Social Media is Real! Formation of Trade Group Proves It!
Those following the social media gospel must be storming the altar like fanatics after a faith healer, following the announcement of the formation of The Social Media Advertising Council.
Yes! Yes! YES! Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Hallelujah and yee haw! The segment of the internet that has spawned an endless procession of conferences, self-made gurus and a lot of hot air will now recede from the Wild West into a more subdued entity with...OMG...rules and standards!
Can you handle it? Now you won't be able to make up buzzwords on Twitter any more! No more Facebook poking without full permission and disclosure. And...the horror...self-made gurus may have to use...the same vocabulary as their competing self-made social media gurus. Oh this is bad. Very bad. No longer will these people be able to get paid obscene amounts of money to appear on panels at conferences just because they have the biggest supply of buzzwords!
Because of these impending standards and practices, all those super coolerific "social media efforts" will now have to...OMG...be accountable! What has the world come to?
Hopping on the Council's bandwagon are Edelman, Havas Digital, Gather, Gartner, Quantcast, Universal McCann, Mediavest, Digitas and others. If you want to join these lemmings...uh...companies, contact Christine Baptiste at cbaptiste@gatherinc.com.
Comments
God, I hate Social Media fuckfaces, mainly because I was in a search firm that got hijacked by a couple of partners who wanted to follow this stupid ass gimmicky trend. Needless to say, they are out of business now.
It takes about 5 minutes to set up a MySpace or Facebook or Twitter account, but if you come to my conference, I will make it seem very hard, then I will help you do it for a ton of money.
"It takes about 5 minutes to set up a MySpace or Facebook or Twitter account, but if you come to my conference, I will make it seem very hard, then I will help you do it for a ton of money."
LOL! Oh wait, Don't you want to hear "Social Media Experts Untangle the Mystery of How to Use Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis and Other Social Media Tools to Find New Clients, Make Money and Create the Lifestyle of Your Dreams"? (quote taken from one of those mile long single web page sales pitches) Come on! Noone can setup a MySpace account by themselves!!!!
Talk about recreating the wheel for publicity sake, isn't this exactly what the www.socialmediaclub.org is doing?
Yes a governing body that allows them to sell more billable hours for services that churn out tired old broadcast marketing techniques through social channels.
The thing I find most interesting about this story is how many of the big players who are NOT the so-called self-made experts in social media are jumping on board. It absolutely "stinks" of "We aren't the experts, so we'll just change the rules and call ourselves the experts."
Not saying it won't work. We ARE lemmings in this industry and these guys ARE the big-boys. But the end results will still be, "Well of course we can implement a small social media effort to compliment this $30 million broadcast buy."
I'm still thinking this is just a joke. SMAC? for real?
on agencyspy, they include Enfantico in the list of agencies signing on, so my BS alarm is going off.
I'm going to start one called the BRanded Entertainment Association for Social Technology... Our slogan will be "Get in touch".
Months later, oblivious to the snickering on Twitter, we will realize the terrible naming mistake when it's pointed out by Adrants, and will disband.