Exploring social business strategy

Consider the following two sentences:

You are an excellent salesperson on Twitter.

You are a very persuasive person on Twitter.

Now I haven’t done a scientific study on this by any means, but I have been exploring a number of stories about Twitter users lately, and I have generated a significant amount of discussion around my previous two posts trying to tie Twitter behavior to the Tipping Point theories. While I have been learning a lot, and realizing the riddle might be harder to solve than I initially thought, one thing that I’ve been noticing is that while few people have a problem with the maven or connector label potentially applied to them, even fewer people are comfortable being called a salesperson (I’ve gone away from the framework adopted the gender neutral term here).

So this is where the power of the single word comes in – if you read up on the Tipping Point on Wikipedia, Salesmen are clearly defined by a single word – persuaders. So in terms of my (hopeful) analysis, if I say someone is functioning mostly as a salesperson on Twitter, I am saying they are persuasive – so the two sentences I started this post with are basically the same thing.

But my hunch is that they’re not perceived that way. So what do you think – does it matter, and if so should I change the word as I explore this issue? And is it a petty game of semantics, or is there a fundamental difference – in peoples minds – between being an effective salesperson, and being persuasive?

Not sure if it helps, but here are the traditional dictionary definitions:

persuade

–verb (used with object), -suad⋅ed, -suad⋅ing.
1. to prevail on (a person) to do something, as by advising or urging: We could not persuade him to wait.
2. to induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convince: to persuade the judge of the prisoner’s innocence.

salesman

–noun, plural -men.

a man who sells goods, services, etc.
n. A man who is employed to sell merchandise in a store or in a designated territory.