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Social Media Gurus 'Can't Believe They're Still Getting Away With This'
I wrestled for a few minutes over whether to focus this final post of the day on Ken of Popehat's body slam of the Legal Internet Consultant who way-too-aggressively sought to build Ken a legal website; or on Brian Tannebaum's use of an article in the UK's Daily Telegraph to fuel his running assault on the uselessness of social media gurus for lawyers. I decided to go with Tannebaum, so buckle up.
Tannebaum says he awoke to find, to his considerable glee, "the greatest article I've ever read on the fraud that is the social media guru." The article by Milo Yannopolous takes a look at the "social media gurus, a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters who are infesting companies of all sizes, on both sides of the Atlantic, blagging their way into consultancy roles and siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions."
So you can see where Yannopolous is going with this, and oh does he ever go there. Yannopolous ties his attack to a conference attended by about 200 such "oddballs" (who he describes as a "mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards") where the theme running through the event was, "I can't believe we're still getting away with this."
Tannebaum uses many of the points made by Yannopolous to emphasize and link to similar points he has been making on his My Law License blog about the efforts of self-proclaimed social media gurus in the legal field:
He nails it on why these frauds are able to exist: One of the conditions that has allowed the faux-academic colloquy of the social media industry to grow so fast is a lack of checks and balances online, especially within social networks. Highly questionable practices go either unremarked upon or purposefully ignored by the Twitter bubble. When someone gets caught with their trousers down, you're more likely to see messages of support than opprobrium. Plus, the industry is well mobilised, and dishes out a number of ludicrous awards to itself.
Milo sees the groupie nature of these scam artists, referring to it as a poisonous cult of the social media guru.
Social media gurus, what say you? Defend your existence in the comments below!
Posted by Bruce Carton on November 23, 2010 at 01:59 PM | Permalink
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