Dilettante: A person who enjoys the arts or someone who engages in a field as an amateur out of casual interest rather than as a profession.

If you’re going to step into the technical freelancer/consultant/contractor game, then it’s time to cowboy up. You can’t abandon the technical part of the equation. In the past, I was never thrilled to run into so-called SEO experts who had never written a bot or spider (or hell, could even tell me what “semantically valid HTML” meant), and nowadays, I’m finding out that most of the people you meet in social media are just a bunch of amateurs running after shiny objects.

When you first meet some of these people, they’re pretty amazing. They talk about the power of networks, and how social conversations will revolutionize the marketplace, and blah blah blah blah blah. After a while, you get to know them better and you realize that they’re just dilettantes. In other words, they’re pretty enthusiastic, but they wouldn’t be able to pass muster in any group of real techies.

• They’ve never installed a Wiki, much less administered a community (like I have over at Frackipedia.com, running on MediaWiki).
• They’ve maybe done some blogging and some commenting, but they’ve never installed, configured, or otherwise looked at the guts of WordPress. In fact, I was told by one of these guys that sidebar widgets are a bit scary. Uh, yeah, just a PHP function in most cases!
• They have no idea how to put together an editorial policy for a blog, nor have they recruited quality bloggers (like I have for WritingMafia.com). Not exactly technical, but still a very important part of what blogging is about.
• They’ve certainly never written a WordPress plugin (like the one I did for Amazon SimpleDB).
• They may use Twitter, but they haven’t looked into the Twitter API and figured out how to use it in a social app for the Enterprise. Or know enough to roll your own twitter-like app thing.
• They’ve totally not built there own social media application, like the one I cooked up over at ShareWordMap.com.

Am I a raving egomaniac? Hells yeah! But I also know what the hell I’m talking about, and you should too! Don’t be that guy with the vaporware presentation and a box full of technical jargon. It might impress the folks down at the ad agency, but it sure as hell doesn’t impress anyone out here doing the technical consultant thing.