Kansas City with the Russian Accent’s Meesha V. caused quite an uproar in the social media community with his post this week that lambasted the case study that Kansas City social media tracking company Spiral 16 did regarding the blogger preview of AMC’s Fork & Screen.

I’ve got a lot invested in this one. Not only did I attend the blogger preview (and blogged about it here), but I have made friends with AMC’s Justin Gardner, Spiral 16′s Whitney Mathews (who wrote the original and completely unattributed case study that Meesha liberally lifted from in his post) and other bloggers who attended the event.

There are always going to be people like Meesha who believe that as marketers we should just leave some things alone. That may be true. But I cannot fault Justin or AMC for trying something new when it comes to marketing to this demographic. The world that we live in has changed significantly over the last two years. Twitter (where Justin originally reached out to the KC Twitterati) has experienced 1,382% growth from February of last year to February of 2009. Facebook, which was already huge, still grew a staggering 228% during the same time period. Social media is the new word of mouth. Marketers who do not figure out how to be a part of the conversation are going to be left in the dust.

Tools like those that Spiral 16 provides are helping those of us in social media and online marketing to help measure results and show value to the people that we report to. Folks like Meesha may not like that, but it’s an important part of the process. One of the beauties of social media is that you have the ability to unsubscribe, unfollow, unfriend someone if you don’t want to hear from them. There’s also always the beautiful “Mark as Read” button. But exercises like AMC’s with bloggers and the Fork & Screen are going to continue to happen. I need only point to Universal Studios notifying seven people about the new Harry Potter Theme Park and getting it viewed by over 350 million people within 24 hours. That’s the power of social media to marketers. Traditional advertising and marketing isn’t working as effectively anymore and so we are looking to new avenues to find our customers.

For the last year or so, I’ve been a part of the Social Media Club of Kansas City, a group of bloggers, marketers, and ad folks who get together on a semi-monthly basis to talk about the challenges and pitfalls of this new online world that we’re dealing with. Speaking with some folks at Friday’s breakfast about this post and what it implicates was interesting. Accusations of “shilling” don’t sit well with me, especially since I’ve gone back to the Fork & Screen time and time again, paying full price each time because I like the experience. Others may not. That’s their opinion. But to accuse people of “shilling” just because they got a free movie…that’s attacking my credibility. I’ve always done my best to be myself on this blog and in person. Pensive Girl hit it on the head yesterday:

be yourself. be true to who you are in real life. the digital space is just an extention of you. don’t foreget this. don’t be fooled by how easy it is to just say whatever you want to say and “be” whoever you want to be. don’t use the digital space as a platform for creating the person you are not strong enough to be in the real world. be you. becuase if someone gets to know you this way. through your tweets and your blog and your thoughts. and if this person then meets you in real life, and you’re nothing like your blog or your tweets or whatnot, there is a huge disconnect between who you really are.

Now that part of my job is applying my knowledge of the web and social media to a large organization like Cerner, I only see the crossover between personal and business becoming more pronounced. This may rub some people the wrong way. But there are some of those people who use “online monikers” and “web personalities” and even their participation in social media isn’t entirely genuine.

The challenge as a marketer like myself who also uses the web as a personal outlet is to always remain authentic. Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that there’s no difference between the real-life me, @shaneomack, Shane Life blogger, and the corporate marketer I am. In fact, for anyone to suggest otherwise is insulting.