My grandfather used to have a sign in his den that said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullshit.“

Years later, I learned of a Zen proverb that goes, “Those who speak don’t know, those who know don’t speak.”

The idea is the same (though grandpa’s colorful language made an impression back in the day). The message is this: Someone talking your ear off about a topic – any topic – probably doesn’t have the depth of understanding of someone who has lived it. The more they yammer, the more suspicious you should be.

Observe a veteran cop, creative director, mechanic, soldier, investment banker, whatever -  you’ll find they listen more than they talk and when they do speak up, they keep it short, simple and to the point.

Sadly,the brave new world of social media is teaming with superflous language and thinly veiled attempts at self-promotion. It often feels to me like an echo chamber where everyone is writing from the same dictionary. Worse, when you sort through the words you often don’t wind up with anything substantive.

Here are two red flags I look out for when sorting out the brilliance from the bullshit.

1. The evangelist/company coins ‘proprietary language’ to replace common language.

Simply put, either an idea is new and therefore best explained in common, easy to understand language or an idea is common and therefore needs to be ‘re-skinned’ with new language in the hopes it will sound more groundbreaking and unique than it is.

If the idea behind ‘social media’ is essentially smart, fluid, efficient communication it is ironic to me that evangelists and pundits commonly stuff their communications with vague paraphrasing, clever lingo and unnecessary ‘new’ terms for existing ones we all already know and agree upon.

As an aside, it’s worth recalling that after the dot-com bust a lot of seasoned business people mocked Internet gurus and web pioneers for their silly business card titles (Chief Disruption Officer), superlative claims (remember brick and mortar being ‘dead’) and jargon-laden banter (“we’re enabling an extensible paradigm shift”).

2. What could be said in one word is said in several, sometimes-hyphenated, words.

Why be ‘comprehensive’ or ‘thorough’ when you can be ‘collectively exhaustive’? Here’s one reason; because it keeps the focus on the point you’re trying to make, not on trying to decipher what all the brainiac-SAT language. Save the academic jargon for graduate courses on Post-Modern Constructivism, we’re conducting business here people, let’s cut to the chase.

Right now, the emerging trend among social media gurus is to bash social media guruism and to talk about ‘social media beyond marketing’. As self promotion goes this is a well-worn tactic. Now that everyone is talking about social media and marketing, the original gurus need another wave of differentiation. Never mind that the latter topic is far from figured out, it’s been exhausted of its headline-garnering value and its insider jargon is commonplace. Next.

It’s also somewhat telling that many of the same people talking about moving beyond marketing habitually dress up their dialogue in language that stinks of marketing spin and slick veneer.

Is it brilliance of bullshit?  Consult a 4th grade dictionary.

I used to write websites for the pharmaceutical industry now and then. One of the trickiest parts of doing pharma sites is being challenged to ‘write it at a 4th grade reading level’. In essence these companies wanted me to distill down all the science and medical research and use simple, clear language that anyone could understand lest they confuse or intimidate people.

What if we applied this same filter to the speeches, presentations and blog posts we read about social media? What if we took all the fancy words and replaced them with their common, 4th-grade equivalent?

Try it.

When you do, you may well find that it sheds a whole new light on the content of what you’re reading.

Conversely, if you’d like to stuff some jargon into a piece of work, I might suggest you play with this application. It does a bang-up job of providing mucky language for any deck, RFP or post you may want to broadcast into the echo chamber of social media evangelism.

Before you know it, you’ll be one of the gang.