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The History of Online “Experts”
These days you can’t move around the Web without encountering a person claiming to be an expert in something. Let’s take a look at the buckets of Web experts and where they have setup a shingle over the years.
HTML Experts
First we had HTML experts. This batch of experts started appearing in the mid-90s and claimed to be able to code any webpage to the provided design specifications. This was also the time when many WYSIWYG programs began to appear including Microsoft’s Frontpage. It was always interesting to meet people who said they were experts and when you asked if they hand-coded their webpages, the answer many times was that they use Frontpage. Naturally any expert should be able to code HTML by hand.
My favorite story from this expert era was during an interview I was conducting to hire a HTML coder for the agency I was at. I wrote several exams for recruiters who wanted to test their candidates before sending them onto an agency or company for hire. One morning I met with a man who told me he had been coding HTML for 15 years. I explained that HTML wasn’t around for 15 years but he remained stern in tone that he was sure he had been practicing his craft for over a decade. I gave him my beginner exam and he failed. He then explained that he was an expert at Frontpage and that he could code any webpage using the tool. We never heard from him again.
It seemed like HTML experts were mostly located in the U.S. initially and then towards the later years the offshore crowd joined in.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Experts
The next crop of experts popped up in the very late ’90s and early ’00s. This was a much more vocal group of experts because they would send you emails explaining how they can raise your ranking in Yahoo, Altavista, Excite and Google. From the stories I’ve heard over the years, most times the shingle would go up, the company would grab some quick cash and then move on to a new shingle.
It seemed like many of the SEO experts operated from outside the U.S. from the beginning. Unlike HTML where offshore started late, with SEO they got to the gold quickly. We still see many expert SEO workers these days but the count has certainly dropped from the peak.
Social Media Experts
This is our current crop of experts – the social media expert. This seems to be the youngest batch of experts to-date in terms of age. So far, social media experts seem to be following the HTML expert trend with a heavy presence in the U.S.
It seems like if you can get a story on the Digg frontpage, you can slap the expert tag on your online profiles. If you slap a camera on your head for a day and get some press, you are a social media expert. If you can make a video that gets some views, you are a social media expert. If you use Tweetdeck, you are most certainly an expert!
Try this experiment – go to Twitter, randomly pick a person. Then starting from that person, randomly select another person from the profile icons on the right side of the page. Do this 50 times and see how many profiles include the word expert in them. It’s a fun experiment which should open your eyes to the massive expertise out there.
Next week I will share my "test" to see if the person your company or startup has engaged (or plans to engage) to help with social media marketing is actually an expert.
Conclusion
When I met with Scott Monty from Ford yesterday, one of the things we agreed on is that you should never call yourself an expert. Let others think and talk about you as an expert. It will be interesting to see where the experts pop up next online although I am pretty confident the social media experts won’t be going anywhere for the next 2-3 years.
Allen,
thanks for this excellent post. I never felt to call myself an expert. Being in the interactive industry right from the start I’ll let other’s do the talk, at least as long as clients and prospects do believe I’m the right guy to talk to ;-)
Oliver.
@david: keep on fighting the jungle beasts, Range Rovers can’t climb trees, but you can :-D
Everyone on Twitter is an expert……it’s driving me nuts.
Funny, every traffic “expert” claims that its best to announce your expertise. I’m so confused
I’ve been teaching social media since before Facebook was born, dagnabbit, and it irks me the number of self-proclaimed “experts” who are giving classes in this stuff. One person I know who charges $50 a head for her lectures gets fewer than 100 hits a day on the blog, has zero LinkedIn presence, uses Twitter once a week to post links to clients. I feel so bad for the victims, but how can I walk up and say so? They’ll think I’m just trying to steal them.
Also: I want to find the losers advocating duplicating your content all over the web “for SEO!” and I want to drop them into a deep, deep well.
I consider myself very good at what I do, but an “expert”? a “guru”? I would never use the term. I love breaking down the smoke and mirrors that SEO and webmasters feed poor local businesses.
The other night I was speaking with an old high school friend about online marketing and new media stuff that I consider easy common knowledge stuff and he said’ “Man, the way you talk about this is like your a guru…” And I stopped him. and explained how it was used by scheezy marketers. He was actually referring to the religious sect (backpedal).
I know a local guy who charges $250 a month to setup and upkeep a twitter account for a local business and they are mostly other people’s blog posts posted by feed through tweetdeck. This is SAD.
On Twitter I Block people who follow me that have “guru” “expert” or “internet marketer” unless they are part of the Nationally recognized media.
But Allen – if you’re going to say “Next week I will share my “test” to see if the person your company or startup has engaged (or plans to engage) to help with social media marketing is actually an expert.” doesn’t that imply that you are calling yourself the expert :)
lol
You seem to be an expert in commenting about experts :)
I have been trying to write this exact article for some time now. Perfectly stated.
thanks!
Expertise is relative. If someone could point me to a clear set of criteria that defines an ‘expert’ in social media (must have been retweeted 100 times and quoted in at least 4 TechCrunch articles)I would love to see it.
If you apply this “i’m more of an expert than you, ergo you’re not an expert” argument, there leaves only one to speak of, and it isn’t you.
I’m not arguing that every person who claims to be an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ actually is one, it’s probable there are many who use the term simply for exposure, but their unfounded claims will be exposed by the negative WOM that such deceit creates. If an individual applies their knowledge to provide value to their community i see no reason why not deem that ‘expertise.’
@patrickcourtney
“Expert” now seems to be the official code phrase for “person who thinks they know more than they really do.” I like to think I know a lot about HTML, CSS, SEO, social media, etc. But I thought I knew a lot about HTML back in the 90’s too. When I look back at my code those days I realize just how far I’ve come since. That keeps the hubris in check and reminds me that learning is an ongoing process. The field continuously evolves and none of us can catch up entirely. We just have to keep learning as best we can.
Your HTML interview story is classic. I recall asking people in a similar situation how they felt about Web standards. I left it open-ended to see how they’d respond. None mentioned the W3C nor did their portfolio samples validate. I realized later that I should have just asked “Who are Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer.”
The social media experts seem even more prolific than the others. I guess it’s because the barrier to entry is so much lower. You don’t need to learn any code to stake your claim. But when I get followed by new Twitter users (as in they just joined this week) and their profile states that they’re social media or social networking experts, I really have to wonder what they’re thinking. Claiming such expertise, as a newbie, takes even more than the usual amount of “expert” chutzpah.
No doubt we have an ‘expert’ problem developing here. However, as long as people continue to fall for it, the so-called experts won’t be going away any time soon. i suppose that will be the end of it though- when enough people have fallen for it and they collectively realize they were lied to.
[...] “It seems like if you can get a story on the Digg frontpage, you can slap the expert tag on your online profiles.” – The History of Online “Experts” [...]
[...] seems to be so simple that everyone can be an expert, a guru, or a maven. It now looks that every third person who follows you on Twitter will be some kind of marketing maven or at least social media consultant judging by their [...]
you mean justine might not actually be an expert?
i do consider myself an expert commenter… :)
You do a fine job Jeremy – good form, proper linking – maybe that’s the next batch of expert – commenters!
Wait! I am DEFINITELY a pizza expert! I have to call myself that, cause there is certainly nobody with more expertise!
Excellent! I’ve performed similar searches for ‘Experts’ and ‘Gurus’ before also – the results are always intriguing. One of these results was a discovery that large numbers of these experts make interesting facial hair choices. I listed some here: http://blog.resolvedigital.com/2009/03/20/211/
Hmm, a definitive post on experts? I think that makes you an expert expert? How post modern – a meta-expert.
Great article, but you forgot to mention design experts.
There are still many HTML and SEO “experts” out there that don’t know a div tag from a hole in the ground. Of course, we’ve also got css “experts.”
I am in complete agreement with your conclusion. I refrain from ever calling myself an expert in anything. I actually tend to understate my experience with things. Most of all, I always simply try to let my work do the talking. If someone likes my work, then I keep working with them. If they don’t, I move on. No skin off my nose.
next will be social media guru’s mark my words.
Already happening: http://loudpoet.com/2009/04/10/attack-of-the-social-media-gurus/
I’ve been blogging (on and off) since 1998. I’ve had an email address since 1993. And now there are kids half my age who claim expertise.
I do remember the folks in the late 90s claiming ‘more than a decade of experience’ in developing Web sites. And the shops claiming to have invented interactive online experiences. Or whatever.
Sometimes I feel like the guy who cleared the brush, waded through the malarial swamps and dodged the jungle beasties only to turn around and see tourists in Range Rovers overtaking me.
As one of those self-proclaimed HTML “experts” back in the 90s I’m enjoying seeing the growing backlash against the self-proclaimed social media “experts” out there. Have you read Dr. Augustine Fou’s “The ROI for Social Media Is Zero” yet? Excellent takedown: http://ow.ly/2s2m