I am finding a ton of success in sharing my tweets with the people I'm writing them about. I wrote an analysis of the Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete and tweeted it to the writer Mike Starrbury and he followed back and retweeted it getting traffic to the article. I guess we all have to find our way and it will be a combination of things.
In regard to that article on WSJ it is in alignment with what I wrote here: http://www.cbpublish.com/thats-not-what-its-for-another-facebook-article/
I have so many of these articles that if people would just visit my shoe site and CBP they could find a wealth of stats and info explaining how small biz does not really benefit from Facebook anymore.
But like I said, for a small biz that requires capital, the banks and lenders are actually taking into consideration your online presence. Which is something you should definitely take a look at. I have had a link to AALBC on my site for years and it will always be there. I redesigned the site and took down the Power List but that is because of a call to action I have at the top of the sidebar that I'm testing during the redesign. The more we link to each other and establish pingbacks we can't be ignored in the search algorithm for bing/google.
I do agree that posting on the larger networks and sharing tweets with hashtags and @s is the way to go.