — these creatures are a blue collar variation of the social media experts and usually have the term “web master” in their bio. Sometimes the social media and SEO zombies can mate to produce a marketing strategy monster, but most of these are harmless as they don’t use the auto-follow technique.

Now shift the thinking to a large company, maybe a Toyota or Unilever. What happens when a technically adept employee decides to have some “fun” with the social media and social search system at one of these companies? This aspect of the next big thing in social media and social search needs a bit of thought… just not by the self appointed experts. Write on, Mr. Pinto.

You may find this social media push back interesting as well. Caroline McCarthy’s “New FriendFeed Feature Gives My Inbox a Headache” here.

Stephen Arnold, January 22, 2009

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