Chris Berry On The Net

In virtually every profession, charlatans and frauds occasionally attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate practitioners. Strict licensing requirements make it more difficult in some fields than others, but that doesn’t prevent the truly dedicated scam artist from attempting to cash in on a potentially lucrative business. It doesn’t happen very often, but the sheer audacity required to pass oneself off as doctor or lawyer is almost mind boggling.

In the interest of protecting the public, states have put in place strict licensing requirements for certain occupations. This is particularly true of the medical, legal and accounting professions. When you see MD, JD, or CPA behind a name, you can usually rest assured that this person has years of specialized professional training, and has passed a rigorous licensing examination.

Certifications and credentials have never been sufficient to identify the most talented practitioners in any field, and that has never been their purpose. Two physicians or attorneys with identical training will not produce identical outcomes in the court room or the operating room. The most talented practitioners will rise to the top of their fields based on their skills and their professional reputations. What credentials are intended to provide is an assurance that the individual possesses a minimum level of competency.

Professional credentials used to be fairly rare, and were typically limited to a small number of occupations. In addition to the medical, legal and accounting professions, academics, architects and engineers were about the only people whose titles included widely recognized designations. Even to the people who didn’t know what the letters stood for, their presence lent an air of respect and credibility. That is no longer true today, due to the widespread use of meaningless designations and credentials issued by organizations representing a wide range of professionals and pseudo-professionals.

Today, many professional credentials are less about protecting public safety, and more about creating an aura of professionalism where none would exist otherwise. Real estate sales is perhaps the best example of this kind of credential proliferation. Earning a real estate license typically involves nothing more than a two-week training course, followed by a two-hour examination. A high school diploma is not a requirement. Considering the fact that a home purchase is the largest and most complex financial transaction that most people will ever make, the licensing standards are incredibly lax.

In an effort to compensate for these low standards, the National Association of Realtors offers over 20 professional designations for real estate agents that result in a virtual alphabet soup of meaningless gobbledygook. The fact that most of these designations can be earned without closing a single transaction is proof of their limited value. Pity the misguided home buyer or seller who falls for this nonsense and selects an agent based on worthless designations rather than a proven history of results.

Real estate sales is a classic example of the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the sales are made by 20% of the agents. For every productive agent, there are at least 5 part-time wannabes and hacks who move in and out of the industry as predictably as the tides. These are the folks who are most likely to have a string of meaningless designations after their names, in an attempt to compensate for their lack of experience or talent. The real producers have no need to hide behind pseudo-professional credentials, and no time to waste on earning them.

While scam artists can be found in virtually every profession, they are particularly drawn to those fields where licensing requirements and professional certifications are nonexistent. The only real talent many of these people possess is the ability to pass themselves off as experts in a field where their expertise is difficult to verify or to challenge. For this reason, these people are often drawn to fads and emerging fields where the ability to rattle off a few impressive sounding buzzwords is all it takes to be viewed as an expert.

Every so often, a new fad emerges that brings with it a flood of self-proclaimed experts. Think back a few years when life coaches and feng-shui consultants peddled their services to anyone foolish enough to take them seriously. Today, most of these so-called experts have found promising new careers in the fast food industry, but they have been replaced by an army of SEO consultants, green experts, and social media gurus. How do we distinguish the true experts in these fields from the poseurs and the frauds?

The promise of achieving top rankings on Google and other major search engines is a temptation that many businesses can’t resist. Unfortunately, search engine algorithms are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the universe, and anyone who claims they have the knowledge required to manipulate them to produce page one results is either a fool or a fraud. In either case, hang onto your wallet. There are a few legitimate SEO practitioners out there, but for every true expert, there are 10 wannabes, phonies and frauds.

Given time, a handful of talented SEO practitioners will rise to the top and gain the recognition they deserve as true experts, but only after the incompetents and frauds are exposed for what they are. The same cannot be said for the small army of self-proclaimed social media experts who have come out of the woodwork to offer their consulting services. While no one can deny the value of improved search rankings, there has of yet been no demonstrable benefit to businesses using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are no case studies that prove a return on investment, so by necessity these so-called experts speak in abstract terms and focus on intangible results. That may allow them to fool a few people for a short time, but sooner or later they are going to have to demonstrate that their clients can actually profit from the use of social media. When that time comes, they better hope that McDonald’s is hiring.