Sadly, adding a specialist term into a Job title or description is still a thing.
Go to any online jobs website and put “Ninja”, “Rockstar” or “Guru” in the keywords search to see what I mean.
The worst part is that it makes things really confusing – especially if you are actually a Ninja, A Rockstar or a Guru looking for a job.
The best thing about social media is that most people still are not sure what it is all about.
Especially many businesses.
Sure, they know it has something to do with connect to their customers, but they are not precisely sure how best to do this.
Many believe the marketing department is the best part of their organisation to handle social media, as it is just another marketing medium, right?
The great thing for many “marketers” who now promote themselves as being experts in the field, is that they can claim this based on the flimsiest of reasons.
They claim to understand and be experts on this new medium, with reasons such as:
The truth (i.m.o.) is that the marketing department should stay away from social media in many cases. They are not always the right people for the job, and social media is not just a marketing medium.
Community managers should be employed to help mange your social media presence. These people are usually the ones with a much better understanding of the new landscape.
They can work in with marketing to help make a campaign more successful, but their most important task is to help keep your social media frontier moving forward, especially when marketing have forgotten it while they go off to prepare their next EDM strategy, or website promotion.
G-U-R-U is the new way to spell “Clueless”
Everyone has heard all about the huge amounts of people self-proclaiming themselves as “Social Media Gurus” over the past few years.
And I bet everyone has met one of these people in real life too.
Almost without exception, these “gurus” are clueless, unimpressive self-promoters who have grabbed on to the latest thing that they think will get them some attention, respect and acclaim.
So many people added this title to their twitter profiles, in 2009, that it became hard to find someone without the word “guru”.
This fairly recent post from BL Ochman talks about the number of people still doing this. You can go to tweepsearch.com and confirm this for yourself too.
It is all so sad and it has created a situation that the word “guru” has lost the reverence that it once had.
The definition of the word shows it was once an honorable title. But no longer. It now draws ridicule, mistrust and scorn in the western world and online.
The odd thing is that a majority of these so called “gurus” have chosen this title for themselves.
This is the reason it has lost it’s former meaning, as the title is one that needs to be placed on you by others, who value your worth and the contribution you can make.
Because these titles were self-bestowed, the wielders of this awesome new rank often made some fantastically stupid mistakes due to their own lack of knowledge. For a great list of some of these, check out this post from mashable
Thankfully, rise of the social media gurus seems to have reached its peak, because there’s a new, contrary, position gaining momentum. It’s the “who the hell are these people to call themselves experts” movement. Posts like this one and this reflect that sentiment.
But the term is forever tarnished, in my opinion.
That’s OK though, because I like the word “sensei” better anyway.
I am also lurking on the internet in places other than here. (and in a VERY non-guru kind of way).
You can check out these places:
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| FB Fan page | Flickr | Google Buzz |
