Social Media Piranhas: They Give Social Media Marketing A Turgid Reputation

If there is one thing I hate the most about picking social media marketing as my niche it is the posers, con artists and chancers that seem to give the world of social media marketing a big bad name.

There are two types of social media piranhas. The unorganised and the organised. Both as bad as each other and both give all in social media a bad reputation.

The Unorganised

The unorganised social media piranha is somebody who has no formal qualifications or even experience in marketing or PR who have decided that by simply living on Twitter and Facebook makes them experts on social media. These people often call themselves marketers when in fact they are merely users of social media who know how to exploit the medium with little to no knowledge of the marketing frameworks that make it work or not work.

The Organised

This social media piranha is one that has stung organisations, often SMBs, (Small to Medium Businesses) charging them a lot of money (and I mean a lot of money) for extremely poorly executed social media marketing or PR work. These people will have very swarve looking websites, ones that look like their own made up organisation is a professional one with years of experience. There’s a saying, the dangerous idiot is an organised one and in this case the saying is confirmed with veracity.

Having A Social Media Account Does Not Make You An Expert

Just as anybody can set up a Facebook Page anybody can kick a football. Having the ability to kick a ball does not make you a professional footballer. Just as a professional footballer knows merely kicking a ball barely touches the surface of the complexity of their profession a professional marketer knows setting up a Facebook Page does not constitute as marketing.

Social media piranhas give the likes of you and I a big bad name. When I tell someone I work in social media marketing I’m often greeted with a wry smile. I know what they’re thinking. They think I’m one of them, a social media piranha. That I designate myself with self-insistive titles like “Social Media Guru” and spend my working hours messing about on Facebook. And you know what? Whilst there are so many social media piranhas around I genuinely don’t blame people for this stereotype.

Key Take Away

Personally I believe the likes of me and you are the ones responsible for changing the negative stereotypes associated with social media marketing. For every social media piranha there is there should be ten of us showing the world that social media marketing is not only a valuable tool in the marketing mix but potentially the most important.

~Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicshark