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Yes some of these types of product are good if your aim is just to blast out at social media but to be honest the winning formula for social stuff is not to be lazy, get involved and interact. Genuine interaction with members is the key to success, if you can't manage so many social media accounts due to cost or time then I would consider picking your key ones that are best suited to your product/ services and focus on doing those well.

I heard on the grapevine, that google would soon be looking at penalising content that is put up for purely SEO reasons i.e. put up for the sake of putting it up, and my thoughts are one of the big things they would use to filter out thsi sort of stuff would be social signals, so my view is as others have already said to put only link worthy and shareable content. I think content purely on its quality and topic is not going to cut it without these social signals. I would forget simply using good writers and look at the more creative and social media savvy writers instead. Try to get discussion around your posts instead of shouting it out at people by social.

Great to see Google making examples of certain groups out there like this, but that being said are they doing it quick enough and are they leaving themselves, and us, wide open to short term gamers of the system.

There a lot of talk out there about how White Hat SEO will prevail, which is of course true, but I can't help feeling these opportunists whilst i'st taking so long for them to be taken down are taking a significant market share at any given time.

Squidoo, and indeed HubPages are great, I use the frequently and as you kind of picked up already yes the real answer is you should look at both guest blogs and Squidoo lenses. The one thing you should focus on here is relativity i.e. how relevant is the blog and it's audience to your market. If there is a real opportunity of a great blog to guest blog on, I would jump on it. Google is placing a lot more emphasis on relativity and of course understands that anyone can add to Squidoo with it begin an open platform.There is always tomorrow for Squidoo, it's not going anywhere, so I would take any quality distinguishable exposure you can get.