On the outskirts of a regional city in Britain – Bristol, perhaps – two hundred people gather to discuss “radical engagement strategies”. They are oddballs: a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards. They fire cheap jibes at the Microsoft event they’re sharing a building with, and from which they’ve nicked a few chairs – a fact they crow about on Twitter as if it were some sort of victory over the “evil” corporation.
Executives see their home-made clothes and the faint whiff of body odour as “alternative”: like programmers, who are expected to look and behave in an eccentric manner, these social media experts must know what they’re doing because, well, you know, only someone really brilliant would look so peculiar, right? So the gurus are hired, and promptly set about cutting and pasting “social media strategy guidelines” into Powerpoint presentations and swanning around the office instructing secretaries about “social media for social good” and how Twitter’s going to change the world, all the while leeching off the productive bit of the organisation.
There are several online guides that profess to help businesses separate the good guys from the quacks. But talk about needles and haystacks! In any case, that presupposes social media consultants are in any way useful or helpful. They aren’t, unless your marketing team is so hopelessly incapable of communicating that they need intermediaries in order to say “Hello” – in which case your problems run a little deeper than hiring the wrong contractors.Marketing directors tempted by social media consultants would be well advised to visit one of their extraordinary conferences and watch them as they waffle, endlessly and without any intelligible purpose, about “transformation and inspiration”, almost visibly rubbing their hands with glee. The red thread running through these events is, “I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this.”
In 2007, there were no social media consultants in London. Just a few short years later there are thousands of the blood-suckers clamouring for attention and lucrative contracts. It is offensive to anyone creating value in their company that social media consultants dare use the word “innovation” to describe what they do for a living. How do these people sleep at night?
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