No, scratch that. I don’t hate experts at all, there is an entire world of experts, fonts of knowledge in subjects ranging from Neurosurgery to Aerospace Engineering who make the world a better place. They spend years and years honing their knowledge and perfecting their craft so that one day they can look out over their domain of knowledge and say, with a straight face, that they truly understand it.

What grinds down my last bit of patience is the world of the web and those self-proclaimed “experts” who ruin it for the rest of us.

Many of you reading this make some if not all of your income picking fruit from the money-tree that is the Internet. You are designers, consultants, entrepreneurs, marketers, PR people. Your business is selling trust and talent to investors and clients for money and reputation. A big part of that sale is convincing these people that what you’re selling them actually exists.

When your product is information, this can be a hard sell indeed.

Enter the snake oil salesman of the web. The ones who sell meta-keywords and friend-adders, the gurus who think that the highest form of marketing is to spam social networks with your .info links, and the highest form of design is the one-page brochure site made entirely in Flash (for $10,000).

They travel the countryside, courting our clients with slick powerpoints and pipe dreams. They reel them in and ruin their businesses, leaving them with half-completed projects, half-finished campaigns and empty wallets.

Worse, they leave them angry.

Angry that they were duped, and angry that they aren’t even sure how badly they were taken. By the time they get to us, these road-weary victims of their own lack of understanding have 1/10th the budget and 1/100th the patience, making it harder for us to make the sale and much worse making it impossible to live up to the false promises left by the fly-by-nighters.

How can anyone solve this problem? It goes back to developing your honesty. I’m not an expert at everything, even in my rather narrow domain. I’d rather lose business than promise something I can’t fulfill; I’d rather say I’m not the man for the job, than take on a project that is outside of my range of talents; I’d rather advise someone to refine their idea than help them create something I know won’t work.

The only way to defeat the snake oil salesman is to shine a light on their tactics and rise above them, if you’re still playing at the ragged edge of legitimacy yourself, it will be impossible for those who are paying for trust to know where to place their coppers. If you are frank and open about what they can expect, and who can really get that to them (even if it isn’t you) — not only will they respect you more as a professional, but when push comes to shove they are a lot more likely to place their bets with you.

Whether you are looking for investor capital or a design contract, remember that the initial sale isn’t important. You can lie, cheat and steal your way into an initial contract without too much resistance but in a world where media is all social, if you cheat and you get found out — the results can be disastrous. Not only will you lose out on the most lucrative aspect of making a sale (the re-buy) but you also lose untold numbers of possible referrals and priceless amounts of goodwill. In the end, the white lie you thought would save your quarter might cost you your business.

Let’s not forget, it might also cost me some of mine . . .

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