Have you ever had a moment, sitting in a meeting, when you realize that the person sitting beside you is blowing it out of their ass?

Social media has become the subject du jour in our communications meetings, and everyone seems to be reading and repeating snippets from articles in Wired and BusinessWeek.

And then they crap all over the idea.

I’m witnessing the behaviour right in front of me. Someone has thrown out a new and imaginative idea … and the faux experts are murmuring slightly positive things about the technology - but only before they start rolling out institutional, technological and bureaucratic reasons for why it won’t work.

They don’t have an outright denial - more of a conditional and begrudging acknowledgement of developments in social media in other parts of the world.

And then they compartamentalize the idea and their perception of the risk:

“We’re exploring it.”

“It’s a pilot project, being launched soon.”

“W’re going to be looking into that.”

Their power comes from their institutional postition: these people arrive with their institutionally-issued black notebooks and the business cards reading “web advertising experts,” “promotion specialists,” or “IT consultant.”

But there’s an unspoken and unwritten text: “I’m here to suffocate your ideas with good intentions and poor policy.”

And I can’t waste the energy to play their boardroom politics.

Please tell me where you, oh faux social media expert, have an office, work with your colleagues and try to exert your authority.

Because I want to avoid it like the plague.

[tags] social media expert, pr consultant, bureaucracy [/tags]