Social media is not radio

Many convential media folks who are used to the 'radio' mode of one way broadcast seem to miss out on the fact that to be successful in social media (especially twitter) one has to remember that this is a two way medium. Unless one engages the audience in two way conversations success will not be sustainable.

A simple metric to analyse this would be what percentage of your tweets are @replies, or the ratio followers to following. If these ratios are heavily skewed then one can be certain about long term unviability - if you don't listen and only talk you are doomed. There are some media folks who don't follow anyone at all! Need I say more?

Social Media for Marketers – Looking Beyond the Hype [blog at PaulWriter]

My take on the hype surrounding Social Media for B2B marketing at Jessie Paul's B2B Marketing blog

Software Review - Snaptu

I came across Snaptu while desperately searching for a mobile program I could use on my Nokia phone to access Twitter. Most programs I found were meant for the higher end phones, and the ones which could work on the entry level GPRS phones were very clumsy (jitter, tiny twitter) and gave you a feeling of browsing the internet using the old text based browser called lynx, whereas what I had in my mind was an equivalent of Gmail for Mobile.

Though I was searching for a twitter specific tool, Snaptu turned out to be much more than just twitter. It is a one point solution for almost all your social networking needs - Twitter, Facebook, News & Blogs, Orkut, LinkedIn, Picassa, flickr, etc. What's more, once you have integrated your twitter/facebook accounts, any news item or blog you read can be directly posted to your twitter/fb accounts, with a built in URL shortener. In the news & blogs section you can add most of the news websites, enabling me to read news in a very mobile friendly format.

On the twitter module, the features I found attractive are 'Reply to All', 'View Conversation', and the ability to access the links found in tweets in a mobile friendly presentation. In addition, all the things you do on twitter web can also be done here - follow/unfollow, add to list, etc.

The other modules are configurable, similar to adding gadgets in Google Desktop or the Windows Vista sidebar. There is only one more feature I wish existed in Snaptu - a direct integration with blogger. Currently I am still to figure out an effective way to blog from mobile.

In short, I am thankful to snaptu for two things - for postponing my decision to purchase a higher end phone (can now patiently wait for the 3G auction mess to be sorted out), and for making my life less boring during most of my boring train journeys (which are increasingly getting alarmingly frequent)

Pros:

Most Social Media already integrated, or links provided for
Good & intuitive user interface

Cons:

No offline mode
No integration with blogger or any direct option to blog