How Social Media Became The New Wild, Wild West.

There is something which bothers me enormously about social media marketing.

Which is this: there is no professional body for social media marketing, no real qualification, anyone can call themselves an expert and anyone can say things like this which sounds plausible - but could not be more wrong. And more often than not, it is wrong on so many levels and demonstrably so with hard numbers.

What I would like businesses to consider is that a significant amount of claims made by the social media marketing community literally have no backing to them, have never been scientifically proven and are largely speculative. Whenever I've looked and done the proper scientific measurement and analysis, I have found a disturbing level of such plausible sounding claims which are, in the final analysis, at the least, misguided. So I want to see businesses start asking harder questions of their social media service providers - or better still, start getting second opinions and peer reviews before you buy.

Worse still, there seems to be a rising tide of bad and unethical practice now, where some so-called social media professionals are not serving business at all, they are self-serving. Situations are being engineered which are exploitative and are literally damaging to businesses and people in the name of social media marketing. I want to see this bad practice outlawed.

To continue on the theme of outlaws, perhaps a much more succinct way to make this point is to simply say this.

Social media marketing is a wild, wild west where people can be laws unto themselves, can shoot from the hip without thinking about the damage they are causing and where there are a lot of snake oil salesmen in them there hills too. Businesses need to have their wits about them at all time when they venture into the land of the cowboys.