DRW'S TMBLR

I was browsing Sphinn today and came across this interview with a lady called Shana Albert (some of you social media buffs might know her better by “Nanny612”). 

For those of you who don’t know who she is, I will give you a brief introduction.  

Shana is a web master, webdesigner and run several blogs and websites. Nothing particularly sensational there one might think.  

What is sensational is that she has managed to leverage the power of social media sites to (indirectly) promote her web projects and generate traffic (a tactic refered to as Social Media Marketing). As you might have figured out by now, she has done this with great results.  

Interesting about Shana and her story is that she managed to become this successful without having an actual “marketing agenda” going in. She got so good results simply by enjoying herself (very important), and over time becoming an invaluable cornerstone of the community. 

Shana is (to my best knowledge) primarily most active on StumbleUpon, where she surely is worth her weight in gold as far as contributing quality content to the community. Social media is about exactly that in a nutshell: contributions and sustainable relationships. 

I’d like to describe this as “content and relations reciprocity”, with strong emphasize on the word reciprocity. This is a medium of mutually beneficial give and take; things cannot be forced or uncaringly pushed on people. It also demands its fair share of time. In other words, pretty much like its “offline” equivalent.  

In conclusion, marketers and others with similar agendas, recognising the value of social media but not fully realizing these fact, will slowly but surely undermine themselves and the brands they try to promote. 

Read interview here. 

Just read over at Pat Phelans blog (to be honest he Twittered it first) about a well cool new venture of his called ‘Twitterfone’. Twitterfone is a new voice-to-text service for the social micro-blogging platform Twitter.

Basically, if you want to get something up on Twitter but you’re behind the wheel of a car and can’t type, you just call a local access number and speak your message which automatically gets converted to text and posted to your Twitter. Wicked indeed.

With a lot of cool new third-party apps and services like this one coming out my stand point on Twitter is definitely reinforced. It basically states that it’s not Twitter in itself that’s so great; it’s all the users, their contributions and especially all the all the cool, value adding apps and other stuff that get released for the platform. Naturally, this goes for pretty much all social networks in general (users generate value) but I believe this is true in particularly in the case of Twitter

As of now, the service is invite only but I have requested an invite and will write a review of the service if I am fortunate enough to receive one.