While social media can be a highly effective strategic marketing tool in the B2B space it seems that it has also spawned legions of people who feel compelled to weigh in on any and all topics with inane comments.

Yes social media is all about sharing various perspectives and opinions with colleagues around the world. However one would hope that people would be a little more judicious and respectful of other peoples’ time before automatically offering their advice and opinions especially when it comes to B2B social media. This wasn’t such a critical issue when social media was in its infancy a couple years ago and you had a limited number of people participating in the various groups. But as more and more people become involved finding the time to monitor all these conversations is becoming very difficult.

For example I belong to several social media marketing groups that I find very valuable and informative. There used to be a dozen or so “discussions” with each posting/update and many of them offered good advice and/or links to other sites where one could find valuable surveys articles white papers and solid information. Some of us would also pose questions to these groups and get valuable answers and suggestions in return.

It appears those good old days may be gone forever. Now many of these groups’ communiques have grown to 40 or 50 discussions per posting with 75% of them offering little value or substance. In many instances it appears these “conversations” are from people who can be categorized into one of five groups:

1)    People who are new to social media and just want to be able to say they are now “experienced” social media professionals because they regularly converse

2)    People who feel compelled to comment even if they don’t have anything new or useful to add

3)    People who don’t read the other “comments” and “conversations” and offer the same advice and/or ask the same questions that have already been posted

4)    People who are promoting a product or service which is against social media decorum.

5)    People who are truly engaged and have valuable comments or suggestions to offer

Unfortunately social media groups are attracting more people from the first three categories. As a result what used to be 12 conversations has grown to 50 conversations and what used to take a couple of minutes to scan and review now takes four times as long. There are still some golden nuggets of information among the various conversations but who has time to pan for gold these days?

My plea to all of you out there is this: Please engage whenever you can if you have something of value to add. If it is not of value please spare us your musings and meanderings.

And just so I’m not wasting your time with my meanderings here’s a golden nugget for you – I would highly recommend logging into Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog. I’ve found his blog to be extremely valuable at providing information surveys reports white papers and topics created by a team of experienced marketing experts. Nope he’s not a friend relative or even acquaintance just a great source for social media information.