Tag Archive for 'conferences'

Josh has called out the fakers, the frauds and the fools in our industry. Especially those who present themselves as experts when their experience is inch deep and not much wider.

Many times recently I’ve been sitting in conferences listening to ‘experts’ talk about various subjects. I’ve always said my definition of expert, especially when it comes to social media, is loosely defined as ‘a few years ahead of you on the learning curve’. It’s funny though that these experts were asking ‘what is social media?’ just a short time ago.

So what do we do, as an industry, about the so-called experts?

For one thing, stop paying to go to conferences that are serving up these experts. And stop patronizing the sponsors of these conferences.

On the subject of conference sponsors, let’s reward those who are putting on quality programs. Let me plug the Society for New Communications Research’s Annual Research Symposium and Awards Gala in Boston next month. If you are reading this and interested in the Future of Our Industry(tm) you better plan on attending.

And what about the individual speakers and experts who give out advice like “add content to your company’s Wikipedia entry?”  How about naming names? Let’s use our collective Google-juice and make sure the permanent record is corrected.

That’s a start. Let a thousand flowers bloom in the comment section and throughout the marketing-blogosphere.