It’s not surprising that those who are most hesitant to adapt will be the first to embrace a contrarian article like this one. Young, small, and agile companies in all industries are seeing great results from their social presence (hence the majority of positive press for SM and the many case studies), because they know how best to use it to their benefit and how to be “real” or authentic.The archaic brands out there who have massive policy restrictions on SM that bind the hands of employees and remove any possibility of authenticity in their mandated One Social Media Decree Posted Per Week (usually something in the vein of “LOOK AT US, WE ARE GREAT, BUY OUR STUFF” partly because of said policy, partly because of fear, and partly because you can’t force creativity), are going to love this article, print it out (because they’re usually the type that prints out everything), think they have been proven correct in their archaic approach to online marketing, and believe their company should immediately cease all SM work.Good. It’s their loss. Let them fail to grasp it, it just gives entrepreneurs a better chance to succeed and cut into that brand’s marketshare.WebVixn wrote: “I agree wholeheartedly with its ineffectiveness in a direct marketing effort (for retail): who logs on to Facebook or Twitter just for the spam?” One could just as easily ask, “Who logs into email just for the spam?” Provided you set up your account properly, no one can spam you on Twitter or Facebook without you first connecting with them. But we all receive unsolicited spam email marketing and, aside from a few masochists, we all hate it.For many folks, email is important for business and transactional use, hence the need for white lists, spam filters, and rules/tags to segregate what comes in through it and cut down on time wasted by junk. It’s all a big pain in the butt, honestly, hence why something like CAN-SPAM had to happen, imperfect as it is.Twitter and Facebook are different tools with different marketing purposes. They aren’t primarily about formal business use, so quite naturally they will be better grounds for building community, customer service and interaction, timely communications, and even certain promotions. To not see the distinctions between the uses of email and a variety of other platforms is to not understand their real benefits of each for a brand.Twitter in particular is practically designed around the concept of what marketers might think of as “spam”, because t...