Sonia Simone at Copyblogger describes two types of people on the web: thought leaders and marketers. Thought leaders (she calls them the “Cool Kids”) constantly push the boundaries of conversation, attention and influence, while the Internet Marketers chase the cash through quick, aggressive, black hat tactics. Then she poses the question: which tribe is lame and which one is smart? Aaron Wall similarly examines the dynamics between salesmanship and competent expertise. He claims people who desire to be experts have trouble being effective sales people:

The truth rarely ends up in marketing copy, so we discount much of what we read, assuming some of it to be false or over-stated. A person that is mostly driven by being an expert will likely have sales copy that sounds wishy-washy, especially when compared against a person who does nothing but write sales copy (or spin public relations) for a living.

I could not agree with him more. [Read more...]