Seth Godin is part marketing guru and part pop philosopher.  It makes for a fascinating mix, as he varies from the typical hypster by his nagging compulsion for thoughtfulness.  Trust me, this can be a serious inhibition for a marketer.  Lawyer too.

So recognizing that some of his readers may have a little bit of free time on their hands at the moment, Seth offers some suggestions to take up the slack:

A lot of corporations have seen dramatic decreases in revenue and have cut back projects as well. In many cases, this is accompanied by layoffs, and so everyone is working far harder.

But in other organizations, and for a lot of freelancers, there’s more time than work. In other words, slack time.

Assume for a moment you don’t have money to develop and launch something new. So, what are you going to do with the slack?

Seth then discusses ways to fill the void, which of course is far better than sitting at home contemplating one’s navel.  But he poses a solution that troubles me:

Use social networking tools to connect to people for no good reason. Post tons of useful answers on discussion boards where your expertise is valued. Build a permission asset in the form of an email newsletter or a fascinating blog that people want to read. Do resume makeovers for 100 friends. Start a neighborhood or industry book group. Don’t go to conventions, earn the right to speak at them.

While he uses the word “earn” in the last sentence, does promoting oneself as an expert make you one?  In order to “post tons of useful answers,” you must first have useful answers to post.  The pervasive belief that creating the perception of expertise is a full-blown substitute for expertise is unfortunate.  In the blogosphere, as in listervs and discussion board before, and the web, twitter and facebook during, there are a vast array of people trying desperately to portray themselves as “experts”.  Indeed, this is the key motivation behind the dreaded Avvo Answers, as well as the pretender websites offering “free legal advice of experts” for the asking.

Forget for a moment that these are unhelpful and destructive to the public, who receives advice worth less than they are paying.  It also serves to make clear to the rest of us that some of you are total incompetent idiots.  You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and once you put it in writing for the world to see, you’ve provided conclusive proof.

In fairness to Seth, his first suggestion is to gain expertise.  I’m a little dubious that this can be accomplished during slack time, as opposed to say 20 years in the trenches, plus a whole lot of extra effort throughout, plus a certain level of innate intelligence, plus some other stuff.  Expertise isn’t easy to gain in most fields of endeavor.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t strive to improve ourselves, to become better than we are.  That’s easy, and it’s a worthy way to spend down time.  But improvement doesn’t equal expertise.

As I write this post, I’m checking the clock because I have a conference call, something I generally consider an offensive waste of my valuable time, with some corporate-types, who consider a day without a conference call a day wasted, to discuss a talk to be given to a prestigious group of lawyers in Chicago.  The people asked to speak aren’t there because they promiscuously roamed the internet soliciting invitations by posting “tons of useful answers,” but rather did whatever they did and were, for whatever reason, viewed as possessing something to say that the group would want to hear.  If this is expertise, then so be it, but the point is that the expertise comes first, and the recognition follows.

One can’t help seeing many bloggers and twitterers and others trying desperately to set themselves up as experts when it’s painfully obvious that they are anything but.  Indeed, some have conclusively proven that they are thick as a brick, apparently to everyone but themselves.  That may well be the best they can ever hope to be, particularly given the low cost of entry to social media.  But while social media offers everyone the chance to express their deepest and best thoughts publicly, it doesn’t mean that anyone with internet access has a right to be accepted as an expert.  To suggest otherwise is foolhearty.  Chances are equally good that those who try to promote themselves as brilliant will destroy what little credibility they might otherwise have if they just kept their mouths shut.

Granted, P.T. Barnum said that there’s a sucker born every minute, and even those who show no indicia of expertise will likely find someone even more foolhearty than them to be willing to accept their advice.  But I somehow doubt that Seth is suggesting that people should spend their downtime trying to be first amongst village idiots.  So let’s not get carried away with creating an online persona of expertise in lieu of actually becoming the expert one hopes to be.  If you lack the latter, you are likely to fail in the former.  And you won’t be any better off for proving to the world that you don’t have a clue.