Apologies in advance to Guy here – this article is nothing personal. I just noticed that Guy is based in the US and yet his Linkedin updates and Tweets seem to march on regardless of whether he is sleeping or working or otherwise.
Savvy social marketers will instantly recognize that Guy (and other prolific opinion leaders) are using social media management tools for scheduling updates. So what’s wrong with that?
Nothing in so far as its an effective way to stay relevant – but what about the personal dimension? After all, we are led to believe that Guy and other opinion leaders are human beings sharing content and engaging with those reading said content.
By and large this is not the case. Guy (and others) time is too valuable to spend all day posting and responding on social media. So who is reading and responding to readers’ comments? My guess is it’s probably a social media marketer, whose job is to sift a vast inbox of content suggested for sharing.
This content is then thrown in the hopper each day and the machine continues unabated. Of course the reality is that Guy and others are simply brands (with their own respective franchises) and they have become sub-channels within social platforms, which are recognized for quality content.
This is great if Guy and others are truly involved in the production and selection of their content, but very sad if those followers out there are really just blindly hoovering up whatever is thrown at them.
Equally, it seems a very good gig to be given such a huge platform within Linkedin. You don’t even need to produce your own content, just scrape the web, click, update, repeat. Perhaps platforms such as Linkedin should educate people to be a little more discerning and actually think about consuming (and writing) something vaguely original instead of recycling others content all the time.
Groups aside, it feels like Linkedin is eating itself, a bunch of social marketers, packaging and publishing content about, guess what – social media, which is read by guess who – social marketers!
The truth is that the vast majority of businesses have a huge variety of issues they face (aside from Social Marketing). It would be great if we could have more opinion leaders generating original content focusing on the specifics of particular industries. This might actually help foster some innovative thinking, which is sorely lacking right now.