I am all for self-promotion.  After all, if you don't promote yourself, no one will.  But along those lines, there are certain terms and phrases that generally you need to have given to you.  If I were to say I was famous, most of you would laugh at me.  I am not famous by any measure of success.  I might be known, or well known, within certain spheres for this or that, but I am not famous.

Which brings me to this morning's email.  I was pinged by someone who wanted to follow my defunct twitter feed.  It still amazes me how many people want to follow my twitter feed, considering I haven't posted anything is quite some time, and officially closed the site more than a year ago.  So imagine my surprise when this individual's bio included the words "a key influencer."

A what?  Key influencer of what?  Could you maybe influence my budget?  No?  How about getting me more people to help with the sesquicentennial?   Could you influence the vendors I deal with to cut me a break on costs?  Yes, I didn't think so.  So tell me again how you can be a "key influencer?"  You might just as well call yourself God for all the influence you have.

Many will argue that social media is the way of the future.  I am not sure that this is the case.  To me social media is another way of saying mass marketing disguised as personal recommendations for a product.  After all, those have always been the best marketing tools, but to describe yourself as a key influencer, when 1) I have never heard of you (35,000 twitter fans is not a market base) and 2) You cannot influence those things that are important to me, is a little grandiose and well, self aggrandizing. I might just as well say I am famous.  It garners the same reaction.