Too often when digesting Social Media blogs, I read the same crap about how to take advantage of basic Social Media tools and methods to promote yourself or company. It's all the same crap about setting up a "listening post" by populating your google reader with tons of blog feeds about social media or using Twitter search tools like Summize or blog search tools like Technorai or just a good "advanced" and narrowed Google search to find where people are either talking about your brand or your niche. The idea is you find these blog articles or twitter conversations or whatever and go comment on them and attempt to interact with people, without hardselling them. That's pretty much the exact lesson that is reguritated in all these Web 2.0 blog articles. And they don't even say it as specifically as I do--they just abstractly say: "Setup a listening post and use X tools" and then some fluffy "everybody loves everyone" crap that connotes genuinely interacting with people you come across in blog comment walls, rather than hardselling them by saying, "come by this from X URL." At the end of the day, what they really mean is just go around blabbering around to important people, i.e. tastemakers, and eventually bring up what you want to sell to them as if that wasn't your intention in the beginning. My thoughts are: Yes this works, but only for small extremely targeted brands like mine, FaceySpacey, where I only need a few clients to make my nut...So I want to share with you a comment I left to one of the top "Social Media Gurus." Expand the whole article to see it -->