I have two thoughts on this.

One, why would you consider it embarrassing to have tried social media and abandoned it? Odds are you abandoned it for something more profitable or lucrative. If you're too busy making money and running a business to update your MySpace page, there's probably not much cause for embarrasment there.

Two, if your clients, candidates and peers are bagging you out for not being active enough on social media, then either they feel the need to demonstrate superiority in a field you've deliberately abandoned, or they're looking for something to criticise, and this is the best they can do. Either way, surely whatever you're doing is more important than listening to critics with so trite and meaningless a complaint.

I've seen many recruiters fail at using social media in general as they simply don't understand the premise. I wrote an article a couple of years back about how consultants were using Facebook and so many had just set up groups that looked like their web page. Others were jumping in on group conversations and advertising jobs.

It's like all the spam you see on twitter with job adverts.

I'm sure that has a very low success rate.

The only consultants that I saw who were using Facebook successfully were thinking about it's purpose, which is friends hooking up where there was already some sort of connection previously. They'd set up events type pages for drinks at the pub. They were the only ones who seemed to have any sort of response or people joining their group.