I Am The “Social Media Guru”. Read on…
I know you’re thinking either of these two – jeez, yet another social media guru (they are ones who just read the title and not the rest) and others thinking, lets see what’s this wanabe guru is upto and bash him up.
Don’t worry – you didn’t miss much. At the end of the story, you’re always welcome to bash me since I’m not the one born with extra intelligence who knows it all. But yes, with my little bit of experience in social media marketing and the industry I belong, I can rightly say that I’m not totally misfit to write this content.
Now to some bigger issues – over the past couple of months of my interaction with many digital marketers, agencies, social media marketers and rest I can rightly say that couple of broad based ideologies has been already established. I’ll try to list some of them below:
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Social Media is a subset of Digital Media and digital media is broadly classified as internet and mobile.
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Most marketers (I mean those in agencies), especially in India present their pitch to clients with broad based game plan of Digital marketing which also might showcase couple of slides which touches facebook, twitter, seeding of content etc as part of social media.
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All through the pitch to finalization process words like customer engagement, brand conversations are mutually agreed terms without further delving into details of how to measurably attain that which coincides with layman’s sales report.
By now, I guess you’re totally sure where am I leading. Also some images or perhaps videos might suffice you if you are to look for how social media has evolved and thus led to evolution of a new breed of marketers who dub them as “Social Media Gurus”.
Google India search of “social media guru”
Now a video perhaps (actually a screencast taken from a cool service called Screenr).
In the video, I’ve tried to capture how social media has evolved (at least from trends graph and google search results) and thus the social media gurus.
btw, mind it, I don’t have any problem of anyone being a guru in something. Infact, I would love to meet somebody and learn as much as possible but in the midst of it all, I feel the actual conceptual understanding of social media has vapoured.
I can’t believe how people practically (not theoretically) consider social media as a subset of Digital media because IMHO the core idea of both these ideas are disparate.
Broadly speaking if you ask me, then this is the way I see how they are different:
- Digital media is a platform for communication which is bought or paid form of media where the currency is attention. So we pay in online ads, banners, social network apps, microsites, paid sponsorships, paid ads etc
- whereas social media is a neo-classical example of earned media where the attention (as the currency) is the same but you can’t pay to get attention from users, audience, customers (whatever you want to say).
Now that’s the challenge because social media can’t be scaled by money. It’s a human driven effort like self-created, user generated and most often collaborated. Now no money in the world can do it.
But yes what we as intelligent marketers can do is try to understand where’s the tipping point which can stimulate, harness and amplify the response. Now that’s where we have to work on – and not with asking an influential blogger write a post about your product/service or making a pricey FB app thinking thousands will come and join your charade.
P.S. If you’re still wondering why the hell did I titled the post as “I’ am the social media guru”, then recently I came to know that people like to read negative stories and pay much more attention. So thought of experimenting. If you ask me, the title of this post should have been “Digital & Social Media Chasm” (how’s that for a post’s title) 
Search Interactive Marketing Blog
December 11th, 2009 at
I hope what you're saying comes true. Though I'm skeptic about it *truly*. Infact, day-in day-out, the number of small agencies coming out poses yet another problem since the terrain becomes murkier and the client trust on such a medium falls apart.
Saying that, I've even seen many smaller agencies doing some awesome work – much better than bigger ones, which makes us think why?
Cheers
@Sampad
December 11th, 2009 at
Great post Sampad. Interesting take on the difference between digital and social media. Marketers (both from brands and agencies) need to understand the concept better to make it work.
Looking forward to more eye-opening posts like these. Kudos!
Cheers
December 11th, 2009 at
Great post and a sticky title!! Vishal Gondal's negative title post was awesome and this was a good attempt too:-)
Social Media could become an integral part of CRM but then metrics is an issue.A keyword based filtering wont do for conversations.With evolving tools, Social Media chatter could prove effective for CRM.
Dell has shown that sales can work and everyone is trying to copy the same.However, around 10% of dell tweets are about issues.So, if even half of these can be solved, it leads to many happy customers
December 11th, 2009 at
Having many 'social media gurus' would only propagate the idea further among talent seekers. Compulsions for connecting with the audience and measuring its impact would encourage brands to seek those who can make a tangible difference for them. Having scores of web designers still keeps demand high for those who work with Movabletype or Wordpress or other specific skills.
Jyoti
December 11th, 2009 at
You've rightly pointed out the right thing about Dell. So at the end of the day its about solving "A" specific issue of customer(s). But can you further explain further how social media can be integrated with CRM or already existing CRM? All I know is integrating with existing CRM is not an easy deal but still looking forward to your inputs.
Thanks!
December 11th, 2009 at
True, It is a daunting challenge.As i pointed out, there is a need for word cloud based filtering which can help bring in relevant data into an existing CRM solution.It may not serve a specific customer issue but then an issue can be resolved none the less.
As of now, human monitoring and filtering can help but with businesses of scale it may not be possible.
The advantage however is that the Customer Issues are centralized which can really be fruitful for any organization.
December 20th, 2009 at
It is the second entry I read tonight. And I am on my third. Got to think which one is next. Thank you.
January 4th, 2010 at
Nice post, it gives me some inpirations, thanks.
January 22nd, 2010 at
Catching up Sampad. Good post, I love the title… I was think: yeah you, me, and everyone else… I love the distinctions you make between social and digital media. Your distinctions are fair and correct. This is an interesting idea that not a ton have picked up on.
January 30th, 2010 at
its good information i agree with article and comments on it..
January 30th, 2010 at
Thanks
February 9th, 2010 at
hii…read through it…actually the entire internet industry in india in on a penetrating state…lot more new things n concepts coming up…like the visint i resently visited….
http://bit.ly/57vFVV
February 26th, 2010 at
Liked your approach. Take any field of study, there are more self proclaimed Guru's than creators.
March 15th, 2010 at
Try this fun is social media.
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July 8th, 2010 at
Thanks.
I agree with you, Social media is a new King in digital marketing.