Former Apple and Google brand evangelist Guy Kawasaki has plenty of people looking to him for tips on social media strategy, but clearly R/GA isn’t one of them.
The digital agency took to Twitter to openly mock Kawasaki’s latest LinkedIn post titled “Behind The Scenes: How I Post on Social Media.” The LinkedIn post was originally tweeted out (sarcastically) by the very funny digital marketing satire account @ProfJeffJarvis:
@ProfJeffJarvis Oh my god.
— R/GA (@RGA) September 23, 2014
R/GA then made its disdain known for the article with a tweet of its own:
Read this and then do the exact opposite of everything it advises: https://t.co/FAxu0E8XBO (via @ProfJeffJarvis)
— R/GA (@RGA) September 23, 2014
What exactly was it about the article that annoyed R/GA so much? For starters, whoever was running the agency’s Twitter account took issue with Kawasaki’s high-handedness about being a social media guru:
Social media will improve vastly when people who practice it for a living stop trying to mystify it or elevate it to high art/science.
— R/GA (@RGA) September 23, 2014
And they also called out Kawasaki for being patronizing towards his audience:
“I share approx. 10-50 posts every day to provide a constant flow of information, analysis, education & assistance.” IT’S MY GIFT TO YOU.
— R/GA (@RGA) September 23, 2014
Kawasaki didn’t help matters by giving out this piece of not-so-great advice in his article:
And you read this right: identical tweets are made four times. This is because I did tests and observed that when you tweet something four times, you get four or more times the traffic. Only wimps tweet everything only once.
It’s true, tweeting once won’t help your cause, but neither will tweeting the same thing multiple times. In fact Twitter has now started cracking down on multiple identical posts to stop people from spamming audiences.
But it was probably Kawasaki’s blatant product placements throughout the article, that caused the most offense. Kawasaki heavily promoted the use of content sharing tools Alltop, MyAlltop, and HolyKaw and Buffer, ending the article with this smug disclaimer:
Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Alltop which contains MyAlltop and HolyKaw. I advise Buffer. I am the chief evangelist of Canva. No one can say I don’t eat my own dogfood.
Let the hyper-thinkfluencer wars begin!
