We wrote about the Shorty Awards, a competition to note the best Twitter users in various categories, last December. The competition is now drawing to a close, the winners will be announced in New York in February.
Twitter users were asked to nominate others and then vote on the finalists in each category. And apparently the competition for the award, absurdly, has driven some people to buy votes on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The going rate? $0.48 per Tweet.
Dan Zarrella noticed and posted the details on his blog. He claims another finalist in the Social Media category, Dan Hollings, was paying Mechanical Turk users $0.48 to create a Twitter account and vote for him. “DO NOT post publically that you are being paid for your work,” he warned.
The organizers of the event seem to be discounting the votes, and Hollings has fallen from over 400 votes to just 115 now.
This comes on the heels of Belkin paying people 65 cents for good reviews on Amazon, which at least has a clear logic trail (good reviews = more sales). I’m not so sure a Shorty Award is quite so monetizable.
One thing to remember with all of these gaming stories is that it isn’t possible to certifiably connect the Mechanical Turk posting to the person. A third party could be doing it to discredit them instead. Only Amazon could verify it by saying who’s doing the paying, and that isn’t likely.
In case you were wondering who is winning in the apps category: http://shortyaw...m/category/apps
dm
225 votes? The entire app developing group couldn’t round up more than 225 ppl to vote for them?
Really?
In 6 hrs, I could have my entire dorm block (and their contacts outside) get me more than 500 votes.
Where’s the networking power of twitter?
weep- dee-doo
http://thecashc...am.blogspot.com
Does anyone in their right mind think an offer to game anything via Mechanical Turk or any public platform will fly under the radar? Stupid is as stupid does.
Things like this are frustrating. I work with @girlinyourshirt and she has been working so hard to get honest votes. It’s so discouraging to see things like this. Check out her most recent push for #Advertising. I think you’ll really like it if you like the Dark Knight:
http://girl.iny...shirt.tv/joker/
The whole concept of ShortyAwards is absolutely ridiculous. It is so dejavu of Matt Bacak.
Michael,
I have voted for many of the Shorty Awards candidates.
I’m sure saddened to hear that some people are alleged to be ‘buying votes’.
The Twitter community I belong to heralds it’s ’self-regulation’.
I trust whoever is responsible for these dishonest practices will be revealed and subsequently banned from Twitter forever.
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase
Someone will be banned from Twitter for trying to game a separate media company’s contest?
Damn! And I’ve got all my votes through shameless begging. So what you’re telling me is that the market rate for all my whoring was 48 cents per tweet. I feel so…..cheap.
Vote for me in #humor. I won’t pay, but I will put out:
http://tinyurl....m/joeshortyvote
And you’ve just made Mr. Hollings quite famous. Or maybe No- No- Notorious (cue the music).
@joe brilliant! LOL’d for real.
Also, I love being mentioned by TC, I just wish the second R would appear in my last name.
Time to change the laundry..
Sounds like a bunch of losers that will do anything for e-fame/recognition.
i completely agree with you… what a waste of time and money.
I have one vote for nerd. Anyone else votes and I’ll bill you forty cents.
It was fun while it remained a noncompetitive thing to joke around with. File the contest under “eh whatever” i guess.
ShortyJokerAwards {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/BIVASSfbB6_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”ShortyJokerAwards ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/gaJJnyrroo”}}}
just goes to show you how valuable the “internet” person really is…
once again… vastly less than a buck ($1)… that’s a double cheeseburger at micky dees!!
peace
If the allegations against Dan Hollings are indeed true, he deserves not to win any awards on account of his being foolish enough to realize that social media is transparent. There is no escape, and you will be discovered. It’s encouraging in this new political era. We can hope that such accountability pervades more consequential realms of society.
I think buying votes is a great idea. The only thing that I am not sure of RIO on it.
This is a joke in every sense of the word! People buying Twitter votes??? WOW!
BestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
“I’m not so sure a Shorty Award is quite so monetizable.”
Some people need to boost their egos and will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
Tamara, you are so right…
I can hear it now. “You know, Dan Hollings! The guy who won the Short Award for Social Media!”
Cheating Twitter is like trying to beat Bruce Wayne in Backgammon.
NS
http://scienced....wordpress.com/
Mike, I am one of the 5 finalist of in the TECH category, and I have to tell you that I will give up this competition, because they just took more than 50 votes of my votes without a reason. I am not trading not paying for my votes.
And you a sooo right.. this competition is pointless… I do appreciate all of my followers voting for me, and I have told them, any prize I win, I will donate to my followers.
@aschek
“it isn’t possible to certifiably connect the Mechanical Turk posting to the person. A third party could be doing it to discredit them instead.”
So, let’s go ahead and run the story anyway and make good old Dan Hollings look like a jerk….even if it may not be true.
Oh, and also….who cares?
I lost around Seven votes myself and I know I didn’t cheat. However I do know that a friend of mine from IconBuffet looks like a total noob on twitter
Alex I know at least one of your Votes was a retweet from your Shortyaward own page:
“@aschek:
Thanks! RT @shortyawards: @aschek, you got a vote in the Shorty Awards Finals from @Riskin (and 99 others) in #tech http://bit.ly/BcBn“
That was not the reason… They contacted me after I emailed them, and they told me that they discounted part of my votes because
“We discounted all the votes in our system (not just yours) that didn’t include a reason”
So, they let people vote without a reason, then they discount them…
On the other side, I am so honored that my followers nominated me in the first place.. thanks!
I empathize with Alexander Schek and respect his decision to bow out of the competition after Twitter dumped 50 of his votes w/out explanation.
I am a finalist in the personal category. This morning I saw my vote count mysteriously drop by about 6 or so. I do know that there were several people who did not give a “because…” reason as required. A couple people voted more than once. A couple tweets were counted as votes prior as they contained the voting format but were not real votes.
If there are contestants paying for votes – SHAME on them! I will continue to run.
I am campaigning for a Shorty Award in the personal category for 2 reasons:
1) To spread the Aloha Spirit throughout Twitterville and the internet
2) I believe engaging in personal relationships is the foundation of social media.
Alexander, my friend, I support and respect your decision. I hope you can also understand mine. I will not be “blackmailed” nor intimidated by those shamsters into crawling under a rock. I will stand high on this rock in Ohau. If my competitors knock me off – so be it. I will give it my personal best.
Mahalo!
Arleen Anderson
Tweet me @AlohaArleen
@AlohaArleen I will just stop asking for votes, makes no sense to bother my beloved voters, make them go thru the process of voting, then later they get deleted because they did not include a “because” reason to vote.
Thanks for your words… And @techcrunch for the first time in a long time, I totally agree with your rant !!
@aschek
totally absurd, just goes to show what some would do for some few mins of fam on , be real and people would vote for you, its a no brainer really!!! it aint
Arleen along with a few others have become vote used car salesmen, imo. Every other tweet from them is “vote for me”. Who really cares? I was following because of your content not because you won some kind of bizarre popularity contest. I for one, would be ecstatic if there were never another silly contest or list or whatever.
btw…Arleen and her gang of vote beggars are blocked. When they stop begging, I’ll follow again because I really do respect what they have to say – just not now.
Hope the shorty sh*t is worth it.
I thought pointless competitions began and ended with The Crunchies.
@Matman agrees with @GirlInYourShirt {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/tck7lQQzNC_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”@Matman agrees with @GirlInYourShirt ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/4KSYEmSjtS”}}}
The same thing happened to Mr. Schek in the nomination round. It would have been good of the Shorties to tell the finalists of any rules they fell afoul of BEFORE the finals round.
It is clear in the rules that a reason has to be provided, but I’m not sure how good a rule that is. How is voting without a reason different than clicking a checkbox, which is how most voting goes? It doesn’t seem fair to make this too much into a “rules-reading” contest.
I am #2 in Travel behind someone with a lot of brand new accounts that have only Tweeted Votes…
I agree with @girlinyourshirt and I wrote ablgo post about all of the benefits I have enjoyed from being a finalist in the Shortys (mostly meeting other great Travel Twitters). This is the first time and of course there are going to be some things they can do better next year… but I have found some of the best users of Twitter because of the Shortys, it just sucks that we have to run the risk of turning off followers asking for votes.
Here is my blog post on what I have benefitted from the Shortys:
http://cruiseso...avel-finalists/
I love it. Keep voting. Keep burning calories on those awards. Give it all you want. Spend tons of loot. Shine that baby up for the mantle.
I’ll be over here doing work.
I agree with @ChrisBrogan – I am running a business (several in fact)
I adore social media and the connections.
Being recognized as a leader in #business content is flattering and AFFIRMING…however –
I am measuring the ‘votes’ from my list in the form of response to conversations, coaching clients, purchases and continued follows.
I will not campaign for shorty again – what could’ve been just fun and a cool social media experiment has been cheapened by the ultra-competitiveness.
Carrie Wilkerson, The Barefoot Executive
http://TwitterBarefoot.com
The Shorty Awards should be on the up and up! If not .. I will post it on my SHIT LIST blog!!! Keep it fair and fun!! Cheating on this is totally retarded!!!
Let’s see, let me offer some “short” comments…
1) As a man, I never thought I’d covet a “shorty” prize.
2) I agree. No cheating. No buying votes.
3) I would have made a video, but I’m not as cute as Girl in your shirt or weird as Matman.
@madmain
I got caught up in the Shorty Awards insanity and was asking people for votes and then realized what a sham it was. I posted my confession on January 1 http://is.gd/encO and asked the organizers to remove me from their web site. They did not do so, nor did they respond to my request.
I will be glad when the shorty awards are over. I don’t get the value and I am tired of being spammed for votes.
After reading Dan Zarrella’s post on @pistachio’s blog and now here on @techcrunch – I feel the entire Shorty Awards contest, sadly, has been tainted.
I’m clear the intent of the Shorty Awards creators is honorable – certainly $1000 grant x 26 categories x 5 finalists in each category is not an insignificant amount of money to be involved. It’s just a shame to see such shenanigans… both in the nomination round and now the voting round.
Last month, I kept wondering whether to take the Shorties seriously or not; I read all the small print and decided to go for it anyway when my votes started increasing.
So, sure, I was pleasantly surprised to win the #socialmedia category in the nomination round by a landslide and also overall nominations. Yes, I do have a large following and am most grateful to all my peeps who voted.
But to have to encourage my friends, followers and fans to vote again in this next round just doesn’t seem worth the bother. Frankly there are people at the top of their industry in many of the 26 categories who are not even one of the five finalists.
I’m with Chris Brogan’s comment above. Chris is one of my favorite social media specialists – someone I’ve interviewed before, met in person and have great admiration and respect for.
I appreciate @danzarrella for bringing the gaming to light. I don’t know him personally – but wish him best of luck in the awards if it’s important.
…meantime, back to running my business.
Cheers,
@marismith
I can’t get too worked about about who’s winnig and/or who got votes taken away (sorry). but it is interesting that the big winner in all these is probably Amazon’s Mechanical Turk… maybe they’re behind it all.
This is about as wrong-headed of a violation of social context/social trust as can be imagined, proving how little some people still get social media (doubly ironic when they are nominated in a “social media” category).
Not to speak of the fact that it must have occurred to certain parties, that the speed and ubiquity of such news spreading on Twitter, etc. is so much greater than it has ever been before in history. And the level of the negative response tends to be magnified in perceived violations of social trust anyway.
@Scobleizer recently found this out with his own little Amazon affiliate link brouhaha (his protestations that many others are worse, because they send people to their Adsense, etc. monetized blogposts, appeared somewhat ineffectual in quelling the “unrest”), as have others recently involving Mechanical Turk (Belkin, ironically using Amazon’s own MT service to game Amazon reviews of its products…).
Bottom line: Violate social trust at your own peril, this stuff is very deeply embedded in people’s psyches, it is VERY MUCH real.
Ask the people at common craft about dan hollings and their twitter video.
Does Rod Blagojevich Tweet? Can I follow him?
Seems to me, the Shorty Awards are a good example of the “Pay to Play” mentality on some level.
It’s politics. This shouldn’t be too shocking to anybody that people would do whatever it takes…
Pay people–> I vote for you if you vote for me. Of course, all passed off as a healthy spirit of competition and/or winning.
There’s a fine line between a crook and an entrepreneur. Sometimes I think the only difference is one gets caught.
Apparently real life mimics itself even inside a Twitterverse.
Shorty Awards is the most worthless thing to come to Twitter in a long time. Seriously – just because it’s a fancy design, people feel the urge to whore themselves out? Gimme a break.
The Shorty Awards were meant to be fun and entertaining. It’s quite a shame when people take something like The Shorty Awards and turn it into a big brewhaha! Come on!
However, that being said, I adore many of the finalists in many of the categories. Sham or not…there are some incredibly powerful people that were nominated for the SA’s.
Wait, I can get votes by paying for them? What’s the going rate? Can I get a bulk discount?
Kinda like the Crunchies?
and I gladly got my 48 cents, and then deleted my post.
I was going to do a follow up ‘oh by the way’ but it already got taken care of.
This is so sad. Thanks @marismith for bringing this to my attention.What could have been fun and meaningful has been tainted by greed, ego and dishonesty. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. And saddened. @davekerpen Peace out
I’m a finalist in the “Design” category.
Day 1: Funny idea. Think I’ll get someone to nominate me.
Day 2-20: Wow! This is kinda cool. Finding some great people to follow in the Design category.
Day 21-35: Okay, I’m taking time off for the holidays, spending more of it online, think I’ll try to improve my ranking in the Shorty Awards.
Day 36-42: I’m neck and neck with Zeldman, and he’s, like, a major design/web guy out there! If I could get ahead of him…hmmmm.
Day 43: Yiying Lu totally deserves to win this. She’s so cute and does such great work, c’mon.
Day 44-Present: This was such a great way to find interesting follows AND introduce myself to people that might want to follow me. Thanks Shorty people (wait, is that politically incorrect?)
Many people asked for votes and the first time, I gave it, some came back and asked again with a story of being a “finalist” if I really knew them I voted again, otherwise ignored.
Of those ignored, one came back (if you got this solicitation, you know who it was) saying that the votes had been mistakenly “deleted” and I needed to cast my vote again – providing the link, of course…are you kidding me?
Come on tweople…come on…stop the madness!
@ZaraGreen
@ZaraGreen — Your vote wasn’t counted and you don’t want to revote so that it IS counted? While I’m sure @BarackObama isn’t listening, that seems counterintuitive. There are more worthy things to do with your time for sure, but still, making your vote count…
It is about time someone started talking about all the cheating and begging going on in the shorty awards!! Thank you!
Despite being voted as #3 in Travel ( and it happens I am the only nominee in the finals who is actually traveling!!) I find I am thoroughly disgusted with this and EVERY contest & link bate list in cyberspace. They ALL seem to be filled with cheating & wasting peoples time ( and getting email addresses etc).
Yeah, you get the award & bragging rites, but then everyone with a brain knows it is worth bupkis! I guess it is like having a million followers, it fools some people.
I have tweeted about this & found many agree.
I was nominated in travel & found the only way to really get lots of votes was to ask for them, regularly. I never even learned how to make it a 1-click item that would go directly into your followers reply place with the “reasons” you would like me, like all of the top people did. Jeesh!
Very soon I realized that was a total waste of my time. I also noticed the heavy cheating going on in almost EVERY category.
I and others reported this to the people at shortyawards but nothing was done. The bot also made tons of stupid mistakes that were never corrected.
If you look at the top person in travel ( just as @cruisesource mentions above) you will see that most of those votes come from brand new accts with no picture who only have a few tweets and all about voting for 1 person. Duh!
That said, I am VERY appreciative to the kind people who said such generous things about us, voted for us in both nominating & voting ( most with never being asked & with no fancy 1click link). They also had to give up their email address & twitter password to vote. Some heard about it in facebook & joined twitter just to vote for us! Kudos to THEM! I am amazed.
If you must do a contest, try not to alienate everyone, condone cheating and go on for months.