I had a brilliant professor in college — a true poet and a proud curmudgeon who warned: “Beware of social scientists. They are not scientists. And they are not particularly social.”

And now, God bless us, we flock to social media marketing, though it be destined with mathematical certainty to reach new heights of failure.

For every Old Spice commercial that goes viral (with the help of millions of dollars in conventional media spending), thousands of ad campaigns will go not just ignored, but virtually unseen. Still, the professional marketers who create them will not be fired just yet. Why? Because the Emperor is still wearing new clothes, and, particularly in a Great Recession, we have a messianic hunger for make believe splendor.

I’m no Luddite. I’m writing this on a blog, after all. And About.com carries my enthusiastic musings on podcasting. I marvel at the bee-like efficiency and collective genius of Wikipedia. My children’s book for the iPad and iPhone is distributed on the iTunes iBookstore, and I have a YouTube channel for heaven’s sake.

But here’s what concerns me about the adjective “social” when you put it in front of the phrase “media marketing.” It sounds, and probably is so amazingly smarter than the random chaos of “mass media.” But so, too, when compared to the stupidity of unplanned capitalism, did the phrase “socially planned economies.” And let’s not forget the early 20th Century intelligentsia’s brainchild, “social engineering” which resulted not simply in economic disaster, but stymied hopes, failed creativity, Gulags and mass murder.

Now that I think about it: beware the word “engineering” after anything other than “civil,” “electrical,” or “mechanical.”

Smarter than the brainiest social media marketing guru who ever pitched his tent in the desert storm of a billion tweets, was a genius I met on the 19th hole of a golf course in Jacksonville. He said about the new economy: “S’gonna be like ’t’s’gonna be: they ain’t nuttin’ you can do about it.”

—Arthur Lubow