Eleven years ago, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke wrote, “the internet has made it possible for genuine human voices to be heard again.”
What do you mean, again? This is a first.
Never has the average Joe been afforded unrestricted access to an audience any bigger than the neighborhood pub. This giant electronic soapbox known as the internet delivers a world-wide audience. Anyone can pontificate at will, on any subject, and potentially reach billions of people across the globe.
On one hand it’s the greatest thing since the invention of the radio broadcast.
On the other hand, it’s a can of worms. Since there’s no barrier to entry, there’s an awful lot of noise.
Used to be, you had to get published to achieve guru status in any given line of work. And the editors in control were brutally picky. They didn’t let just anyone in. You had to have something to say, and a unique voice with which to say it.
Not online.
Any dumbass can start a blog on Wordpress or Blogspot. That’s the essence of social media and “Web 2.0” — publishing is now free and open to anyone. (Some estimates have the number of blogs up to 100 million. And that doesn’t count the microblog sites like Twitter)
As the popularity of Wordpress and Twitter explode, the quality of the dialog has not improved. Just the quantity.
On some subjects, it’s too much information from too many questionable sources. For instance, you could never wade through all the chatter about Twitter, Facebook and social media marketing in general. “Will it help my small business? Can I build a brand around it? How do I do it? Can I generate leads on Twitter? Where’s it all going?”
I don’t know. But I know this: Just because you have a blog and a few thousand friends on Facebook doesn’t make you a social media marketing guru. There are no gurus in that field. It’s too new, too experimental. Guru status comes from wisdom, proven results and the perspective you can only get from lifelong experience.
But there are a lot of wannabe rockstars. So if you’re a brand manager, marketing director or business owner trying to figure out that social media thing, beware. Many of those purported “experts” or “thought leaders” are just accomplished, online self-promoters riding the next big internet craze.
Here’s something else I know for a fact: Few people can communicate meaty, worthwhile thoughts in less than 140 characters. If they can, they were doing it way before social media was ever invented. They were the copywriters, the journalists, the humorists and the guru businessmen. The great communicators of the world who were published in books a lot bigger than Cluetrain.
Locke preached a sermon of hope for the digital pulpit. He predicted that the internet would forever shift the nature of business communications, and he envisioned a world where the consumer would have a voice and corporations would have to listen.
Pretty good crystal ball, he had.
Many great brands are embracing the online “conversation” and are getting better at communicating on a one-to-one level. They may not be the earliest adopters, but they’re catching on and beginning to respond to our wishes. If nothing else, they’re now painfully aware when people start spreading negative word-of-mouth.
But corporations don’t control the bulk of the internet conversation. It’s the average Joe on his soapbox with a big ego and a pay-per-click budget. Those businesses are popping up faster than you can say, “what happened to Myspace?” And unfortunately, many have the tone of a snake oil salesman.
In other words, despite the advances of social media, (or maybe because of the advances) there’s more phony crap out there than ever before.
The self-help industry. The diet programs. The plastic surgeons. The get-rich-quick guys. And my personal favorite, the golf swing gurus who can’t break 80. What a bunch of crackpots! Every Tin Cup wannabe has an instructional DVD or downloadable E-book available on the web. And they’re all “guaranteed to shave strokes off your game.”
Golf Digest wouldn’t publish any of them on a bet. Most wouldn’t even make it in the infomercial world. But they’re out there, sucking people in faster than the word can spread against them.
The tone is no better than the corporate spiel that Locke railed against in Cluetrain Manifesto. “The voice is like a third-rate actor in a 4th rate play reciting lines that no one believes in a manner no one respects.”
Yep.
Sometimes I long for the good old days when websites weren’t free and there was some barrier to entry on the internet. But not really. We’ll all put up with some noise in exchange for the freedom that blogging has provided. Now I’m just hoping for a natural weeding out process.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Deafening as it is, I’m happy to trade the new noise for the end of military, corporate, and yes, even editorial control. Funny you should mention the self-help hucksters, that’s been a good part of my beat since Gonzo Marketing, my little known book that followed on the heels of Cluetrain.
http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com
btw, the “third-rate actor in a 4th rate play” line was David Weinberger’s, if memory serves. Cluetrain had two other authors as well: Doc Searls and Rick Levine.
Thanks for pressing WordPress into service to blog on this ever-bloggable theme, Rockstar.
Those self help ‘gurus’ have always been around, whether it was in the small ads or stickers on a lampost. The Internet indeed has given them a potentially bigger voice and a quicker reach but the problem is not new.
I guess a simple rule should be, if you call yourself an expert, guru or such you should be ignored. It is for others to define someone as an expert or guru for it to really mean something.
Based on the etymology of the word ‘guru”, the locution “self help gurus” has a distancing and somewhat critical connotation. I believe we all had one or two gurus in our formative years and only later in life we (some of us) tend to become more critical of those who think they know best what is good for us or for the survival of humankind. I still respect (the notion) that some of us are more expert at something than others (the natural or socially-engineered division of work is perhaps the main factor), but when I see the mental prosternation of people vis-a-vis gurus like Anthony Robbins I simply cringe. Personally, I was lucky to experience such awakenings about the roles these gurus play in our life and how phony they could be. One example is (Dr) Andrew Weil when, during a televised conference, (he)explained how toxic celery sticks are. I didn’t touch celery sticks for a couple of years after that and one day, cornered by politeness, I had to munch on the only snack a graceful hostess put under my nose. I felt like Gustave Mahler must have felt when he was offered pork to eat at a party in his honour. I don’t say that (Dr) Weil is an idiot; on the contrary, I am grateful to him for opening my eyes and helping me with discerning amongst true experts and self-titled experts.
The net and the web 2.0 have produced a plethora of self-proclaimed gurus and, unfortunately, because we are highly developed social & societal beings, we tend to choose a leader of sorts from amongst us. Yes, I agree with Chris Locke that the deafening noise of social media (marketing) is preferable to the old methods of all kinds of indoctrination. And John, the fact that we chit-chat freely about that shows that we still have the capacity to discern, criticize and ridicule the resellers of old get-rich-quick or become-an-expert-in-five-minutes hucksters — the latest kind of nouveau riche riding on the waves of social media. Their crass lack of modesty and (intellectual & moral) decency is another manifestation of the homo homini lupus world we still live in after 10,000 years of human…evolution.
Yes, Jamie is right in his first paragraph, but then who could enforce the “simple rule”? Yes, we could ignore the so-called gurus, but they are becoming better and better at marketing themselves. We all look pretty much alike and the differences appear and become evident mostly when we open our mouth and prove who we really are.
Great Post. Can you email me back, please. Thanks so much.