Are “The Experts” Really Experts?
There’s been a lot of backlash lately against the terms “guru” and “expert”, especially when dealing with SEO and social media. Frankly, these terms have irked me for some time, but I’m glad to see this is finally catching on.
What makes these people experts? And why are we so quick to jump and follow everything they say?
Who are the experts?
The so-called experts I’m speaking of fall in the social media, marketing and SEO category. To me, web design and development is measurable. Anyone can clearly see the difference between a terrible designer or developer and a good one. But how do you really measure marketing?
Some of the undisputed gurus in these areas are Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. Both of these marketing gurus have written multiple books in the area. I recently picked up several of these books and have been reviewing them over the year. It’s interesting to me though, to see how many people jump on the bandwagon to follow any advice these guys give.
Of course, I believe both are great marketers and most of their advice is sound. But what about the other millions of people claiming to be an “expert” on twitter? How good is their advice?
Why do they claim to be experts?
Anyone running a business will tell you that you need to be considered an expert in your field to really excel. While true, it’s up to the community to call you an expert, not yourself.
What makes marketers like Chris Brogan and Seth Godin seem like experts? Because they don’t call themselves experts.
What do these fake experts do?
The damage from these social media/marketing/SEO experts has already been done. I’ve had hundreds of these people follow me on twitter – and I ignore every one.
I had a client once ask me for some names of a good SEO company and I couldn’t think of one. How much business do legitimate marketers lose because of this?
I’ve always felt that SEO was cheating and most companies claiming to “get you to the top” were scammers. Your site shouldn’t try to cheat the system to get to the top because that ultimately screws the community. When I search for something, I want relevant content to come up, not some junk that someone stuffed with those keywords.
Your site should naturally rank well if you have great content, clean code and a use of accessibility and semantics. Of course, using keywords in this area isn’t wrong – and it will help your ranking – but it’s really your unique content that will rank your site.
What about real experts?
It still scares me though, the almost “cult” follower of experts – and this falls into the web dev and design world as well. Just because one expert claims you should do A or B, or C is junk doesn’t mean you should listen. You’ll never get anywhere following every experts’ advice.
Your Thoughts
What are your thoughts on these “experts”?
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
I learned pretty quickly after I joined twitter that there are so many “fake experts” out there and usually they do tend to be in fields where its hard to measure ROI or overall success. People may be very knowledgeable about social media and SEO but very few can actually be considered an expert. And as you said, those few don’t boast about being an expert. David Meerman Scott is another example of a marketing person who fits into the group with Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. When I see all these people on twitter that claim to be be experts in Social Media or SEO, I’m usually reminded of the guys from the late night infomercials that will make me a windows XP expert or a MS Excel expert. Better yet, become an expert at Google.
exactly. I tend to ignore these people, even if they are legit. Probably 75% of my followers are self-proclaimed SEO or social media “experts” . It’s gotten to where I also don’t enjoy going to Barcamp/PodCamp or other tech get togethers, all they talk about is social media/SEO. Not that I don’t believe that’s not important…it’s just not all important.
Just read a Entrepreneur Magazine article stating that 80% of SEO is scam. Had someone tell me an honest truth of what happened to them and is something everyone must understand and be careful about so here goes. The guy ranked on the first page of google with an important keyword for years hired a SEO company and changed the title, keywords, etc and what happened is that the keyword is so competitive changing his tags cased him to lose his ranking and since never rebounded again so big damages can be caused. Its best to start your SEO first and work on it then change it midway and lose what you have no matter how big or small it may be.
I think I read the same article and then another blog post about it, which is what made me want to write about it. Glad it’s just not me noticing this stuff.
I started at my current position learning SEO. I came to figure out what you’ve noted here. It comes down to code, content, and knowing what you’re talking about. If the designer, developer, and content manager know their jobs, you don’t really need an additional ‘expert’.
Here’s the thing. SEO should be an aspect of web development, not something you slap on. So an ‘SEO expert’ should be more of a ‘web development expert’ first.
‘Social Media Expert’, well that’s just one aspect of what a Public Relations Expert should handle. And to be an expert at Social Media is like being an expert at the internet.
So you’re an expert at Facebook, MySpace, Blip.fm, WordPress.com, Blogger, Twitter, Friendster, Friendfeed, Squidoo, Last.fm, Flickr, LinkedIn, and the many other ‘social’ websites? Are you also an expert at commenting on applicable blogs with pertinent information?
‘Social Media’ is just the buzzword that all the news outlets latched onto so they’d inflate their own importance.
And to be 100% honest, social media started a long time ago. Anyone ever hear of ‘word-of-mouth’?
That’s a good point, word of mouth would be classified as social media
If Joe holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and 20 years of experience as chief neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, would you deny him the right to call himself a neuroscience expert?
What if had a Bachelor of Science in Neurology and 5 years of experience?
What if he was a high school graduate and had 2 years of experience?
Does your acceptance of someone’s self-proclaimed expertise change according to education credentials?
If so, then enter social media. Considering few universities worldwide offer such a degree, what’s the benchmark? Published books?
I’ll argue that it doesn’t matter if someone says he or she is an expert or not, but how people view him. I’m the first to say I’m no expert, but I’m also the first to suggest people who say I am one.
In regards to the topic of self-proclaimed experts in social media and SEO, how can this be shown with experience today? 5 years ago most people had never heard of SEO and now people are becoming inundated with Social Media and SEO talk left and right. If someone’s an expert they should have a fairly insightful idea of what will change in the next few years and what metrics can be used to benchmark success (or lack there of). Every industry or business has different metrics and to be an expert on how social media can help any given industry is absurd, especially in a day in age when new social networks are constantly emerging and existing ones are constantly changing. The same goes with forecasting how search engine algorithms will change and how to adapt. I’m guessing an expert would have an answer for me though : )
Well it seems that the only measure of a SM/SEO expert is in ROI. Break out the charts and graphs that your traffic analytics software of choice offers up. See how many new visitors and conversions came from that new Facebook fan page.
For instance, I recently saved a client almost $400/month by using proper SEO techniques. He now gets more organic traffic than what was coming from YellowPages.com and says he’s always busy. He hasn’t contacted me lately. Maybe I worked myself out of a job with that guy, lol.
Everyone including myself will use ROI when talking to clients about SEO/SM but it’s hard to measure ROI even with all the traffic analytics you want. Implementing analytics for a client is usually my first step when I take on a new client. But how much can you really learn for this data? Sure if you have a targeted marketing campaign with unique landing pages, it’s easy to measure, but how much of your organic SEO and Social Media strategies can really be tracked with analytics?
I recently designed/developed an unsigned musician’s website just before the release of their 3rd album. I optimized the site and integrated a bunch of social networking sites and the album ranked #2 in their genre on iTunes upon release and even made the billboards top 10 for digital distribution for two weeks. I’d like to be able to say that it was my work that played a role in this but there are way too many factors that come into play for me to be able measure overall ROI. All I can say is that I did my part.
“I had a client once ask me for some names of a good SEO company and I couldn’t think of one.”
Do a Google search for “SEO services”. Boom, you know have a perfect list of the world’s top ten SEO experts.
What if you do a bing or yahoo search? Do you find the same “perfect list”? SEO isn’t limited to Google. What if you change the query phrase from SEO services to SEO expert; are you still going to find the same results? In most cases it’s unlikely. You have to be careful who you suggests to your clients because as Amber pointed out there are so many fake experts out there. Blackhat SEO is being weeded out but it still exists.
True but I still think that SEO is a quantifiable skill, if not more so than any other.
Blackhat may be a risk but I would expect a wider sampling to reduce the risk.
Anyway I forgot to mention that I’ve also noticed the “expert/Guru”
Warll, just because they’re at the top of Google does NOT mean they’re legit or good companies. If you do a google search for web design agencies, most of the first pagers are terrible, out of date looking websites built in tables. Definitely not the best.
I’d stick my hand up as an SEO “expert” – because I know more than most. That said its not that hard – you need to get the on page factors right – as you alluded to – and you need a legitimate link building campaign End of story – its not very sexy or interesting – but it works, predictably.
I cringe at the prices the “experts” charge real world business and I have clients that don’t get that I am not a website designer (or developer) – I will rank their site for them (so long as its not all in flash LOL)