Would you buy a car from a salesman who didn't have a drivers' license?
Would you take tennis lessons from somebody who first picked up a racket last week?
Would you hire a nanny without first doing a background check?
Would you take singing lessons from Marge Simpson?
Didn't think so.
So then, why would you pay to take a class on "How to Use Twitter Effectively for Business" by somebody whose Twitter ratio looks like this:
?
Whose Twitter stream was only broadcasting what they were doing â€" "come to my workshop" this and "my business is having an event on ___, here's a link" that â€" and whose only visible interaction with anybody on Twitter was one lonely retweet . . . of their BUSINESS PARTNER'S, broadcasting yet another event they were having? Said person is also charging money to teach people how to use other social media tools "effectively" and "for your business" when they themselves are barely active on them.
One of my favorite people in the social media space (and now real life space), Amber Naslund, made a great point the other day:
Look, we need the craptastic shillers to showcase the good work when it's done. We need examples of lousy results and scattershot tactics because the people that are really digging deep to do good work will eventually look that much more brilliant, and their results will be that much more compelling.
. . . and I agree with her, so I'm not about to beat a dead horse. Said shiller above is somebody local to me. I'm not going to waste the time and energy calling this person out because a) I'm classier than that, and b) the universe will balance it out in the end, but please, folks, all I ask is that you just do your homework a little bit before forking over your cash.
I'm leaving you with this commentary by Perry Belcher, a guy I totally admire and adore for his ability to tell it like it is:
Kind of reminds me of the old rhetorical quip:
What do you call the guy who graduated last in his medical school class?