It’s been a bad week for the social media gurus. First Mark Schaefer called them out collectively, and some individually, for constant backslapping and creating, inadvertently or not, a country club atmosphere where eveything is fine and cozy.

Sadly, he’s correct. And the pseudo gurus were none-too-quick to jump in with defenses of their own. My favorites were the ones who saw fit to establish their own credibility by outlining years of experience and other credentials. It was as if to say their words were somehow more credible simply because what they can verify on paper, which ignores that even the youngest and least experienced of all are sometimes the best teachers.

The dialogue below the original post is fascinating. Perhaps the larger issue raised is how social media handles popularity. If this interpretation of original research into the so-called “wisdom of crowds” is correct, essentially a small few are actually creating the most ingested content around the Web.

What that means for social media is that, as ever, despite its perceived democratic nature, social media, like life,  is a game of winners and losers. We saw this with the Twitter Vote Report. A small few controlled the content of the larger stream, “empowered” (the chosen word of the chief “data sweeper”) to admit or delete on a whim.

The consequence of the minority of so-called “thought leaders” is the natural outflow of the majority being followers. One special example came up just yesterday. Marketing guru Seth Godin publicly announced his new project, a presumed social media dialogue maker he calls “Brands in Public.”

“Brands in Public” is code for “Brands in Seth Godin’s Paws for a Price.” Essentially he believes that since Amazon or Maytag don’t have a blog that he can find, he will pirate content from said brands in order to provide a forum for others to bash, or praise, the brands. The companies then have an opportunity to pay him $400 a month to be in charge of these pages.

Godin’s own words:

“If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once you take the page over, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.”

The shocker of this endeavor is that it was announced around the same time that Google announced Sidewiki, which is very similar in concept. Now users with Google accounts can go to any Web page and comment on it. A Google sidebar is added to the page where you may partake in a discussion about the page.

This is exactly what Ike Pigott did – to Seth Godin, who does not allow his readers to comment on his blog. In addition to two posts about the issue, Pigott started a discussion about Godin’s post on a Sidewiki and even invited others to see how long it would take Godin to notice.

The issue is not so much that this stuff happens; such endeavors are expected. The problem is that when people of Godin’s status do it, they too frequently get the mindless cheerleader crowd chiming in (Edit: The link that was here was deleted. The writer said she was being sarcastic about supporting Godin.) with nary a thought to the questionable ethical or even legal principles of such efforts.

If the wisdom of crowds exists, social media is not the place to find it.