A fence you don't want to be on

A lot of so-called web content is plagued by a kind of ambivalence.  It's as if the author can't decide whether to be a marketing copywriter or a provider of high value, unbiased material.   Could it be that these authors hope to be able to persuade without actually appearing to be  doing so?

One of my earliest writing lessons was that if you're not clear about your intended message, your reader will never be.  It strikes me that material that tries to be in both the pitching and the valuable content camps gets awfully muddy.  And I think it's clear that in the world of the 140 character attention span, readers will bail out of muddy content pretty darned quickly. 

So I say to those writers, make up your mind.  If you're going to pitch, do it unabashedly.  Pitching is not a crime, and when somebody is making a buying decision, a pitch is exactly what they are looking for.

On the other hand, when it's clear that a pitch is the last thing your readers want to see, don't try to fool them - it won't work.  Give them the valuable content they are looking for.  If they like what they see, they'll continue the conversation with you. 

Now, there's not much value here if you're selling laundry soap.  But if you're providing complex products to businesses, and your sales cycle depends on conversations, there's a lot to be said for conversation-building materials.  In this case, you want to make them as effective as you can, unfettered by any fuzziness of purpose.