Let’s Say Goodbye to Social Media “Gurus”

I’ve never liked the term Guru – it’s a throwaway word, much
like Paradigm, Content, or Kanye. Plus, I wonder if calling a marketing person a “guru” is
offensive to actual gurus, and whether by using the term I’ll get punished with
some karmic payback, like being reincarnated as a Fox News anchor.

But I particularly dislike the word when precedent by two
other overused words, “social” and “media.”

Any blowhard with a blog can self-designate as a social
media guru, and because any blowhard can, many blowhards do. Same goes for Twitter,
the only difference being that Twitter allows people to become assholes much
faster and with more grammatical errors.

If you say you are a social media guru, then you are
focusing on the wrong thing. It’s important to understand the tools and channels
and all that, totally fine – twenty years ago it was important to understand
fax machines too, but not a lot of people touted themselves as gurus in
“faxable media.”

What really matters is understanding consumer behavior, how
people communicate and why, what they are saying and why, and to whom, and
where. We use the word “social” as often as a person with a cold reaches for a
tissue, yet we forget that “social” is about sociology – you know, people, not
platforms.

All media today is social, so in my opinion there is no
“social media.” And there are no gurus either, only those who know a little
more than some others – and trust me, the others aren’t too far behind.