0
0
Social media consultants are an inexcusable waste of money, says Milo Yiannopoulos
Amplify’d from www.telegraph.co.uk
These are the social media gurus, a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters who are infesting companies of all sizes, on both sides of the Atlantic, blagging their way into consultancy roles and siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions. They claim to be able to improve your relationships with your customers by “executing 360 degree reignition programs”. But who are these people? Where did they come from? And how on earth have they managed to hoodwink so many big companies so quickly and so comprehensively?
I am not making this stuff up: these people are genuinely beyond parody. If you were to conduct an archaeological dig into a social media guru, you’d probably uncover layers of life coaches, yoga teachers, acupuncturists and feng shui consultants. That’s the level of business insight and mission-critical expertise we’re talking about here.
Why am I banging on about this? Because the poisonous cult of the social media guru – or, get this, “swami” – is disastrous for pretty much every kind of business: it’s wasteful for large companies and potentially fatal for start-ups. Social media consulting amounts to little more than mastering the art of the bleeding obvious and no company, no matter what its size, should even consider hiring external social media consultants. Internally, the most you need is a couple of interns with laptops.
But there’s some way to go yet. The rot of social media is, in a sense, only just setting in. A lot of corporates are announcing high-level social media-related appointments at the moment, and it will be a long time before brands are able to reliably distinguish useful technical tools like London-based Conversocial from the nonsense peddled by freelance social media morons and, to their shame, many of London’s top digital agencies.
In 2007, there were no social media consultants in London. Just a few short years later there are thousands of the blood-suckers clamouring for attention and lucrative contracts. It is offensive to anyone creating value in their company that social media consultants dare use the word “innovation” to describe what they do for a living. How do these people sleep at night?
