The comedian B.J. Mendelson is a master of social media. Mendelson was one of the few non-celebrities included on the old Twitter suggested user list and has now over 770,000 followers – a number that makes him a genuine player in the social media game. But in spite of his Twitter fame and his more than 60,000 tweets, Mendelson believes that social media is, to put it politely, crap. And to underline his skepticism about the value of social media networks to build brands, Mendelson has written a book titled Social Media is Bullshit which is out today. The book, as he told me when we Skyped earlier, reveals social media’s dirty secret. Networks like Twitter and Facebook, Mendelson argues, are “useless” in terms of raising the profile of aspiring artists. Twitter, he insists, has become “mostly a tool for comedians and journalists”. But for the rest of us, Mendelson says, it’s a graveyard.
So is Mendelson right? Is social media bullshit? Or is it actually B.J. himself who is full of crap?