My hope is to prove that a small group of people with whom you’ve built a relationship and trust is more powerful than a large group of people with no relationship. We’ll see what happens

I totally agree with you that entirely selfish and singled-minded approaches will inevitably fail.

However, I would also argue that the best sales people never try to aggressively sell the first time they interact with someone. They ALWAYS first build trust and develop relationships. I think the desperate sale’s people might make 1-2 sales, but ultimately they run out of business because everyone avoids them.

People who go into social media with an entirely selfish and single-minded approach will inevitably fail. In fact, they’ve already failed. I think of it this way: the salesperson (especially in social media) is the guy you don’t want at your party. He’s the guy who’s pestering everyone asking them to look at his product, and ruining everyone’s time. The marketer is the guy who everyone loves to have around and he uses his (interesting, noteworthy and potentially revolutionary) product to actually create interest and add to the conversation. It’s a fine line sometimes, but an important one to take heed of.