I recently embarked on a misguided campaign to "win" a Shorty Award for "The best producers of short content in 2008." I'd seen in the past people asking for votes for their company for a TechCrunch Award, and other industry awards, so I thought, "What would be wrong with asking my Twitter friends for Shorty nominations?" A lot apparently.
I decided to tweet every 12 hours, no more, with a link asking that people nominate me. Mid-way through, I saw a cleverly formatted link from TwitterTips and learned how to do one-click nominations. Every morning I looked at the Shorty Awards home page to see my standing. All I wanted was to stay in the top 100, which required about two nominations a day. I ended up at number 85.
It turns out that I was extremely annoying to people, and when Ben Kessler tweeted "@jpostman I am unfollowing because of your incessant nagging for a Shorty nomination. It's about earning it.. do actors beg for their Oscar*?," I decided to withdraw from the contest, stop asking for nominations, and remove the link from the sidebar of my blog.
I sent an e-mail and a direct message to the Shorty Award people and asked that they delete me from the web site and remove me from the contest.
I'd like to request that you delete me, [ @jpostman ] from the Shorty Awards home page and remove me from the contest. I made an error in judgment by going overboard in promoting myself for votes and found that it was not consistent with who I am and why I am on Twitter. I lost a number of followers and received criticism from several people. I have no issues with the awards themselves, but it's not the right thing for me, so I would appreciate it if you take me off the web site.
They did not respond to my request and as of this morning I am still there.
I'm not the kind of person to say, "Well, it was a learning experience," because I prefer to do things right the first time and not damage my own reputation, or that of a client. But I did learn from this. Shameless self promotion is bad manners. And you can do it for a long time before someone calls you on it, so better not to do it in the first place.
But here's the bigger lesson. Who cares, really, about getting a Shorty or Top Tweeples or Most Interesting People on Twitter award? None of them measure your worth, or the quality of your work. They won't help you get a better job or date more attractive partners. So the other thing I learned, then, is what it feels like to be caught up in Twitter popularity madness. What a poor use of time and energy, with many of my followers annoyed and a couple of weeks of my time wasted thinking about this.
Onward and upward. It's a new year.
* Actually, actors DO beg for their Oscars. Studios place ads in Variety and elsewhere asking directly for nominations and they also lobby within the industry. Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year promoting actors for Oscar nominations.
Tags: Twitter, Shorty Awards
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