Departure to Athens For Eurotrip 2013: Free Wifi in the airport

Just arrived in the departure terminal of Schiphol Airport for the trip to Athens. Our Eurotrip 2013 students are already there and seem to have (at least some of them) a nice view to Acropolis from their rooms.
The Wifi in the area I sit is overloaded at the moment but fortunately I can use my smartphone as station; you can get 1 hour internet connection for free in the airport so it seems that everyone is using this possibility at the moment. I must say that more and more businesses in the hospitality sector realize now how important is free internet access for their customers. This is something different than even 5-6 years ago when such free online access was very limited in public spaces and you had to pay 10 Euro per day in the hotel to get a slow internet connection through a cable.

The overload system at this moment here in Schiphol indicates that some extra capacity is needed in busy areas but I am sure the airport will listen to some complaints about it and react. I will send a tweet also soon.
For the rest nice weather here, in Athens seems to be a nice weather too, only much warmer!

EuroTrip 2013: What are the effects of the Euro crisis on Greek businesses

With a group of 22  of our 2nd and 3rd year students we start from Monday the EuroTrip 2013, a study trip that is part of our Business Administration curriculum on the University of Twente organised by the study association STESS. A busy program with one lecture in the Athens University of Economics and Business and 7 business visits the students will try to figure out what are the effects of the crisis in the country worst hit by it on their strategy and marketing activities.
It promises to be a very interesting and educational trip

Details in my Twitter and this blog the most interesting news from the trip.

The Airline Cookie Conspiracy Part II

One of the most popular posts for the visitors of this blog is the post about the Airline Cookie Conspiracy. To groups of my students are working on writing a paper where the methodology and results of our experiment will be documented in detail, we hope also to publish at least one of the papers in a scientific journal or conference.  The papers will be also available as working papers as soon as they are ready (around the end of May). If anyone is interested for a copy send an email to e.constantinides@utwente.nl

Collaborative Marketing issues

From McKinseey Qarterly

Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Video?vid=4505

Co-Innovation, The Customer as Innovation Motor

In the SOMERE web site you can read my white paper on Co-Innovation. What is this? Co-Creation by means of Social Media platforms
http://www.somere.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Innovation-21-white-paper-final-Constantinides-1.pdf

Accidental message

My apologies to colleagues or contacts who received an email about a new blog post, the email was not intentional and was sent accidentally.

Co-Innovation: The customer as innovation motor White Paper

INNOVATION IS A WAY OF FULFILLING changing customer needs by developing new and better solutions; it is also one of the most extensively discussed issues in the academic literature and field practice. Innovation has been identified as a necessary condition for survival and growth in an ever changing global world. Many corporations have based their market success on a continuous and consistent market leadership based on their innovative power and potential: IBM, Apple, Intel, Amazon and Google are well known pioneers in their markets. Under increasing competition and market pressure the innovation process has been subject to important transformation during the last 30 years; from being traditionally a “closed’, internal process, based on internal organizational expertise and structures (R&D, New Product Department, New product Management etc.) the innovation process is increasingly becoming externally oriented. Chesbrough (2003) popularized the trend of externalizing the innovation process by engaging innovation partners in what he called the Open Innovation model...  Read the rest in my new White Paper by downloading it in the SOMERE.nl web site or clicking to the New Publications--->

Marketing in crisis: what's the way out?

In his 2004 book Marketing As Strategy Nirmalya Kumar expressed his views on how the marketing profession can escape from the destructive route it is riding the last years and transform to a business activity that will regain the respect of the public and CEOs. If we believe the latest findings of the study conducted by the of the Fournaise Marketing group in 2011 not much has changed since: Marketers are still not seen by the majority of CEOs as a a real asset: "73% of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility: They can't prove they generate business growth".
This is a worrying fact and a red flag that field marketers and academics should take seriously. We academics must realize that there seems to be a gap between what we teach our students in college, what they will be asked to do when they enter the field and what their CEOs expect from them. Field marketers on the other hand must understand the big change in the marketplace called customer empowerment. One of the symptoms of this change is the fact that the public is mistrusting marketers, mainly those insisting on monologues, one way communication and those who still think that they know better than their customers what they need and want.
One of the interesting issues highlighted in the report is the perception of  the majority of CEOs that "They (Marketers) are focused too much on the latest trends such as social media, because they believe they represent the new marketing frontiers - but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help generate more business for the company".
Interesting remark but it should not surprise us, there are very few marketing activities that can really and clearly demonstrate how they help generate more business for the company, so in fact we do not talk about a new problem here.
To my opinion the whole issue is simple, many marketers never learned to be critical of themselves and were also never critical of trends and hypes. In a number of earlier posts in this blog I highlighted the Social Media "experts" explosion threatening to derail the social media marketing. The social media is indeed an important marketing landmark as well as an important social phenomenon; it is also a major challenge to marketers who have to learn new ways of dealing with the new customer. This simply means listening to the customer's (social) voice, engage customers and stop broadcasting; the customer is now the powerful party and the sooner marketers realize this the better.
Douglas McGregor wrote in 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise where on the basis of the X - Y theory he urged organizations to pursue their objectives by engaging their personnel rather than managing it. That means to look for ways to develop and use the potential of their employees rather than trying to manage them by means of control and punishment. Marketers should in analogy look for ways to help their customers to meet their objectives and needs by listening to them, getting them involved in their business processes and becoming their advocates. This will be The Human Side of Marketing that the empowered customers expect to experience today.

So if we talk about a way out of the crisis in Marketing theory and practice the best course to follow is to get back to the basics: Listen to the customer voice and try to understand who the new customer is. This will help us marketers to transform our picture based on the mass marketing era and device ways to communicate with the customer on personal, individual level. A basic requirement here is to understand that we are not the powerful party any more and that our brand is not our property any more either. Successful business of the future will be those finding ways to engage the customer successfully, address the individual customer needs and use the customer intelligence as a source of innovation.

Back to business

This is the second week of the 1st semester here in the University of Twente and things go well: Many students (our International BA in Business Administration program has more than 250 first-year students in its third year from start). Together with the class Marketing for the Industrial Engineering and Management and the Minor Business Administration I have about 400 students to teach in this quarter. The program includes also workshops and guest lectures.
This week we kicked-off the Marketing Assignment: about 70 groups of students from 3 classes will put all their creativity and enthusiasm to work in order to develop the best strategy for the online presence of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. Traditionally this project is always about online marketing of cultural, non profit institutions: We started with the Acropolis Museum in 2010, in 2011 we had the LVR-Archaelogical Park Xanten in Germany (the ancient Roman city of Colonia Ulpia Traiana) as subject.
Regarding research, our new focus on E-Marketing lays on Co-Innovation: Innovating together with your customers in Social Media platforms. I thought to use the term Social Innovation yet but a Google search indicated that this term is already used for other purposes. So Co-Innovation is the term that my colleagues and myself will use from now on.
The organization of the Social Media Practice congress on the 6th of November is another activity that keeps me busy, we as University of Twente participate in this with a survey that is conducted now aiming at the identification of social media strategies among Dutch firms in the North and East of the country, The "most social" company will receive also the congress award.

Co-Innovation: A subject for the Digital Agenda for Europe?

Since a week or so I participate in the forum of the Digital Agenda for Europe http://daa.ec.europa.eu/group/8/content.
In the issue of Innovation and Entrepreneurship I argue for including the issue of Co-Innovation in the Digital Agenda. My comment on the forum was meant to address the question if Co-Innovation is the same as Living Labs and whether there are successful examples. Also whether the issue is interesting enough for the EU Digital Agenda. My comment below:

The Co-Innovation has a number of common elements with Living Labs but it is in many respects they are different: while both are focused on innovation the Living Labs are commonly seen as mostly structured, institutionalized projects often having at societal or technical innovation focus. We consider Co-Innovation primarily as a marketing strategy aiming at engaging the final customer in product or services innovation processes taking place in digital environment and often making use of social media tools. The central question is how to effectively tap the customer creativity in order to innovate faster, cheaper, more efficiently i.e. reducing the ratio of unsuccessful products / services. In this sense the co-innovation goes one step further than the concept of the Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) that propagates innovation in cooperation with the supply chain partners.

In the very heart of the Co-Innovation concept (also known as co-creation, crowdsourcing, or distributed co-creation to mention some of the most common terms) lays the empowered and sophisticated consumer who understands the effects of the democratization of technology and feels powerful enough to require participation in new product development processes. The sources of the customer empowerment are the new ICTs and more importantly the social media. The modern consumer furthermore is quite individualistic and willing to pay more for products tailored to his/her specific needs or having a very personal character. The industry response to this trend is known as Mass Customization; this is often seen also as a form of co-innovation.
While the co-creation is not by any means a new concept) in the marketing literature and practice (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004) it is interesting to analyze and understand how this phenomenon develops in digital and networked environments. A primary focus in our research is to provide conceptual clarity around this issue and develop theories and models useful for the business operating in increasingly open, global and customer dominated environments. In that sense a prime objective is to develop a typology of co-innovation practices since there are different types of it; these types are characterized by different scope, different motives and different rewards for the participants. Next to this a number of interesting research issues require more research, experimentation and practical applications in order to fully understand the issue. The bottom line is to provide businesses with sustainable competitive advantages through efficient innovation processes based on customer creativity and engagement.
Regarding successful corporate examples there are many of them. Examples range from businesses who seem to have no need for R&D anymore since all new product ideas and development comes from the customers. Examples: The t-shirt producer Threadless http://www.threadless.com/ and LEGO http://mln.lego.com/en-us/network/status.aspx?ReturnUrl=/Default.aspx are known and typical examples.
Other companies use co-innovation approaches in order to collect new product ideas like P&G https://secure3.verticali.net/pg-connection-portal/ctx/noauth/PortalHome.do ,
Ford Motors http://social.ford.com/your-ideas/technologies/performance/ , Starbucks http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ , Dell Computers http://www.ideastorm.com/ and NOKIA http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Discussion/content.php ).
In some cases co-innovation is about incremental, yet important innovations like customized packaging (Heineken http://www.facebook.com/heineken?sk=app_256849211027281 ) using social media as interaction platforms. Often attracting customer creativity takes the form of marketing actions (OSRAM http://www.led-emotionalize.com/ ) or it is focused on creation of communication concepts at low cost using amateur creativity (HEINZ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh2FBhPGcHg ).
In some cases co-innovation is focused on finding solutions to technical problems arising in the process of innovation; such efforts to engage third parties as problem solvers include often a financial reward. There are many examples of “knowledge brokers” who facilitate such processes. www.innocentive.com . Another related area where co-innovation practices apply is the practice of engaging company employees in solving complicated management problems; these practices are known as Prediction Markets.
Finally plenty of mainly anecdotal evidence indicates that the concept is successful, yet relatively a very small percentage of businesses are open to the idea of engaging the customer in the innovation process that they see always as a proprietary one. To my opinion Co-Innovation can become a source of competitive advantage for European companies (and maybe European institutions and governments). I think that the EU should promote the concept or at least discuss it; the more opinions the better. In the University of Twente the issue in any case is on our research agenda.


Chesbrough, H.W. (2003) Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing
Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004) Co-creation Experiences: The next practice in Value Creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5-14.

The impact of Social Media on top brands in The Netherlands

The Dutch Magazine of Marketing (Tijdschrift van Marketing) publishes in the April edition the results of a study conducted among the top 100 brands in The Netherlands based on their advertising budget. The study conducted by Greenberry analysed more than 1.8 million messages during a period of 3 months.As sources were used channels like Twitter, Facebook, Hyves (a popular Dutch social networking site) YouTube and various weblogs.
The results are quite interesting for a number of reasons; this is one of the few studies in the area to begin with. Furthermore (and maybe surprisingly) the well known 80/20 rule of thumb seems to apply also here : The 25 bigger brands are good for 80% of the total message volume. The top 25 brands had on the average 627 messages about them in the social media per day. Another finding is that the most "Social" brand is the Dutch Rail with 274.000 messages in 3 months (almost 3.000 per day) followed by the telecom KPN. The supermarket chain Alber Heijn is nr. 3 followed by the bank ING. Interestingly in the top 10 are included two more telecoms: T-Mobile (nr 5) and Vodafone (nr 7).
The picture is a bit different if we look to the reach of the messages: The average reach for the top 10 brands was 41 million users in the period of 3 months with the Dutch Railways (NS) on the top with 121 million. Interestingly the KPN who is nr 2 in the number of total messages is surpassed by T-Mobile as to the reach.
The sentiment of the messages was also analysed and here I think some of the toppers in the list of social activity and reach were less happy about the findings: The NS, Vodafone, KPN and T-Mobile are among the top 10 as to the negative sentiment of the messages! Being a social brand is therefore not the silver bullet. It seems that some of the most online social brands in Holland are social for the wrong reasons! The customer is talking about brands online but it seems that most of the talk is negative.

Time for a new definition of the term MARKETING?

The latest definition of the term Marketing by the American Marketing Association (AMA) dates from 2007. Marketing is defined as " the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large".
In a post of this blog in 2008 I commented on the fact that this definition replaced another one, just 3 years after its introduction in 2004. The 2004 definition was obviously heavily criticised for its myopic view on marketing.
While many traditional marketers (and other stakeholders) were obviously pleased with the 2007 AMA definition of Marketing - it is found today in almost all marketing textbooks - I think that this definition is again at the end of its life cycle; most young people entering today the marketing domain as professional would have problems to accept it.
This because a few things have dramatically changed since 2007, most important one being the staggering growth of the social media domain and the subsequent customer empowerment as a result of it. While the 2007 AMA definition is underlining the role of marketing for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings it completely ignores the customer domination of the marketplace and a number of other facts that the social media explosion has introduced to the marketing reality.
There are two main drawbacks in this definition: The first is that it is still based on the one-way, broadcasting type of thinking that still dominates the thinking of older marketers. In a customer-dominated market the broadcasting attitude must be replaced by an interactive one based on listening and engagement.
The second issue here is that two basic elements of the definition have been transformed today in something completely different than what they used to be: the creation and the communication.

• "creation" is rapidly replaced by "co-creation". Businesses failing to tap the customer creativity in developing new products, services and communication concepts will be the laggards of the future.   
• Old fashion "Communication" by means of mass media is rapidly losing ground and influence. Looking to a billboard this morning on the way to the office I suddenly realised that the only function of the ad displayed there was to inform me about a product and nothing else! My customer journey will actually start behind my laptop, iPad or smartphone where I would go searching about the product I saw by reading reviews and opinions of those who already bought it. The message is not anymore the  medium: The Customer is the medium (and the message).

These simple realities make the latest Marketing definition obsolete. I could fill pages explaining this further but I think the bottom line is that Marketing academics must bend again over the drawing board and redefine the term marketing. We are already late with this: our students and the field are waiting.

Bloggers Beware: Consumers’ Trust Is on the Wane

"Consumer trust in bloggers remained low in 2011, with only 26 percent indicating that they trusted the advice and opinions found in blogs. Additionally, 86 percent of consumers question the truthfulness of a post written by a blogger who has received a free sample in exchange for writing a review. Although consumers continue to rely heavily on the Internet to inform purchasing decisions, bloggers are struggling to achieve the credibility of other online sources. We ponder whether a credible third party can provide the level of authority previously reserved for journalists in traditional media. Credible bloggers clearly exist, as indicated by the massive following some of them enjoy. However, the sheer number of bloggers online highlights the need for a way to differentiate and portray credibility."
Source: Understanding the Role of the Internet in the lives of consumers, 2012 Digital Influence Index, Annual Global Study, Fleishman -  Hillard http://fleishmanhillard.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/2012-DII-White-Paper.pdf

A post that attracted my attention yesterday. Are we bloggers facing a credibility crisis? Only 26% of the online public is trusting our opinions and advice? Has blogging become too mainstream? Or is much nonsense posted? Interesting questions and maybe time for some research here.

One prediction about the future of the Social Media and one promise

The question I have the most problems to answer (usually asked by someone in the audience after a talk about Social Media) is to tell what my predictions are for the future of Social Media. The difficulty to answer has to do with several factors, the most important being the unpredictable character of people (who are the main factor behind the social media phenomenon) and the ever changing technological context (including the developments of innovative Social Media apps). If you want to give a sound answer to this question you need to make some concrete assumptions and develop different scenarios. This is something that I do not dare to attempt in a 3 minute answer and mostly I disappoint my audience saying just this.

The truth is that most people have no problem with this question at all. This morning I googled "predictions" AND "Social" AND "Media" AND "2012" and received 147 mil results!!! It seems that by now almost everyone has become an expert in Social Media and many of these experts have also developed the charisma of prognosticator!
Looking randomly to some of these predictions you can find everything you can imagine: from copying of predictions of others to some serious attempts to say something, some logical predictions, a lot of trivia, much wishful thinking or even pure crap. It would be interesting to repeat this Google query replacing "2012" with "2010" and write an article about the sense and nonsense of the 2010 predictions. Or rather write a book for that matter.

But seriously, I feel embarrassed that I do not want to predict the future because some people really expect me to do that. So for the first time I will do one prediction for the future of Social Media and a promise:
The prediction is that the Social Media is not a bubble (not much of a prediction I am afraid but it is mu opinion to a fundamental question) and that we are already on the way to Social Media 2.0. What is Social Media 2.0 I cannot say yet with certainty. With my colleagues and our students in SOMERE we will try to figure this out and hopefully soon come with a white paper about this subject.

Facebook never forgets you

Regular followers of this blog can maybe remember that in May 2010 I gave up my Facebook account and till today very proud to belong to the minority without an account to THE Social Network. However from the social media marketing researcher's perspective this proved to be not very handy! I occasionally am refused to look to marketing actions of known and less known brands in their Facebook pages because I have no account in it. So today I took the big decision to open a new account but strictly for scientific purposes! That means no friends and contacts online and a name that would conceal my identity. I gave the right gender and date of birth but no other information whatsoever. To avoid the flux of invitations for Facebook" friendships" I made the content of my page invisible to everyone except myself. You can imagine my surprise when in a few milliseconds after the account was made my screen was full with pictures and names of people all known to me inviting me to become friends!!! The system knew exactly who I was despite the new name and the lack of any information about me.

So what's the snag? Nothing more than "browser fingerprinting" I read about some time ago in combination I think with information stored in the Facebook data mines from my previous account (closed in 2010 as I mentioned earlier). It must be a piece of cake for the Facebook algorithms to recognize me and find instantly about one hundred potential "friends" and "likes".

Conclusion: once in Facebook forever in Facebook. Despite all talk and legislation protecting our privacy the simple truth is that there is no way to erase personal information once it is stored in the memory boards of Facebook's (and for sure many other social networks). The other question of course here is how much personal information is stored there and what exactly happens with it. If you want to find out you must follow the example of the Austrian law student Max Scherms

The Future of Social Web?

An interesting talk on to the future of the (Social) Web by Forrester's CEO George Colony during LEWEB 2011. 

He foresees three major "Social Thunderstorms" : The Death of the Web (not the death of the Internet), The Social saturation, and the Social Enterprise. Of course next to these trends attention needs to be paid to the real social thunderstorms namely the Social Effects of the Social Media 2.0 era. Hope to have more to say about this soon.

Are Top Managers the (Top) Laggards of Social Media?

A white paper published by the Dutch education and strategy consulting firm MarketingMonday reveals that CEOs and CFOs of the biggest Dutch companies (50 corporations from the AEX and AMX  and American companies (first 100 in the Fortune500 list) are to their great majority no users of Social Media. The study was focused on the active use of Facebook, Hyves (the most popular Dutch social networking site), LinkedIn and Twitter in Holland and of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the US.

The most important findings: biggest corporations top managers' participation in Social Media

Dutch CEOs / CFOs                                                    US CEOs
LinkedIn                         26%                                      LinkedIn                 8%
Facebook                         6%                                      Facebook               7%
Twitter                              1%                                      Twitter                    2%
Hyves                               1%

It is interesting that the penetration of social media is higher among Dutch top managers than their American counterparts. The study also looked to the use of social media by the CEOs of the 100 fastest growing US businesses according to the CNNMoney.com. Surprisingly the percentages are exactly the same as the US 100 biggest corporations!

US CEOs of 100 fastest growing corporations
LinkedIn 8%

Facebook 7%

Twitter 2%


The MarketingMonday report attributes the low adoption rates of social media to eight reasons: Age, Income and Education level, Knowledge, Time, Regulations, Fear, Cultur and Lack of Transparency. They also strongly recommend to CEOs to use social media indeed, mentioning several advantages for them and their company.

I think that age and lack of time are the main reasons for the low adoption of social media by top managers. On the other hand I have serious doubt that a CEO Facebook page will add much to the image of a big corporation. The names of CEOs are largely unknown to the public and few consumers will become friends of them. Those who would possibly be interested to become their friends are other CEOs and top managers who for all intents and purposes are also no users of social media.

Twitter Spam: new headache for the social nedia user?

I don't know about you but my Junk email file has been substantially smaller the last months. Busting some mafia email spam networks seems to be the reason for this but I suspect that the email spam aficionados realize that email spam finds itself in the decline stage of its life cycle. A new form of spam seems to be emerging though. Counting on the increasing popularity of the social media the spammers try now to use these as spam platforms. Twitter spam seems to be the new emerging headache for Twitter users; this takes sometimes very subtle and sophisticated forms. Do we now need a Twitter spam filter? An interesting post in WIRED

En route to Social Media 2.0?

On 2007 I wrote an article co-authored by my Master student Stefan Fountain* (published in 2008 in the Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice) arguing that businesses could use efficiently the Social Media (the term Web 2.0 was more popular at that time) as Marketing tools. As you might remember at that time businesses were looking puzzled and helpless to the alarming signs of growing customer empowerment through the Social Media Revolution. For me and those following the developments closely at that time, was clear that the Social Media will be the next big thing in the Internet evolution and the next frontier for business strategists.
Today, just four years later, the Web 2.0 / Social Media movement (described as Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff) has been firmly embedded in the minds and hearts of online users and business strategists alike. The Social Media have also become substantial channels of political expression and tools of citizen empowerment beyond the control of states or regimes.   The online users using social media as part of their daily routines has reached the hundreds of millions. With more than 50% of consumers using “smartphones, social networks and other emerging tools” McKinsey talks in a recent report about the customer becoming a media junkie. On the other hand the staggering adoption rates of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn by businesses has created a gold rush atmosphere reminding the dot.com age. In a recent report published here in Holland presenting the results of a survey about the adoption of the social media by businesses (Social Media Monitor, 2011) we read that by now 90% of the top 100 brands in Holland have now adopted the Social Media as part of their strategy, up from 67% last year;  48% of them has already a Social Media Manager in place. This has happened for more businesses very swiftly: only 5 from the brands that participated in the survey were active in social media longer than three years while the majority (56%) was active between six months and two years in social media.
While the picture looks encouraging we could ask ourselves whether the social media as marketing strategy is reaching its maturity stage and more importantly what will be the next step. I am afraid that soon we will detect the first signals of saturation: Any marketing tool when adopted by everyone is losing its effectiveness and uniqueness. The same I would expect to happen with the Social Media soon, mainly as a result of the unbalanced focus of businesses in 4-5 social media platforms and the very limited use of the social media as tools for promoting innovation, co-creation and mass customization. In the above mentioned Social Media Monitor we can clearly see that social networks are hardly used for R&D purposes. Furthermore there is little attention on the identification of Brand Promoters or Super Promoters as customer influencers while the social media domain is underutilized by most SMEs as (free) source of market intelligence.

Al in all a mixed picture on the status of social media as strategic marketing tools. On one hand the threat of saturation due to one-sided focus, on the other hand opportunities hardly utilized. Time for the Social Media 2.0 era?
* Constantinides E., Fountain S., 2008, Web 2.0: Conceptual foundations and Marketing Issues, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, vol 9, nr 3, pp. 231 – 244

The tragedy of the (Social Media) gurus

In this blog I raised a number of times the red flag about the well-known phenomenon of "experts" or "gurus" etc. who mushroom when management hypes erupt. The Social Media hype could not be an exception so with a lot of interest I read the post in the blog of Stephan ten Kate titled (in Dutch*) " The public ends the deception of Social media experts". 
One thing some Social Media experts seem to ignore is that today there are no secrets, the public has the means and the will to scrutinize everything; treating the customer with respect is now the rule. In the good old days we would say that one unhappy customer might talk about the bad experiences to 10-12 others. Today an unhappy customer can reach thousands or even millions with his/her bad experience. The Social Media have made today the Word Of Mouth potential advantage but also a substantial risk factor for those making unsubstantiated and bases product (or service) claims. The post of Stephan shows clearly what the power of the Social Media is; he talks also about this in his reflection.
*For non-Dutch speakers a Google translation could help at least for the text!