Most of you already know Maki aka. DoshDosh. He has a very successful blog at doshdosh.com. For those few of you that don’t know, the site is a wealth of great information about blogging and making money online. All of the content is original and DoshDosh speaks candidly about what works and what doesn’t.

Initially I was just a lurker on his site along with the other dozen or so that I read. Even when posts were more delayed, I always went back just because of the content. Not trying to make my nose look too brown, but his blog is one of the best I know of in this niche. With over 13,000 readers, I am also not the only one that feels this way.

DoshDosh has multiple social networking profiles. Obviously his blog where he gets involved in the post comments would count as a network but he also has a Twitter account, Sphinn, and a StumbleUpon profile. Those are just the few I know of. DoshDosh has made more than one post on his blog about the need for people to embrace social media as a marketing tool.

I was involved in a brief chat with DoshDosh on Twitter today with some other people. The talk revolved around getting more followers on Twitter.

This update from Maki started a conversation about how to get more followers and @BrentCsutoras shared a link to a site that taps into the Twitter API. This site TwitterAdder takes your profile and automatically adds friends to your account. The site only does this 20 friends at a time but it doesn’t look like there is anything stopping someone from repeating this process over and over again for hours.

The TwitterAdder site looks very basic. All you need to type in is your profile name and password and the little web app randomly adds 20 people to your profile in a matter of seconds. this got me thinking, is this safe?

Adding friends to your profile is not hard using Twitter. Hell, all you need to do is find a popular person like @Scobleizer or @iJustine and run through their friends list clicking on “follow”. What would stop a person to write a script that used Twitters API and wrote a code that extracts your password before “adding” your friends? Some clever person just PWND your Twitter account!!

Well, I changed my password as soon as the paranoia set in and the conversation continued with DoshDosh. He made a great point about building a quick mass of followers vs. building them naturally.

I tend to agree. Using Social Media as a marketing tool is great if you remember that it’s a marketing tool. The point is to get the largest number of people to see your content and hope that the message sticks and is transfered to others. If you can do this by using an API that adds 3,000 friends to your profile, that can make quite an impact of your next blog post or messsage.

A few people in the Twitter conversation said this was deceitful and shady. So I felt compelled to write a quick post about it and as the question.

What are the limits you would go to in order to market your blog?