Team Abraham Harrison and I join Olivier Blanchard in bidding adieu to the social media experts, social media gurus, and their band of 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!

(Via Marketing Conversation)

Zach Goldfarb wrote a great post over at the Washington Post and popped me an email to see if I had any comment on it. I did! The article was posted on Friday last and is called TechPost: Washington’s Twin Tech Towns. My comment starts right below the following video:

I attended the Spank party for Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk because I wanted to hang out with Robert and Gary.

I really must remind the reader that this is what the gathering was, a small get-together that mushroomed into a big event.

Unlike the Pulver Breakfasts or PodCamps, this gathering started as the ultimate cult-of-personality fest — even I popped there to meet THE Robert Scoble — and to meet folks I have known online, on Twitter, on Facebook, and in the blogosphere, for almost ten years!

Then it became an amazing schmooze-fest! I not only got to meet the Scobleizer and Mr. Wine Library TV but I met a dozen people I had only known virtually online!

I am very pleased to see things like this happen spontaneously in DC. It was fun, playful, generous, and I got to connect to people I had met a couple weeks prior at Geoff Livingston’s BlogPotomac such as the amazing and enthusiastic Shana Glickfield.

I must rush to mention that there were very few PR and marketing folks. There was the lovely Rachelle Lacroix from Fleishman-Hillard and a couple others — this was a group of people who were hard core geeks and nerds and programmers and developers and all the most choice horse meat in the world of entrepreneurs and programmers.

I may have read the crowd wrong, but we were all there for an audience with A-list blogger Robert Scoble and A-list video blogger, Gary Vaynerchuk.

I am still giddy that Gary Vaynerchuk recognized me from across the room and that Robert Scoble bragged to his friends that we had finally met after knowing each other online for close to 8 years.

I hope there are more of these!

Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison
http://www.abrahamharrison.com