I'm not sure what this comment has to do with the article at all. Try to evaluate the idea, and not the author.

Whether or not you think women are treated unfairly in the industry (I used to bristle at the idea, then watched my wife interview for jobs and radically changed my take), and whether or not this particular woman endured any real unfairness:

It is still worth considering how totally unprofessional and inappropriate it may be to ask a woman for her business card in order to abuse it for your personal benefit. It's not something I had thought of before. It's worth discussing.

If gender politics makes your brain turn off (and, it used to do that to me too), just pivot the story in your head so that instead of asking for a date, the guy takes her card at a tech convention and later calls and tries to sell her a dental insurance policy. It's spam. Spam is bad. There's an implied agreement when I give you my card that you're going to use it for its intended purpose: to contact me about something relevant to my business.

I don't think your analogy is a good match, someone selling you dental insurance out of the blue is also considered a nuisance, someone asking if you would like to go out on a date out of the blue is par for the course on normal human relations, and the author admits as much and points out that it is easy to simply refuse in this instance.

I have been propositioned for this kind of thing in a business context and have refused and not had negative blowback from doing so. That was actually the first mental shift I tried to see if it made any more sense to me that way, but it still seemed overblown. I can't think of an invitation that it is socially acceptable to make to a new acquintance that it is not socially acceptable to make to a new potential business contact, admittedly I guess that might be a consequence of the extremely limited array of things I consider to be socially acceptable invitations to new acquaintances.

Just saying no thanks is really not so hard, and if it continues after that point it becomes a hell of a lot less ambiguous or defensible.

Taking someone's business contact information with no intent of building a business relationship and then using it for your own personal benefit is unprofessional and rude. I'm not sure any number of words is going to get you around that fact.

mentioned multiple times a) it is not clear that there was no intent beside personal benefit and b) it is not clear where the line between personal and business is if your business is schmoozing.

This is not to say this is absolutely positively an instance of either of the above, merely that it is too ambiguous and unclear to not come across poorly.

It's always going to be possible to come up with some circumstance the author didn't foresee or insulate themselves from that might mitigate the specific facts they're using to promote their idea. But who cares? That's a nerd message board game.

The question is: is taking someone's business card under the auspices of a business inquiry and then using it solely for your own personal reasons unprofessional or not? The answer (I'll go out on a limb here...) is: yes. It's unprofessional. Interesting point, blog author! Thanks!

Your single paragraph summary was immeasurably clearer than her entire rant. Yes, under those exact circumstances it is both unprofessional and stalkerish.

Asking someone on a date is not solely for one's own personal benefit. It's expected that the other party could benefit from the offer too.

So is selling someone dental insurance. Doesn't mean it's not spam.

That's a fair point.

As far as I can tell she does social media.

This is not a sarcastic question but what does that actually mean? Anyone? I'm genuinely curious.

It's a kind of marketing. But yeah, it's bullshit. It's the new "SEO consultant".

'Doing social media' isn't necessarily bullshit. For example, it could be useful for a large company to know what's being said about them on Twitter -- maybe even to respond -- and it's not necessarily clear whose job that would be... except for the person who does social media?

So the same kind of thing one could do with an irc bot in your dev chat room that monitors social media for mentions of your name? That would actually be useful if you didn't know how to do the above I think.

I have karma to burn so mod me down as much as you please, but for the record this was not intended as a sarcastic comment either, I was trying to see exactly what this "monitoring of social media" actually implies beyond my stated example.

What you described is essentially grep. Hiring someone to give you an executive summary of your image on the internet is different.

Honestly, I don't know if this is really the most important function of a social media consultant. They are really a domain expert. Like any consultant, their job is as not just to perform tasks in the domain, but to offer expertise and help make decisions as well. Knowledge of effectively using Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc can be leveraged for shareholder value. This could be marketing campaigns, coupons, contests, tech support, retweeting when relevent or almost any other use of social media.

Now, not every company needs this. But for big companies with large support and customer relations staffs, it's not unreasonable that a few social media experts can save enough money to make it worth their while.