@Steve: What you say is true.. so long as the people doing the hiring actually require results.

When it Absolutely, Positively has to get done, or else you, your company, and potentially your PARENT COMPANY are all going to lose face, lose money or lose business, you can’t afford to pass the rock to unreliable people.

The grey area occurs when there’s no actual yardstick for measuring success or failure.

A lot of Social Media “success” is defined by attention as opposed to the quality of the work. It’s defined by “eyeballs” and “hits” and “views”. It doesn’t matter WHAT the people are viewing or WHO the people are that are viewing the video, so long as you can turn around and say to your superiors “We paid X amount of dollars for Y number of people to become aware of [whatever we're selling].

Because of this, it makes more sense to the bottom line to hire someone that sucks at creating media but comes with an instant fanbase of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. The concept being that regardless of what this person creates, a percentage of their fanbois will come to click on the page and then the video.

You actually see this effect every year when they have these “Sexiest Male In Social Media” contests and the most drab-looking people get the most votes because they have the most fans and nobody cares about such a stupid concept as a sexy male. That’s reserved for the females, where the hottest chick wins the contest whether she’s associated with Social Media or not.

The funny/pathetic part is that there’s no room for rewarding quality in these situations, because if you create infinitely better media but you have less of a following, the company has to depend on ITS OWN FOLLOWING as well as its own grasp and implementation of Social Media to get the audience to watch your content. Better quality + way fewer hits/views = Your project doesn’t get funded again and/or you get fired.

It gets even worse when the people doing the hiring are fanbois to begin with, so they’re more impressed with the ‘fishbowl rockstar’ qualities of the snake oil salesman than the ability of the actual professional to make their company look competent & professional.
 
 
I’d also like to address a couple of friends of mine that informed me that they felt I sounded angry in my post. :) I’m not angry at all because I’m not involved in this situation.

I do REAL work for REAL companies, and have for more than a decade.

I’m just saying that it’s embarrassing to me that by associating myself with Social Media and saying that I create videos that play on the internet, people automatically assume low quality and skateboarding dog videos because the industry’s more interested in cutting corners than producing quality programming.

I wrote “Why Professionals Avoid Web Video” in September 2008 and more than a year later, I’d probably write an extremely similar article. I expected more from “the space”, but it didn’t materialize. Am I extremely disappointed? Yes. Does it matter to me at all? Nope. :D