Over a quarter of a million social media gurus

Social media gurus are breeding like rabbits roaches:

The June 2014 What’s Next Blog social media guru Twitter Bio list (researched on FollowerWonk) has grown to epic proportions. The list now tops 297,897 – up from a mere 16,000 when we first started tracking them in 2009.

Well over a quarter of a million people are self-declaring themselves as social media experts on Twitter now. Pause. Consider that. Despair for humanity.

Here’s why you should immediately discount anyone who describes themselves in this way: no-one is a social media expert.

This is a new field, and a dynamic one. The services, approaches and tools are changing by the minute, and what you know now can be wrong in a month’s time. Plus: it’s a social field – and thus the answers tend to be different in every social group.

Look at it this way: social media is a communication tool – like the telephone. How many self-proclaimed “telephone gurus” are there? And how seriously would you take them?

[via Brent Simmons]