8 Ways Social Media Gurus will both Hate and yet Leverage the Impending Death of Social Media
June 18, 2009 16 Comments
Various not-to-be-named Internet experts have announced the impending Death of Social Media™. This has caused distress among the “twittering classes” of social media gurus, who see their lives, emotional well-being, and even livelihoods threatened by this shark-jumping portent of doom.
Nonetheless, the virtual world as we know it will not end. In fact, this will simply be another evolutionary step forward – yet another way for the Guru Strata™ to maintain their position of influence in that series of tubes we call the Interwebs.
Here are 8 ways to leverage the Death of Social Media while still proclaiming to hate it:
- 1. Launch a new conference series, “Preparing for the Death of Social Media in 140 Characters.” ™ Beside soaking the masses for registration, charge Apple $25 for every Mac laptop and iPhone seen on the premises.
2. Charge for a blogging course, “How to blog about the demise of blogging” and give away to all registrants the 29 biggest secrets to AdSense revenue that will die along with your blog.
3. Put together a conference called, let’s say, UnBlog Chesapeake, ™ collect loads of money from the masses, and then bloviate forth with expertise on how gurus can unwind their social media involvement and find real jobs.
4. Do sponsored tweets, lose all your followers, get a little bit of revenue while the getting is good, then proclaim how your experience shows that we are at the tipping point of the Death of Social Media.
5. Charge thousands for a new research report on how the Death of Social Media will lead to the demise of social media gurus, but the ascent of a new Guru Strata class, the Trendalyst. ™ Wait. I think we’ve already got this..
6. Create a campaign to help millions erase their Facebook profiles with a new tool, the CleanMyFace. ™ Charge extra for zapping MySpace.
7. Open a series of Micro-blog Recovery Centers ™ where the truly addicted can come for daily appointments, pretend to tweet with make-believe friends, and feel “connected” once again before facing the real world.
8. Shave your head and write a book called “Islands” ™, a follow-up to the “Tribes” concept, extolling the virtues of every man being an island in a desolate wasteland of human disconnectedness.
As for me, I think I’ll launch a site called AllFlop, where we can easily track (by topic) the dead pool of all those deceased social media apps.
Yep, great times are ahead. Now’s the time to get ahead of the curve by ripping down your blog, erasing your tweets, and showing the rest of the world how to enjoy the Death of Social Media. Don’t be left behind!
UPDATE: Part 2 of this vital series is here: Bye-bye, Social Media Die (the new anthem for the end of social media).
(do I really think Social Media is dying? Of course not. Here’s how I see the evolution unfolding…)
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About Steve Woodruff
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Very funny, I mean visionary, post. I am already laying the biz plan for the FBR, Inc. (facebook rippers, inc).
See, I was coming over to do the whole “this is not death, this won’t die, you don’t know what you are talking about” bit. I also had my twit written – “check out this guy does not know what he is talking about – SM death? Pfffft. “.
Now I have to change it to say… well, just check out twitter for the RT.
Spot on! This whole Web craze is temporary, too. In fact, I may go blog about that an then tweet about my post.
Brilliant Steve!! I’ve been a fan of yours for a while and your posts always make me think. I like the way you titled your post “8 Ways Social Media Gurus will both Hate and yet Leverage the Impending Death of Social Media” and then actually presented 8 ways!! Let’s see those old school traditional marketers go ahead and do something like that! They’d probably only write 7 because they don’t embrace the consumer. Yesterday I was talking to my friend Mort, who’s a shoe salesman in the mall and he asked me if I as still writing that “blog thing” you know, like blogging wasn’t the single coolest thing ever until Twitter, right. Keep up the good work and keep the faith dewd!!
Hey – it’s all about the customer experience. I read that somewhere on-line and it really resonated with me. Before Social Media died, that is.
Very funny! I doubt it will die I mean Myspace is still around and everyone isn’t on there as much! I think it might need to be reinvented.
Though it is a good way of sharing information I think there is still a digital divide which we have to conquer and to figure out how to do that. Well that is a story for another day.
Steve:
Fun read. But there’s actually some merit in your comments related to interweb garbage collection.
Years ago (10 actually) I predicted we’d eventually need services to remove content from the web for a variety of reasons. My premise (at the time) wasn’t so accurate – the definition of “remove” was far different than it is today. However, there is a growing need among some content producers to clean up the crap we’ve all played a roll in creating. Doing so will logicaly increase the quality and usefulness of all interwebs.
Celebrities (of course) are the niche market that will pave this trail while paying handsome rewards for making content go away – perhaps they already are. Other niches will emerge too – e.g., how do you get your marketing partners to unpublish your old telephone number, or your discontinued products and services? So many of the pages in search results are completely useless simply because they are outdated, yet others (outdated as well) are knowledge gems.
In my view, the only reasonable approach is to find a way to make certain content *less* findable. This leads me to believe there’s probably a need for an interweb archive attribute that contra-seo’ists know how to influence, ergo – the *intentional* death of certain social media artifacts.
Incidentally, our MyST social media platform was engineered to make it as easy to remove content (or make it less findable gracefully) without negative impact, as it easy is to create high visibility.
–bf
Cool, but instead of erasing everything, why not just cover everything in deep green, much easier and more convenient, while supporting a good cause.
Hang on, TheMaria might not like that 😉
Great post. Might be a job in the future for a social media waste hauler — someone who creates bots that transverse the net picking up hunks of ourselves and incinerating them. Then there will, of course, be the trash-pickers, who will take tweets of Ashton or Godin blogs and place them oddly in their living rooms.
Doug – I think you must mean an eWall-E.
E-exactly.
Steve,
Too funny, yet how true. It’s like the social media seedy side, with the used car salesman effect. Psst, I got something for you, c’mover here… They DM you with links and forced ideas. They’re like bad neighbors who you just wish would go away.
I would agree there is a bunch of junk content out there in the ethers that is so old and dated, I’m always amazed. I’ve started adding dates in all my searches just so I don’t stumble into the 1995 version on wireless technology.
Love the post, thanks Steve!
At the risk of I’m an Austin, TX international business development consultant focused on Latin America. This is a fancy way of saying I help people sell stuff down there, or vice versa. About 2 months ago I was sucked into a project related to a very tightly contested election in my home country in a certain country in LATAM. Although it was not my direct field of expertise, I was a strong supporter of the now elected President (we won), yet I had a role mostly in crafting messages for the immigrant community living in the US, a full 30% of the aggregate population living in both the country proper and in the the US, to which this 30% migrated.
My role centered primarily in getting them out of some jams with their email marketing campaigns, help them contract some guys up here to fix their websites and enable streaming video, things of that sort. So… I have become a bit of a tech celebrity to these folks, who are now foaming at the mouth for more bells and whistles on their government sites. And lo an behold, they have fallen upon the social media concept courtesy of some young guns in the new power structure, and have to have it…
I can relate to this article in that it’s frankly pathetic how a certain technocratic elite has hijacked the very basic foundations of marketing and PR, which remain for the most part immutable and highly effective in 90% of the cases which require some promotional muscle. They would have us believe a seismic shift is underfoot that will erase whole legions of professionals who don’t tweet, digg, or suck face (book).
I hereby call for a referendum on this foregone conclusion and mass hysteria afoot in the halls of supposed political and corporate global communications temples of wisdom. There are places in the world with less than 10% penetration of Internet services, and connectivity to them is being able to make a phone call to LA to secure their next remittance. These masses are a long way from savoring the sweet honey of gratuitous self-expression. Yeah sure it’s cool that young folks in the developing are getting creative with their cell phones and laptops, yet we need to cool it with the messianic rhetoric surrounding social media. It’s merely a tool, for business as usual. the fundamentals of supply and demand will not be undone by 140 characters, regardless of how prophetic, desperate, original or inspired they may be.
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