Your cautionary advice is doubly apt for small business. Most will never engage an agency or consultancy that has developed real social marketing depth for a myriad of reasons.

So, they are stuck treating with lone practitioners and smaller houses, of limited experience and dubious quality who, too often, compound the risk their lack of experience engenders by delivering their “product” with such hubris as would make PT Barnum blush. Bad enough they prattle on about the “twitter revolution”, “laws of attraction” and such.

To make matters worse, their prospective clients, who know even less…much, much less, about social marketing are one bad month away from needing to “re-invent” themselves also and greedy for the silver bullet. They are susceptible to all manner of flimflam and boy are they getting it aplenty. The sharks are trolling the networking groups and chambers of commerce daily and growing fat but, never sated. The desperation for market share, new revenue and the “big marketing easy” has created a target rich environment for the predators.

Truth is nothing is going to stop the carnage until there is so much blood on the floor that no one can keep their footing. Then……?

Cluetrain manifesto indeed! We need a Clued-in manifesto instead.

Great post, excellent commentary.

For me, this fairly new marketing channel is all about results – and there are far too few who can produce them to prove the ROI of their efforts.

Time will tell, but your filters are a great start for creating a platform of accountability.

This is a really interesting post that created quite the topic of discussion at my work. We all here can relate to what you are saying – our clients are our priority and we put our time, energy and resources into them first, then concentrate on building our own stream of social media. Here’s some more of what we had to say about it: http://www.springcreekgroup.com/2009/03/338/?fbid=b5w4CEHHTYk.

Again, great post,

Cody