The short-lived triumph of social media noise

Stephanie Booth:

I recently realised that I need to distance myself a little from this social media pigeonhole I’m in — not that I’m going to stop doing what I’ve done until now, not at all, but I find the label keeps dragging me a little too close to social media marketing for my comfort, and keeps me away from gigs which are more productivity-related (“use technology better to do what you want to do”). This can cover strategies for dealing with e-mail, discovering Evernote, Google Docs, managing one’s digital content, etc.

One of the things I discovered last year was that the social media marketing crowd have managed to make so much noise that a very significant proportion of people now think that social media is marketing and nothing else. Mind you, you’d expect marketing people to try and dominate a conversation, wouldn’t you?

It wasn’t always this way – back in the mid-2000s the conversation revolved around ways of using social media to enhance businesses on multiple levels. That will come back, because there are good people doing these things, and having an impact. We just need the social media marketing bubble to burst a little, as people get tired of the increasing marketing noise in their social channels.