Social Media Snake Oil. Story Harsh?

But because it ignores some core underlying factors that surround the social media phenomena. Social Media Marketing (or to use the less commonly used phrase but more accurate in my opinioin, social influence marketing) is about tapping into the long tail of social influencers and encouraging them to do the marketing for you on the social platforms but also on your own websites. It is also about evolving a brand into a more social one with social voices from within and outside the organization supporting it. It is about recognizing that your customers aren't statistics but people whom you should listen to in real time and from whom you can learn (using whatever appropriate statistically significant tools you can). And, social media marketing can should be looked at with the same rigor and metrics as other forms of marketing. We do at Razorfish using the SIM Score and many other platform specific metrics. There's nothing abstract, vague or clumsy about this.

There are certainly skeptics as there should be. But I think a better story would have been to explain the state of social influence marketing, which brands are harnessing it successfully, which ones aren't and how the lines between PR, advertising, marketing, corporate communications and HR are all blurring. Maybe a story about some of the innovations that are changing marketing and blurring the lines between digital and non-digital might have been interesting. Or even something like the one Ad Age just did about the Super Bowl and how advertisers are using social media to extend their campaign ROI. Focusing on the consultants is not the important story and given how much attention BW has given to social in the past, it seems a little unusual to publish this simplistic perspective. Am I being too harsh?