“Social Media Experts are the Cancer of Twitter (and must be stopped!” was an article that naturally ruffled a lot of feathers on Twitter last week. In it Michael Pinto describes a scourge of social media expert “zombies” who follow each other, and what’s worse, aspire to manufacture other zombies: “Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.”

Despite its inflammatory tone, the article nonetheless resonated with me and other social media practitioners I know. After I posted the article via my Twitter feed, one representative of a prominent institution DM’d me to say how surprised she was to find that a significant slice of her “followers” were not regular members of the museum-going public but “social media experts.”

So if they’re not zombies, who are these people?

Confession time: I’ve been there. I’ve been in organizations where no one really knew anything about social media and with my Facebook know-how and interwebs surfing ability I’ve been tempted to cultivate my waning whipper-snapper aura and stick on the badge of “expert.”

But I’m here today to say, fellow social media practitioners, its time to put down the crack pipe.

The truth is, there are no experts yet in this  emerging field. Social media is simply a set of tools you can experiment with, in the hopes of finding a better way of dealing with traditional business challenges: interacting with customers, promoting your goods or services, and cultivating a positive image.

Further, I believe that social media will create jobs, but they won’t be for something so amorphous as “social media expert.” Rather, social media will begin to be integrated into traditional job functions, rather than being seen as some superfluous extra. But what do I actually mean? It was fun to think about how social media will inform the jobs of tomorrow. These are my predictions. Obama are you listening?

From Information Technology to Interaction Design

For many years, technology made the flow of information easier, and it was good. Gradually, it became clear that technology is not the be-all, end-all. We have to be extremely mindful of how people interact with technology. Technology and systems aren’t everything—social media is there to remind us that online media, in the end, is a people-centered enterprise. Interaction Design is a real discipline that involves psychology, design, information architechture, and clean writing and is absolutely a field that’s poised to grow immensely in the coming years.

From Customer Service to Community Management

Time was, a customer had a problem and someone in Customer Service from up on high issued their proclamation: free coupon! We’re sorry! You’re SOL! These days, if the only time you hear from a customer is through a complaint, you’ve blown it.

Social media will tweak the traditional customer service relationship from top-down to putting a company representative right in the mix: chatting with actual, real customers all day, solving problems and whipping up positive enthusiasm. Twitter is already beginning to make this happen, with corporate representatives manning the desk for @Starbucks and @Zappos. But expect “Community Manager” to become a must-hire of the social media rich future.

From Marketing/PR to Conversation Leveraging

If it sounds like tomorrow’s “Conversation Leverager” ought to have his organization’s  “Community Manager” on speed dial, that’s because she should! It’s time to start breaking down the wall between departments, people. That’s part of the revolutionary change social media will bring.

And gone are the days when a Marketer tells the public what to think. Instead, social media is creating an atmosphere in which the successful Conversation Leverager puts their ear to the ground, measures the affinity for their brand that already exists, and then channels that affinity into the media and platforms that will amplify it.

Let’s face it: people call themselves “social media experts” because the field is incredibly new and there’s no one around to tell them to stop. As a community of social media practitioners, we can do better.

We can recognize the most wildly successful players on the social media scene right now—the people inspiring great community conversation, building fan bases on Facebook, and getting a lot of buzz going—are people who know better than to slap on a label that places them above their audience.

Where are these people? Good question—you don’t see them because they are down in the trenches, actually interacting with their communities. More than that, they are learning from their communities. They think of themselves as students, not experts.

So let’s all be students for now. Let’s recognize that there’s a lot to learn. And let’s be good community players and egg each other on to better integrate the tools afforded by social media into our current jobs.

How do you use social media in your job today? And how do you think social media will affect the jobs of tomorrow?

-Amanda McCormick is the web editor of the Film Society of Lincoln Center