Interesting and amusing post by B.L. Ochman on Self-Proclaimed Social Media Gurus on Twitter Multiplying Like Rabbits which was added to by BroadStuff – TWITTER TO BE NEARLY ENTIRELY COMPOSED OF SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS BY 2013.

Since there’s no “generally recognized” certification process and few standards from which to evaluate anyone’s claim to be an expert in this realm, nothing stops anyone from proclaiming themselves an expert or Guru, if they choose to.    Oliver Blanchard (theBrandBuilder) weighted in recently on certifications for Social Media which matches what I feel – while Web Analytics could be certified, Social Media, probably, can’t be, yet, since the field is evolving so quickly.    And there’s the certifying body – who is willing to step up to the plate that can command enough respect?

Anyway, my post isn’t really about that – but since I wrote a post two days ago

on  Using Twitter to find Influentials using TweepSearch, I feel keenly aware that what B.L. said, pulls me in to this discussion (or conversation), weather intentional, or not.

First of all, some of the results in TweepSearch are updated fairly recently, and some are quite old – and that can be sorted as well, once you get the data into Excel, which I cover – though I left out the details since I didn’t want my post to be much longer than it was.

Second of all – having TweepSearch results being somewhat uneven in quality isn’t really the problem it’s made out to be ….. the real problem isn’t TweepSearch – it’s the lack of structured data on the web from which to pull out the meaning of what people are saying and “who they are”.

Perhaps, the only place that makes sense, that is “somewhat” reliable, to pull a description  of what a person does for a living – is from their own “self declared” profile – and while we can’t get it  off of Facebook yet, we can easily get it from Twitter with tools like TweepSearch.

Who cares if the data isn’t 100% fresh – that’s the least of our problem – but yes, it would be nice if all the data was up to date.

I have no argument that there are too many “self proclaimed” experts out there in Social Media – but that’s not really a problem of TweepSearch – it’s a problem of lack of certification for Social Media (which is too early to be effectively done today) and people’s own willingness to proclaim themselves experts.

I see no problem combing and extracting the data out of TweepSearch – which was actually much better and more on target than I could get from any of the Social Media Monitoring Platforms  – which focus on what people are saying, not what they are doing or who they are.

Eventually, this problem will be solved, by the inclusion of Microformats and semantic web, but it will take a few years, at least – I dealt with the issue in my London presentation last month on the Future of Social Media Monitoring (working on a new deck, by the way, which I hope will be ready within a week – on what people are saying about Monitoring Platforms and Vendors).