In general yes Steve, but I have to disagree on a couple of points. Firstly, general directories are worthless but niche ones can be helpful. Find a directory based on your niche which looks well maintained and it's probably worth a backlink, even if you have to pay a small sum.
Secondly, although nofollow links won't help improve your PR score, you do need them. If Google sees you have only dofollow links it will see you are trying to game the rankings. These days you need a mix of do and no follow links.
Totally agree, the original poster said nothing about niche, quality etc. directories, he said post everywhere to any directories, really, directories should be seen as a place to build human traffic rather than great SEO resources I think, same with social networks for the moment at least.
I agree also to a balance of nofollow links, my point is sweating blood building a Facebook profile in itself will not benefit your SEO, if you want to build nofollow links there are much quicker ways to do it, you would have to spam the crap out of your social networks to balance a decent sized dofollow link building effort, however there are tons of forum posts kicking around the web saying social networks are great for SEO implying if you get 1000 Twitter followers you'll suddenly rocket up SERPS or something.
Also agree it is worth building social because it builds human traffic and it is pretty likely to be relevant to SEO in future, but right now it does not have any direct impact on SEO, it's good for Internet marketing but it's not at all immediately relevant to SEO or, as far as I know, PR. There are some marginal suggestions of large numbers of +1s or retweets boosting SERPS a little but they are fairly hefty numbers you have to get. All round, there are far more effective ways of doing SEO and building pagerank; like good on page optimisation and quality, time effective link building. People are always looking for shortcuts and someone's always ready to leap up and give out of date or undetailed advice.
You're right, I should have explained myself better, though lately I seem to spend 90% of my forums time in different places repeating myself endlessly that article spinning and spamming, press release spamming, unedited directory spamming etc. are not good SEO techniques, apologies!
