When the economy first began to slide into the deep and ugly spiral that we have found ourselves in, rumors spread through the social media sphere about how corporate America would drop the bomb on traditional advertising and marketing budgets with shady ROI in favor of social media marketing in hopes of much smaller budgets with much larger brand impact.

And with this rumored influx of cash to the social media sphere, so began the “social media gold rush.” Headed west (figuratively) these newly professional millennials and middle managers struggling to stay relevant polished up their Web 2.0 speak to make a name for themselves and would take a few bucks from anyone who needed help setting up their Twitter account or cover up some embarrassing MySpace pics.

While eager to take advantage of this new financial opportunity, it became clear very quickly that the vast majority of this group was far too eager to don their new “social media guru” title on their resume, linkedin profile, twitter page and facebook info. They became little more than modern day snake oil salesman when their skills and professional creds just weren’t up to snuff.

The sad truth for many of these wannabe gurus is that just because you grew up with Facebook and were a Twitter early adopter, that doesn’t mean any of that knowledge is immediately transferable to the business world. You may be able to fool a few and sell them on your services, but as the economy continues its slide and each penny is even more closely watched than the last, only the real Web Strategists will survive.

The impact of this recession has played an interesting part in the evolution of the social media guru role. Unlike recessions in the past, there was no huge bubble or explosive downfall. The truth is that the trickle down effect of this recession has had most businesses running extremely lean for about 6 months now. Under those conditions, anyone that wasn’t able to clearly and immediately justify their value earned themselves a spot at the front of the like to get the axe.

While social media budgets ARE still being cut just as much as traditional marketing budgets, I think it is fair to say that it is at least easier to determine the real gurus from the snake oil salesman. With the extra financial pressure for a clear ROI, if you can’t prove your value, you aren’t going to make a living and will already have polished up your resume with a brand new set of skills.

In case you still aren’t sure who you are dealing with before hiring a social media consultant, Web Worker Daily has compiled a great starting point for questions to ask before offering any contracts.

While Twitter’s ranking on the “shiny new toy” scale has waned recently, you should never worry that there isn’t always something new waiting in the wings to hold the attention of social media geeks around the world few more minutes.

Enter: The Shorty Awards - for the best producers of short (140 characters or less on Twitter) content in 2008.

While it has evolved and proven itself, Twitter is still a pretty immature technology. If Twitter is like high school, consider the Shorty Awards a loosely organized popularity contest, complete with class clowns attempting to stuff the ballot box.

The Shorty Awards are completely driven users tweeting their votes and nominations for their favorite users in a number of different categories (best brand, advertising, business education, etc) helping to organically spread the word about the contest and spur even more voting.

But the truth is that most viral content on the web is complete fluff – eye catching, but lacking in any sort of real value, and that is where the Shorty Awards come in. As long as you have your expectations in order, you won’t miss a thing. Just try replacing The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal by getting all your real news from Digg.com and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And no, I’m not calling the latest apple product news or tech toy “real news.”

After a quick look at the list of Shorty Award nominees and those that weren’t named (but clearly should have been) it is clear that this is really just a group of Twitter users who have become the best at pimping themselves out to their followers with no clear understanding why they were doing it in the first place. The contest may be one of the worst ways of actually measuring public opinion, but may do a pretty decent job at measuring someone’s ability to blindly market themselves for an award that they themselves don’t completely understand the value of.

Even Melanie Notkin, a finalist in the Shorty Awards “Brand” category for Savvy Aunty, points out that a far more influential twitter user on behalf of their brand, Zappos CEO Tony Shieh, wasn’t even a finalist and decided to gracefully bow out of competition.

Everyone wanted to win, but no one is quite sure why. There is no big prize at the end. No BusinessWeek cover story. You just know that someone else wants it, and on that premise alone, so do you. Thankfully not everyone was so heavily struck with a case of shiny new toy syndrome and were actually able to call the Shorty Awards by what they actually are.
@mvolpe: “I think the shorty awards are total crap. Just saying.”

The ultimate winner in the brand category @MarthaVan, who tweets on behalf of Action Wipes, noted that for her “The challenge for a small business such as mine is always getting national publicity. I entered the contest in hopes that the national news would pick up on the awards and thus bring awareness to all the winners.”

For Martha, the time investment in promoting herself and outreaching to her followers for votes was well worth the gamble that winning would actually provide some real business value and lead to additional sales or national visibility for her company. So far, that time hasn’t come.

So much of what is emerging in social media is new and needs to be experimented with, tested and measured to fully understand its ultimate value, so I’m not blaming the Shorty Awards for any of their missteps along the way. I actually give them credit for playing around in this new area, but the true danger comes in when people begin mistaking what they are actually measuring and replace a fun experiment with a new are of technology for something with legitimate value.