The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.

Poster: Jeremiah Owyang

Blog name: Web Strategy

Company: Forrester Research

Backstory: Owyang is a social-media industry analyst who blogs and tweets regularly, although he says he has had to cut back on his posting because of other commitments. When he gets around to it, however, it’s really him sitting behind the screen: “I’m authentic, warts and all,” he says. That, he insists, is not the case with many of his web peers, who don’t manage their own social media efforts, hiring “virtual assistants” to respond to Facebook and Twitter messages and to write blog posts. And, he says, it’s a growing trend.

Blog entry: “So what does this mean? It means the social-media space is starting to look like just about every other industry that starts to get mainstream,” he writes. “Social media is often the premise built on 1:1 relationships, and even with technology, that clearly doesn’t scale.” He sets out a few possible reasons for the shift: “Maybe it’s the economy, with less resources, and more pressure. We’re all being stretched to the limits. Or maybe, this is the evolution of every industry—- music, art and film started out simple and pure, then became institutionalized. Or maybe, I just never bothered to look close enough.”

Postcript: Chris Saad, an entrepreneur, responded to Owyang in a post of his own with the headline, “Social Media Is Dead.” He argues that while it might be called “SOCIAL media”—it’s actually “PERSONAL media.” So, he suggested, people should not try to scale up their “one-to-one interactions” online. Rather than responding to all messages sent to them, for instance, they should simply ensure that “what you DO say is real.”

We asked Owyang, who has 45,000 followers on Twitter (@jowyang), how he maintains even the semblance of one-on-one interactions with his followers. “I have a hard time making 1:1 interactions,” he said, “so I tend to move conversations to private channels like Twitter DM and email (like this!)”

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