Adieu to the Social Media A-List from Olivier Blanchard

Team Abraham Harrison, and I, join Olivier Blanchard in bidding adieu to the social media experts, social media gurus, and their merry “curious little cult of personality” pranksters. The king is dead, long live the king:

Sometime between August of 2010 and January of 2011, something changed. Something tipped. Your momentum died. The pendulum started to swing back. More people started to see past the BS than fell for it. At long last, the ratio of savvy to gullible tipped in the favor of progress. And what became clear was that the damage you caused by concentrating your astounding ineptitude, supercharged egos and overpriced bad advice created a wealth of opportunity for those of us who care more about doing good work than in building our own “personal brands,” “content strategies” or affiliate networks. Those of us focused on making social media actually work for the business world rather than earning Fortune 500 bragging rights in the digital “consulting” space, if that is what you want to call it. The beauty of your scheme is that what you broke requires fixing now. That means an increasing amount of work for people with the skill to rebuild social media programs from scratch, and do it right.

This one paragraph does not do In praise of the A-List justice so please go read it yourself.  The only problem with the post is that it is nuanced and subtle and ironic and satirical and very snarky – so there is just about zero chance that the cadre of folks dressed down in the blog post with ever truly recognize themselves at all — so, alas, my friend Olivier, you’re doing a Shakespeare, which is to say that all the people who you’re mocking are joining you in mocking themselves without ever realizing it.

Here’s the hint: how psyched are you about SXSW?

However, assuming that your message is getting through, I agree that something shifted and I am excited about doing more business, offering more results, creating more value, and a time when all the wounds that all these social media a-listers inflicted heal and they’re willing to try again — and there, at the end, will be Mr. Blanchard, my agency, and me. 

Bravo!