Dearest blog snorkellers, you must be thinking this is your lucky fortnight. After months without word, I regale you with not one, but two, whole posts. You’ll recall my last was all a tad gloaty, pangs of vindication panging through my very being, as Mark Borkowski, PR Guru of this parish and to the stars, echoed some of my thinking on the dark and loathsome subject of social media and its appropriateness to sales and marketing. (Clue – it isn’t.)
You’d think that would be enough – my gloat chalice brimming to overflowing – but, no, hold, there’s more. This from a PR Week blog which says “Some PR people who chose to focus purely on social media campaigns are now finding it difficult to develop their careers further”. It appears that someone else has noticed the proliferation of social media gurus, the Imperial haberdashers, the guardians of the Sacred Shiny Object and has also noticed that as the smoke drifts and the mirrors stop reflecting, as the next big thing simply becomes another similarly-sized thing, our gurus are left without much to gurd. Some will survive, some will either learn new skills or remember the old ones, but many will disappear without trace. Oh, well.
And then. Oh – and then. Facebook floats. Many, many moons ago, in an overlooked and little-read post I said that the ‘book was not worth whatever frantic valuation was put on it then – some $50bn, I think. I seem to recall issuing the advice (received from someone far wiser than I) that when F’book floats, short it. Short the shit out of it.
I believe ‘shorting’ refers to the practice of agreeing to sell shares you do not own, at today’s price, in the belief that you will be able to fulfil the contract by buying the shares at a later date, for less than today’s price, thereby making a profit – the difference between today’s price and the lower price you pay in the future. According to this – if you’d sold $100k of Facebook shares short on the day of issue, you’d have made $11k profit within two days. I know that one slump does not a summer make, but still – not good, is it?
So – and I know this isn’t pretty – the four little words of my title? I f#cking told you so. (Ooops. That’s five.)
thewordmonger 