Social media dickwads on the hunt

While much of the tech blogosphere was pre-occupied with some faux bitchmeme about Paris or some such conference there was a much more interesting discussion going on elsewhere. A discussion that has some definite pros and cons with some social media dickwads acting like the world was coming to an end. All because Chris Brogan took part in a K-Mart social media experiment where they provided a select number of bloggers with a $500.00 gift card to spend in a K-Mart store (you mean there’s still some left?).

Once they had spent the money the bloggers were asked to write about their experience in a post that was to be clearly marked as Sponsored. Well Chris did just that only to find himself in the middle of a shitstorm – that I really don’t think he deserved. You can read the full post on Chris’ Dad-o-matic blog but it is plain to see that it is a Sponsored post. There is a couple of important points to keep in mind here:

• Chris posted it to the Dad-o-matic blog not his own social media blog. This was a perfect fit for the post and I have no problem with that. Now if he had posted it to his social media blog I might have raised an eyebrow and asked him is he was feeling okay.
• Chris might have made a mistake in believing that people were intelligent enough to make out the difference between Chris the father posting on Dad-o-matic and Chris the social media guru helping more people than you can count free of charge on his Chris Brogan blog.

Needless to say once his post hit the blogosphere the self-righteous social media experts came out in full force. It first started out on Twitter and then branched out to blogs. While a lot of the feedback was in support of Chris there were a rabid few who thought that he had done everything from sell out his brand to demean the whole social media ecosystem.

One person (Barb_G) even tried suggesting that Chris had created Dad-o-matic just for this K-Mart post

Barb_G: @jowyang Reading @chrisbrogan‘s kmart post, on new blog that seems to have been created for that, has changed my mind. It does hurt cred.

1 day ago · Reply · View Tweet

Excuse me but if you are going to insult someone’s integrity don’t you think you should do some basic background. The fact is that Dad-o-matic is a collaborative blog maintained by a bunch of dads – not just Chris and has been around for awhile now. The interesting thing is that all the comments on the original K-Mart post are nothing but positive just as are the comments on the post Chris wrote on his home blog about the bullshit surrounding this.

From where I sit I don’t see how anything Chris has done is wrong or has hurt his reputation in anyway. So if you are among the idiots who think this then you really need to get a grip on reality and stop feeling so self-important.

And for those of you who think that by clearly divorcing himself from his social media guru status and writing as a father on a totally separate blog in anyway hurts social media then you are a dickwad – get over yourself.