Rant.

It’s aggravating to me the overload of books being written about how-to social media. Just like when search marketing became the next big thing, there were a ton of books and articles popping up, telling everyone how important search.  Of course, I’m not talking about all books and articles on the subject. The offenders know who they are. They are the ones that put a lot of effort into making the subject seem extraordinarily more complicated than it actually is, hoping to make money by alienating the folks that can benefit most from it. Doesn’t this attack the very reason why search marketing was created? Doesn’t this defeat the essence of what social media is?

Then I wonder about those who buy the books. Does someone really need a book to tell them how to make use of social media? Does that defeat the purpose of social media? And to that person that needs a book to build a Facebook page – what are you going to do with it? Should you even have a Facebook page, or a blog, or a Twitter account? In order to grow their business they think they need to buy a book to learn how to cheat the social media system.

They are causing social media to lose integrity.

In addition to spam emails and spam bloggers, we now have spam twitters and spam Facebook friends to look out for. And, in addition to that, we have overzealous, shilling social media “entrepreneurs” clogging up our linked-in groups.

True story: We actually had a client come to us last year to take over their public relations needs because the agency they were using was posting their social media press releases to spam websites and then they sent it to them as a clipping!

 In an effort to make-more-money-faster and do-more-with-less are we must be aware that we might be contributing to an online world of inappropriate, uncessary content and general social media douchebagginess.