Morbean

I’m not a Social Media Guru. I have a Twitter account that I’m slowly getting to grips with. I’ve had limited experience with it, the best of which was finding a sneaky way of securing myself tickets to see the Foo Fighters via O2 Blueroom when the fansite pre-sales office snarled up. It also secured me 15% of the hits to my website in the first week of its deployment. Facebook secured me 25%, a much more impressive result which is, in fairness attributed to the fact that my network on Facebook is larger. In short I’m not immersed in social media but I get the potential.

Initially my stance, or seat, was to sit on the fence while I read this, as social media has become somewhat of a bandwagon but I quickly fell off and realised Milo seemed to be vilifying the boys and girls of Soho.

In fairness to Milo, describing these Gurus as “a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards.” painted a beautifully, stereotypically accurate picture in my head that did make some snot come out of my nose as I guffawed. In fact, the accuracy in many of his observations was right on the money. Media lovvies (and I don’t disclude myself from this statement) are ponces. They wear wide-rimmed glasses, dress like teenagers and they talk absolute bollocks. So whats my issue?

Social media is just another channel that can, and I think should, be exploited for marketing. I could go on about the similarities amongst the nay-sayers when the internet first began integrating into marketing communications but to be honest, I don’t really know, or care too much about it. What I do know is that it called for traditional marketing agencies to learn fast to continue being ‘full service’ or they had to adopt the use of specialist digital agencies. Here teams of dedicated developers, planners and designers made it their business to know the web and all of its derivatives inside-out, top to bottom. If you wanted a decent website that worked hard you went to them. Did they use jargon that you didn’t understand? Hell yeah they did! But my mechanic does that, it lets me know that he knows what he’s doing, I don’t, and that’s why I’m paying him to scrape his knuckles, swear and make my car work.

There were loads of digital agencies to choose from too. Why? because there was the demand for them. Just like there is for these new ‘Blood Sucking’ social media consultants. So now with the emergence of social media into the marketing mix why would you not maximise the channels you have available in your marketing mix? We’re in a recession. Those who have had the initiative to exploit the social media channels to put a roof over their heads and to help kick start the economy should be encouraged.

And for those of you who are interested, Milo has 4189 followers on Twitter today, no doubt helping him maximise his exposure as a freelance technology journalist, something he does on the side when he’s not studying at Cambridge.

You can read Milo’s article here