As you can imagine, I was one extremely thrilled editor when freelancer and regular Bizcommunity contributor and columnist Herman Manson (@marklives) was announced on Friday night, 4 November 2011, as the first-ever Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year - the look on my face, Herman tells me, was something to behold, as it came as a complete surprise to me. Anyway, it tickles me pink that Herman, who'd written a story here on Biz about the launch of this new category, sponsored by Cerebra, should be the inaugural winner. Congrats once again, Herman, you make us proud!

It was the 10th year of the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards honouring the excellent journalism talent that South Africa has to offer across the entire spectrum of media disciplines, and it was a much more intimate affair than previous times I'd attended. I was impressed to see how much Vodacom has embraced the use of Twitter, including promoting that night the use of an official hashtag (#VJOY11) and actively encouraging the audience to switch to silent, not off-mode, so that we could tweet to our hearts' content and have our tweets appear up on the twitterfall. The only thing that was missing was someone officially dedicated to tweeting all the results as they were announced, as is becoming the norm at award events around the world.

I've also noticed this year, while attending various awards and events or through following on Twitter, just how many more media and creative professionals are now on Twitter, as against late 2007 and 2008, when I was generally one of very few live-tweeters. Twitter is definitely becoming much more mainstream these days, as recent research by World Wide Worx and Fuseware shows. In fact, the editor of a certain national Sunday paper told me on Friday night that it's become so mainstream that he gets spammed in DMs (direct messages on Twitter) with people trying to send him their press releases - and the same on Facebook. Hint: do not do this; it's on par with those calls or emails that go: "Did you get my press release? When are you going to use it?".

Herman was also a busy bee in Istanbul last week, so look out this week for his stories filed from the Microsoft Advertising Imagine Istanbul 2011 conference, the first of which we've published today.

Have a fantastic week!
Simone Puterman (@SimoneBiz)
Managing editor

PS If you want to know what we journos get up to on Twitter, apart from reporting from events, breaking and spreading the news, engaging with our readers, widening our networks, promoting our latest stories and sharing useful links with each other, we also enjoy wordplay - so a meme this weekend was coming up with collective nouns: a press/jot/column/scoop/pun of journalists, a curmudgeon/subversion/nitpicking of sub-editors, a click/shoot of photographers, an ego of editors, a gag of censors - we're definitely an argument of hacks!

PPS In the ninth article in our "Google AdWord Free Trial" series, find out how you can combine the power of visual advertising (Google Display Network) with the targeting capability of AdWords to make sure your message follows your audience across the web.

PPPS Long-time Bizcommunity.com contributor Issa Sikiti da Silva has terminated his contract as a news supplier to us.

Responses to this column welcomed in our editor's column archive. Please send all South African marketing and media news to marketingnews@bizcommunity.com, opinion pieces to contributors-marketing@bizcommunity.com and international news to internationalnews@bizcommunity.com. For more on how to contribute to Biz, go here. Also follow @Bizcommunity on Twitter and join us on Facebook.