The vampire can be used as a hostile metaphor. Case in point, this attack on social media marketers.
First, establish the metaphor of the target as vitality-draining parasites:
a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters...
leeching off the productive bit of the organisation....
One London-based freelancer - let's call him Nosferatu...
there are thousands of the blood-suckers clamouring for attention and lucrative contracts.
Next, add some body shame:
[they are] a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty [and] overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards...
[they sport] home-made clothes and the faint whiff of body odour...
Mix in some geek hatred:
...siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions...
Then ramp up the seriousness, in terms of financial return, accusing the enemy of:
siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend...
leeching off the productive bit of the organisation...
[being] wasteful for large companies and potentially fatal for start-ups.
Cap it off with accusations of hidden newageyness:
If you were to conduct an archaeological dig into a social media guru, you'd probably uncover layers of life coaches, yoga teachers, acupuncturists and feng shui consultants. That's the level of business insight and mission-critical expertise we're talking about here.
Once again, the vampire metaphor remains potent for satire and criticism. This article is also another example of fearing social media, on yet another level.
(thanks to Jesse Walker)
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