How to manufacture an expert in a few days using credibility indicators

Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2015; the reference to the 2014 “Little Nicolás” affair and the remarks about Spanish newspapers reflect the situation at that time.

Let’s be realistic. Some people have more résumé than real knowledge of their subject, but when they are introduced somewhere, after the long introduction listing their degrees and appointments, we take it for granted that whatever they say is going to be good.

Besides, at the end of the day, these days the message matters less than the messenger. As Tim Ferriss said in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, there is a huge difference between being an expert and being perceived as an expert. In fact, in business, being perceived as an expert sells much more than actually being one.

You may know a great deal about a particular subject, such as medicine. But if your name isn’t accompanied by “doctor of medicine”, what you say won’t be taken into account.

In the same way, in economics your name has to be preceded by “economist”. And in this case, a large part of the problems society has had come from listening to people who carried the title of “economist”, when sometimes having studied economics doesn’t make you a good economist. In many cases, all it gives you is a sort of licence to spew your political ideology disguised as economic theory.

So you have to make use of what Ferriss called “credibility indicators“. When you use those credibility indicators, other people won’t question your message. Without going any further, remember the case of “el pequeño Nicolás” (“Little Nicolás”): once he had photos of himself with the Spanish prime minister and the mayor of Madrid, everyone else assumed he was a powerful and important person. Nobody questioned it at the time.

Today we’re going to look at how to be perceived as an expert or, put another way, how to be a “fake expert”, using some of the strategies Ferriss mentioned in his book. And as you read, ask yourself how many times this technique may have been used by people you have considered experts. Ultimately, it is our biases that give us false perceptions.

It can also be used, though, once you consider yourself an expert in your business niche and find that people need a few trimmings before they will believe you: you should know what else they need in order to give you credibility.

1. Join two or three industry organizations in your field whose names sound official.

Belonging to an association usually only requires paying a membership fee. Sometimes people include something like “Graduate in Business Administration and Management, member of the Young Entrepreneurs Association, partner of the NMC (I made up those initials) and holder of a Master’s in Marketing”.

Personally, an introduction like that usually tells me nothing about what that person knows about a given field, but most people will find it credible because, as I said at the beginning, we don’t care so much about the message as about the messenger.

This trick is a way of conditioning the listener.

2. Read two or three books in the field you talk about.

Sometimes you don’t need to know a subject at an expert level. It’s enough to know a little more than the audience you’re speaking to. So just by reading a few of the bestselling books and picking out their main ideas, you can come across as an expert, especially if your listeners haven’t read those books and you adapt the authors’ message so it seems to be your own.

That way, even someone who has read those books will think: “Warren Buffett said something similar. This guy clearly knows what he’s talking about.”

I have sometimes been to talks where speakers shamelessly paraphrased authors I have been reading for years. I know nobody is going to invent anything new these days and that all we can do is adapt messages that already exist, but what I saw some of them do was downright tasteless. And the thing is, most of the audience left happy, so this strategy works.

3. Give a free short course on something to an organization with an impressive name.

A few years ago, we saw how a company that sold online courses used one of its clients to build itself a great reputation. The company boasted of having worked with and trained the Guardia Civil (Spain’s national gendarmerie).

If the Guardia Civil trusted that company, it obviously must have a spotless reputation. It later came out that there had been no collaboration worth mentioning, just some small strategy of this kind.

So do the same. Get the chance to give a talk at a university or an association. Make a short video, take a few photos, and there you have more to add to your résumé, and those pictures of you on stage, teaching others what you know, will give you the credibility you need.

Automatically, people will say: “This guy must know his stuff.”

4. Offer to write a few articles for specialist magazines.

If you manage to get a specialist magazine or a national newspaper to let you publish something, and these days that’s not hard at all, you’re already an expert.

Look at it this way. Some of the biggest blunders against the basic pillars of financial education I have ever seen were in the serious press. In this case, we look at the outlet, not the writer. In other words, we say: “It’s true, because I saw it published in El País or El Mundo” (two of Spain’s main national newspapers).

Nobody wonders whether it was written by a journalism intern who probably has no idea about the subject, but who either used the strategy in point 2 or simply copied the content from another outlet, where it had been written by yet another intern.

The point is that if you add to your résumé that you have contributed articles to major media, “Now you really must be one hell of an expert in your field, because those outlets are very serious and don’t let just anyone write for them.”

With a bit of luck, that article you publish in a serious outlet in your country (Spain, in this case) gets picked up by The New York Times, which quotes you, and then you can add to your long introduction:

“His work has been cited by numerous media outlets, including The New York Times.”

And that’s how we manufacture an expert out of nothing.

See also: 8 ways to be, or seem to be, an interesting person

Featured image: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.