Apparently there are 15,740 social media experts on Twitter of who take the forms of gurus, consultants, stars, experts and ninjas. I am not entirely surprised and as Mashable observed this self-accredited title is just hot air. Surely the only way somebody can be truly convinced of your worth is through the voice of another?
Notice how on my Twitter profile I have avoided cliché terminology. There is nothing worse than those who big themselves up on Twitter without any experience or content to prove their worth. Just because you Re-Tweet social media posts doesn’t make you an expert; it makes you a regurgitator.
I am not an expert but instead a ‘web 2.0 enthusiast’. Even though I am only a student I have been surfing the internet since the age of five and have built similar social media websites which have received so much hype today. I am an enthusiast, passionate about the subject and can see potential as well as flaws.
So forgive me as I walk the controversial path into what could be considered short sighted and simply wrong. Social media is experiencing a frenzy of attention at the moment. Rather than personal attributes people are being viewed by how many followers they have on Twitter and the amount of websites they have heard of. I am getting fed up with this hype.
In one breath I can name over a dozen different websites which will help share content from your website. Methods to spread a company’s word into the different sections of the heterogeneous audience in which social networking has created. I did a presentation to a client at the beginning of this month and they were more interested in a social media strategy surrounding Facebook than considering ‘old fashioned pr’.
It is in my opinion that the world has gone crazy. Of course there is value to using social media but let’s all calm down about this. Just because a PR firm has offered social media in their pitch doesn’t mean that they will do it well. It is really just basic logic. Whilst computers deal in 0′s and 1′s, humans don’t. To use social media or not use social media isn’t the focus. It is to have a campaign when social media is used well.
If social media isn’t used well then your company is running the risk of receiving bad coverage. To a certain extent using social media is a bit like a PR agency signing their own death warrant. Once your message is out there you have no control over how people react. You can’t hide details on the internet because people will join together and form a power much stronger than your company.
Not that good PR should hide messages but you can’t even be lenient with the truth either. Honesty is an open ordeal and the internet allows PR to be very honest. Using social media it is possible to interact with individuals, for companies to build personal relationships. In this way advertising has fundamentally been left behind in the 20th Century.
For example, Twitter. It is true that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool and is frequently being used to promote. However, Twitter is not always a promotional tool. For certain businesses the social networking site would work very well but in other cases it simply doesn’t. Over the summer I was working for a company who wanted to attract more people to their website and so I drew people through new blog articles. This method worked very well but I was communicating with people. Not just promoting.
Keep in mind through that whilst PR seems to be utterly delighted over the concepts of social media, we should also be very scared. We can send out our messages but then that is it. We can keep releasing statements through social networks but it is not possible to manage reputation effectively. Once communities start communicating on a large enough scale the noise simply drowns out any other messages on the medium.
PR on any social network simply stands as one insignificant individual. An agency needs to build a reputation online before anybody decides to take notice of their messages. This is why viral communication can no longer exist.
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