My mom used to tell me a story of how when she was a little girl, she was sent to get water. Now she's from North Carolina and at that time sinks inside the house was a luxury. So she sat her bucket down and pulled the lever on the water pump. After a couple of pulls, it goes up and down by itself and fills up the bucket. So she's watching the lever and decides to jump on it for a horsey ride. Well, she does this for a little bit until she slips and the lever in an upswing pops her in the chin. I can't remember if it knocks her out or not but she learned something valuable that day: Don't play with the lever!

I'm not sure people are getting the point in Social Media. I asked Alejandro Reyes( www.successfool.com ) about Robert Scoble and on live video he said he didn't want to talk about him, curious... You would think Scoble is the perfect model to follow for Internet marketing: Be yourself 100% percent of the time. Gain a following and direct them to cool stuff you find interesting...Ohhh no profit making, hmph. Well I'm not too sure about that. After gaining the loyalty of so many tech hungry people, pulling the lever to get something out of it shouldn't be devious in my opinion. This was touched on before once he put ads on his blog. The question not answered though is how can we use these social media tools properly?

I'm certainly not an expert in this space but (wait for it..) I do have some ideas.

1) Use your Followers to work for a company promoting new tech things:
Ok that's not new since that's what Scoble is currently doing...

2) Start your own company working (for profit) with potential developers and test their products with your audience:
I guess this is the rub, since I feel your hard work to get a following, should allow you to be compensated for it in some way.

3) Use your numbers to promote yourself as a Social Media Guru (SMG?) and work as a consultant helping other companies:
I like this idea the most. Actually I'm testing this pitch by interjecting my currently small stats into business meetings with people wanting me to create websites. I think this model has huge potential!

4) Get a lot of traffic. Talk in circles. Make emotional connections and sell them ebooks:
I am I being too harsh with this? This seems to be a dead end street to me. What does your followers get out of it?

There are other models out there but I'm just trying to narrow the choices down. Eventually popular bloggers will get to this juncture and to have your chin popped by the social media lever, might be something hard to recover from, look at Calacanis...