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.

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

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?)

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.

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.

http://thecashc...am.blogspot.com

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.

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

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