I like Gary Vaynerchuck – I love his new video podcast Ask Gary. But Gary put up an important blog post yesterday titled “Are experts the only people who should put out content?” and he argues that expertise is subjective, that it doesn’t objectively exist. I disagree and think it’s important enough to write a blog post.
Just because he’s seen several ways that people have been wrong about their assessments of expertise does not mean that the concept of expertise is invalid. TL;DR: I believe you can build expertise through consistent participation in global discourse on the social web. And I think that’s pretty awesome.
I am a social media expert (Gary is too), despite people saying “there’s no such thing as a social media expert.” I’ve written thousands of blog posts and I’ve gotten progressively better results from them. I know a lot and can do a lot more than I was able to do 10 years ago when I started all this. Now I run a company that finds influential experts on any topics....
Marshall Kirkpatrick believes there ARE "social media experts." I like his thinking about thought leaders, influencers and what matters in social media.