Seth Godin, famed author, marketer, and blogger, caused a tempest in a social media teapot this week, with his blog post about the failure of non-profits to use social media tools to advance their cause.

No surprise, but, the blogosphere was quick with their response: Beth Kanter summarizes the responses garnered by this post, and touches on the point that smaller metrics don’t necessary translate to actual change encouraged.

Geoff Livingston, of The Buzz Bin, also posted his take. As a practitioner working with both corporations and nonprofits, he notes that non-profits “get” social media better than businesses.

Which, in turn, brings me to my minor point. Isn’t the reason social media exists is to cut through the massive amounts of clutter caused by constant advertising broadcasting from corporations? So, following this line of reasoning, wouldn’t it follow that non-profits using social media inherently “get” social media? Their message, at the very least, is one that’s important to society, one that can and should be shared over a network where real, authentic, human dialogue is (and always should be) the name of the game.

In short, social media was made for social marketing. Which means, the problem doesn’t lie among the non-profits, as Seth Godin claims, but with companies, who can use it so, so wrongly.