I am writing this post out of anger. One of my friends approached some of the Irish ‘Twitterati‘ to ask them to retweet/pass on an offer they were promoting and one response in particular really grinded my gears.

They accused them of being ‘clueless’ about digital marketing for contacting them directly on Twitter without following them. I mean, who writes the rules on this. The arrogance to think there is a set paradigm on using social/digital media tools (outside of privacy/security controls obviously).

These Irish Twitterati display what I have come to detest over the last two years in particular – they are trying to form an ‘old boys club’ that was/is prevalent in traditional Irish media over the last 50 years. Instead of trying to usurp the old and bring on the initial promise of the web – openness and endless possibilities – it is like they are trying to create a new walled garden of back slapping and insider jokes, or even worse, pander to become part of the existing cliques in Irish media.

The absolute arrogance to think that they can dicate the rules on how to communicate with people. A lot of these guys are ‘social snakeoil salesmen’ who use LIST JOURNALISM (the worst kind) to tell you the ’10 best ways…’ or ‘5 reasons to…’ use, essentially open and intuitive tools to fit into some preformed conception of what is the ‘best’ way in their eyes to communicate with your audience, peers and people in general. Piss off!!

In my view, this stuff is about trial and error and gut instinct. Do you think people like Steve Jobs, Branson,Henry Ford, Andrew Carnergie and Mark Zuckerberg would have checked some faux-communications rule book from some media guru (I abhor that phrase so so much) when starting their respective enterprises.Nope, they picked up a phone or knocked on a door.

Hell, Zuckerberg even used some nefarious means to get ‘The Facebook’ out there. Was he concerned with what some self appointed marketing don dictated as the best approach to raise awareness?I doubt it. It’s funny that these ‘social media gurus’ now eek out a living by writing blogs, holding seminars and even building agencies based on telling people the best way to use the platform.

So good luck to the those snakeoil social divas – keep living life through the medium of pageviews, follows, likes and backlinks. God forbid you might actually, you know, build a product or something. Nuff said.

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