Expert in the field of BS

From Wikipedia: An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.

‘Expert in a field’ have been so loosely used to define speakers in the tech industry. I’ve seen many folks who classify themselves as ‘experts in xyz’ overnight. Do you need real experience, been in the trenches to be an expert in a particular field? or is academic knowledge enough?

Some real life examples (names are hidden to protect the innocent):

- a marketing media person spent a weekend playing with social media games on facebook. The following Monday, this person redefined their role as a ’social gaming expert’ and started to give talks on how to make social games engaging, attract users etc

- a small group of engineers spent a weekend and created a social application. It launched the following Monday and ’spiked’ with users (friends?). The following week, they were giving demo/advice on how to create viral apps that works – “how to go from 0 to thousands”. (Their own app died in a less then a month).

Why is this a problem? The ‘experts’ giving advice are typically invited to many of the smaller talks (like meetups) that are also frequented by attendees who are exploring opportunities and gathering information to enter the field. These attendees have no benchmark to measure against and in many cases are misinformed – not a good start. These experts are stroking their own ego – but at the cost of leading others down the wrong path.