Social media is like fly fishing. Traditional media is a stick of dynamite. Oh, and stay away from the peach flavoured Serbian booze, says Jeremy Probert

Oh! There you are. And there was I, a couple of years ago, in Belgrade, attending a press function. As you do. As the event wound down, I got into conversation (over a complementary glass of the local hooch, which is - to all intents and purposes - peach flavoured meths) with the lady from the PR agency. She told me that she mainly worked with social and also said - and here I had to question whether I’m actually wasting the money I give to that nice Mr Clinique and his wonderful male grooming range - that I would probably hate social.

And maybe it’s because I’m a bit old, or maybe it’s because I feel the Emperor is slightly bereft in the vestements department, or maybe (altogether) it’s because I’m a Londoner, I rose to the bait and developed the fish metaphor for social media. Or maybe it was because of the peach flavoured meths, which, I have to admit, is the only drink in recent times that I have had to put down unfinished. If you ever find yourself in Belgrade - well, just don’t.

So I asked the nice lady how she measured her work in social. How she could actually deliver a sensible measure of ROI to her client. What she felt was achieved by the whole social media effort. Whether, in point of fact, there were any tangible results at all. And we progressed to the big debate around social media vs. the commercial (sales) objectives of a client and, further, the aim of PR period. After all, what does PR do - if not sell products through image and reputation creation?

Using social media as a commercial tool is like fly fishing. You cast your fly and all the little fishes are thinking “oooooo - look at this, something new, are we going to like it?” But to hook them, you’ve got to be careful. Adding a commercial message at the wrong time is like striking too soon - you rip back the rod and the fishies scatter, never to be seen again. And unlike fish, which are renowned for being stupid, your social media audience will never come back. However, even if you strike at the right time, then your reward is one fish or if you’ve got a few hooks, several fish. OK, so they’re yours to do what you will with, but it’s still just a few fish.

Traditional media is like a stick of dynamite. Get the story right, get the mass coverage - BOOM. Fish. Everywhere. OK, they may not all be the right fish, but amongst your gasping, flapping haul, there’s going to be a great deal of the right fish. And, not that I’ve ever bought a stick of dynamite, but it’s got to be cheaper than a couple of days fly fishing on a decent stretch of river. And that’s the deal - working against social media is disproportionately expensive, especially as you - no matter what anyone says - cannot measure the direct results.

The recent bankruptcy of Syncapse has done nothing to convince me otherwise. Syncapse, a ‘social media marketing management company’ (oh yes) had an enviable roster of blue chip companies. But somehow it never made any money. Its reliance on Blackberry as its main revenue stream was, apparently, its undoing but – and this is the key bit – Jim Edwards of Business Insider concluded his article with the words, “Worryingly, every time we’ve seen hard numbers come out of social media marketing companies — even the successful ones — they’ve always been losing money.”

And this won’t change (Mystic Jeremy predicts...) while the Pew Internet and American Life Project (no, I don’t care if it’s made up) is telling us that “86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints — ranging from clearing cookies to encrypting their email (and) 55% of internet users have taken steps to avoid observation by specific people, organizations, or the government”. All because – in the prescient words of Zuckerberg : “Privacy is no longer the norm.” It’s overfishing in the digital age.