One of my New Year’s goals (or resolutions, if you go old school) is to listen to the advice of fellow blogger Kris Dunn and become more skilled in using social networking tools to help do my job.

Don’t get me wrong: I consider myself a relative novice when it comes to social networking, given that I really only use LinkedIn and Twitter while religiously avoiding the siren song of Facebook or MySpace. Still, I felt a surge of social networking pride this past fall when I asked my college class full of tech-savvy 20-something students if anyone used Twitter and I only got one to hand go up.

But back to my point: I’m trying to do more real work with the social networking tools I have, so I’ve been making a big push to get and use more LinkedIn connections and recruit more followers on Twitter. As part of this effort, I bumped into the “Answers” feature on LinkedIn that allows users to ask a question in any number of targeted areas of their own LinkedIn network connections as well as the larger group of people using the service.

Most of the questions are about things that don’t interest or pertain to me, but this week, I bumped into one that got me going. Here’s what it asked:

“I keep seeing the word ‘evangelist’ being posted in want-ads and by several professional folks here on LinkedIn. Not to sound dense, but while I have some idea of the use of this word in today’s marketplace, I’d love to see a real definition of this term.”

Most of the answers to this sincere question were courteous and straightforward (example: “I understand the term to mean a passionate spokesperson for a company, product, service or initiative.”), but just about all missed the larger point. “Evangelist” in a business setting is a pompous and overinflated title that is both silly and stupid. It says nothing, yet reeks of arrogance and idiocy.

I’ve written about silly, meaningless titles before, the last time about “chief people officer,” and what I said about that holds for any business title with the word “evangelist” in it as well. It’s not only incredibly pretentious, but it’s also vague and terribly overdone. Plus, it’s laugh-out-loud nutty—like something from the “Department of Silly Titles” in a Monty Python skit.

The “evangelist” title is apparently something that was coined by Guy Kawasaki, but that only confirms to me how over the top this is. Kawasaki is the original full-of-himself, know-it-all business type I hear speak at just about every business or HR conference these days. You know what I’m talking about: the business “expert” who gets paid a lot of money to talk to a captive conference audience for an hour with vague and non-actionable “solutions” to the latest pressing business problem.

To my way of thinking, the wave of silly job titles we’re seeing speaks to a bigger issue, which is that people who use sobriquets like “business evangelist” or “chief people officer” believe that they need some marketing blather to get people to listen to them. Rather than leading people through their charisma, strength of character and compelling argument, they have to resort to trickery and puff—or silly and foolish titles.

Could we please get rid of all this nonsense in 2009? I sure hope we can, because I have no respect or use for anyone using the term “evangelist” in their job title—unless he’s John the Baptist.

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