Newbies and n00bs: SSDD

TSSTechangel shared an acronym with me today on my Ustream.tv chatroom (Hips for Hire):

SSDD = Same Sh!t, Different Day.

I suppose the same thing could be said about experts and gurus claiming to be Social Media experts. When Scott Berkun delivered his presentation to SMCSea (Social Media Club Seattle) last week, "How to Call B.S. on a Social Media Guru", the audience murmured with agreement that so-called experts in this new field need to substantiate their claims and do not need to be received as experts just because they have a book or a program to sell. No one, however, mentioned that because Social Media is so new, maybe we ought to stop looking for gurus and just learn as much as we can collectively.

Oh but wait: that would make all of us in the room a bunch of newbies and n00bs. Is this possible? Therefore, SSDD.

For the past eight months, I've been calling myself "the n00b of Social Media". Two weeks after having launched a new company idea, HipsForHire.com, and armed with a Twitter account and a blog, I attended BlogWorld 2009 in Las Vegas. Seated across from me during a radio interview was Chris Pirillo, and across from him was the most "newbie" person in the room: me. I figured "n00b" was a better description than "village idiot".

Eight months later, I'm told that essentially everyone who uses Social Media is a newbie. We don't know what we're doing. Even Mark Zuckerberg in his most recent admissions has shared that Facebook has made mistakes. We simply don't know what the impact of our actions are in this sensitive new media climate.

Why then are so many people quick to name themselves as Social Media master consultants and experts? Why aren't they taking Berkun's advice by allowing others to label a person as an expert? Since October 2009, I'm managed to attend four Social Media Events: Blogworld 2009, LeWeb 2009, SXSW 2010, ReThinkHawaii 2010. By August, I'll have attended my first Gnomedex, and I'll be rounding the corner into the final days of the first n00b year. And I'll still be calling myself a n00b.

If anything I'm learning in my journey of immersion into the world of Social Media, it is that we only end up learning how much we don't know. Albert Einstein got it right, "If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it Research."

I'm a n00b, and likely I'll stay a n00b for years to come. I'm still researching, still learning, still growing. Every day I'm exposed to some new tool, some little trick, a different way of organizing and disseminating products, services, or ideas. This Social Media universe is big. . I'll let some other person call himself an expert. With title comes responsibility. Then again, if you never make any mistakes, you probably weren't working on anything of importance.