I did a search of books on social media, and there are (get ready for this) 286,797 books out there on Amazon. That’s about 119,000 more people than the population of Tempe, Arizona.

No shortage of experts, too, in this vast field of social media.  B.L. Ochman, writing for Advertising Age recently noted that there are 181,000 Social Media ‘Gurus,’ ‘Ninjas,’ ‘Masters,’ and ‘Mavens’ on Twitter.

She rightly suggests that we are on guru overload.

“The fact remains: a guru is something someone else calls you, not something you call yourself.”

I cannot agree with her more, and made this point when I was speaking in Sri Lanka earlier in June. The media like to call anyone who address an audience as a guru and I had to debunk the notion, much to the alarm of some.

You would imagine that, with so many experts and gurus, we ought to have found the perfect recipe for using social media. But we haven’t. And will never quite get it, for the simple reason that the goal posts are constantly being moved. There are no seven golden rules. There is no no lost manual

I address this because whenever I am asked what Chat Republic is about, I could come up with a pat answer that might fit onto the back of a business card, or make a nice elevator speech. But I try to resist this. I’m sorry, I don’t give that elevator speech, because:
(a) That would imply this is a one-size-fits-all book
(b) That something as wide –and murky–as social media could be given the Cliff Notes treatment, or be condensed into 140-characters

If someone is looking for that, I could refer that person to an afore-mentioned ‘ninja. There are plenty of them to outnumber the population of Belgium, Portugal and Greece combined!