The Shorty Awards are a pretty typical example of the “popularity contest” model so ubiquitous in social media. At their best, they can be used to measure popular opinion, and as we know (perhaps too well) popular opinion does not equal truth. Nor does it indicate quality or value.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” -Einstein
I’ve written before about the idea that ideas don’t spread because they are good, and the best way to understand this is to remember that there are plenty of good ideas or people that are not very popular and plenty of bad ideas that are, pet rock anyone? If we are trying to engage Twitter users to extract some value either for ourselves or our business, we must remember that sheer popularity, or collecting followers, is often a pretty useless endeavor.
The other problem with popularity contests is that they are vulnerable to all manner of gaming and manipulation (if you don’t believe me, check out Digg or really any other social news voting site) from simple vote begging, which in some cases is accepted or even encouraged, to full-out vote buying.
But could someone buy votes to game the Shorty Awards? It seems to defy not only logic, but the economy of microblogging. But it turns out that Belkin is not alone in its “creative” use of Mechanical Turk for “social media marketing.”
Enter Amazon’s MechanicalTurk.
I am currently the second-place finalist for the Shorty Awards in social media. I got there by encouraging my followers and blog readers to vote for me and making it simple via a shortened link to an automatically filled Twitter page. Twitter does not allow such links to automatically post to someone’s account and a user must click the link, review the text of the Tweet and manually click “update”. I’ve had some wonderful successes recently with TweetBacks and TweetSuite so I’ve been lucky enough to be able to garner over 160 votes (something like 30 more than the current 3rd place finalist). On the Shorty Awards site, they explicitly condone this type of behavior.
Much to my chagrin however, there has been one user, with fewer followers, who has managed to outpace me in vote gathering, no matter how much traffic my site gets, or how many times I ask for votes on Twitter. I had given up on the awards when his vote count reached more than double my own votes. But on Monday night, I was surprised to see a somewhat anonymous email sent via the contact form on my website (if that was you that sent me the email, thank you!).
dhollings is buying Shorty Awards votes using Amazon’s MTurk.
MTurk listing to buy votes for $.48 each:
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=3W1WRX1EXT1ZT8YG51WZ
The URL listed in the HIT (http://budurl.com/shortyvote) points to http://twittinsecrets.com/shorty-awards/rotator.php (a domain registered to hollings).
DO NOT post publically that you are being paid for your work.
We’re investigating it now. We take voter fraud, an unfortunate byproduct of any democracy, very seriously. We threw out about 4,000 suspicious nominations during our audit of the first round of the awards, and we’re going to be even more vigilant this round. I’ll let you know the result when we’re done investigating. Since the voting process is completely transparent, we invite anyone in the community to look for suspicious votes and report them to us.
Just as this was about to post, @ShortyAwards tweeted that they had done an audit and discounted votes, and linked to this FAQ regarding vote counts decreasing.
Dan Zarrella is a self-proclaimed social media and viral marketing scientist. Check out his viral marketing blog for more of his posts, research and tools.
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I’m glad you brought this to our attention–and also glad the Shorty Awards originators discounted the votes bought. I quit watching the Shorty Awards a few weeks ago because I was dismayed how quickly it turned into a popularity contest with scant, if any, attention paid to qualifications.
In fact, I unfollowed someone who was fairly new to my list when she offered to nominate anyone who wanted to be nominated–people she had no real connection with and may not have even exchanged tweets with. Just a blanket, “Want a nomination to the Shorty Awards? Just send me an @ message and tell me the category.”
Good luck, Dan. I hope you do win–you’ve put in the obvious effort (done the right way).
@connie thank you, its a fine line to walk between “campaigning” the right way and getting annoying.
The person in question was driving me nuts with his incessant begging so I stopped following him. I am not surprised that he was doing this.
Hi Dan and Laura,
Did you see the blog post I wrote this past weekend on Why I am Saying Goodbye Shorty? http://budurl.com/sashrt
I am a finalist in the Brand category.
Anyway – look in the comments section. @dhollings wrote a nasty one yesterday…. Interesting….
@savvyauntie
Dan,
I am a finalist at the #tech category, and they just discounted about 40-50 from my votes, without a reason. I kept it clean and fair, and I know all my followers that voted for me.
I am very dissapointed also, but well…. hey, it´s just a competition. And I already won all the love of my followers…
@aschek
I am #2 in travel after @WildEarth …. @Wildearth lost about 30 votes today, but they still have a high percentage of votes that are account set up only to vote…how can a brand new account have any idea how well someone uses Twitter –
There were very little rules to the voting so I am not upset…I just want all my votes to be from legit Twitter Users. I am hoping that REAL Users will come out in support of @CruiseSource in #Travel to beat the brand new accounts being set up by @WildEarth.
Let me rephrase that, I do not think @WildEarth is setting up new accounts… I think that they have followers who are non-twitter users who are signing up for the purpose of voting and that is all….I have an office 40 non-twitter users, I am not signing all of them up to vote.
The internet sure is serious business.
re: cruisesource concern about new accounts set up to vote. For someone to (or to have proxy) to set up dummy accounts for sole purpose of voting–yes, unethical. For someone to announce on blog or forum site, “Hey I’ve been nominated here’s where/how to vote” and generate new user accounts as a result–that seems fair. (It brings new “business” to Twitter, which presumably is a desired by-product of any site related media exposure.)
However, I had no idea in the beginning–or really all along, that the Shorty Awards were anything “real” or to be taken seriously. Just seemed like some sort of “game” people were playing for fun–indeed, I believe people were nominating & making up categories left & right
And like everything else related to Twitter statistics, ranking, the worrying over how many followers vs follows, why someone un-follows or doesn’t follow back– or TwitterSnobs– those celebrities (are they really who they purport to be) who have thousands of followers but only follow 43… it really seems like just so much nonsense. There is so much slipperiness (read also “human behavior”) behind any of the numbers in Twitter that any attempt at statistical analysis is frustrated. Anyone who believes any of the numbers mean anything concrete is not paying attention.
How shameful! And it didn’t even pay that well.
It is about time people talked about all the cheating that has been going on in the Shortyawards! Thank you. Although, I must admit, this seems to be the pattern that almost ALWAYS takes place in contests in blogosphere, too much cheating, too much annoying begging, slanted results.
I know for a fact that several people contacted shortawards about the cheating going on with the number 1 person in travel and nothing was done about it in the nomination phase. Most don’t feel the vote has been fair in the final phase either. It looked to me like their was cheating in every category and little if anything was done. Nobody I know even got an answer from shortyawards.
I believe @Wildearth l just came to twitter around the time the shortawards started. They are a company with a a huge following.. @cruisesource gave a free cruise away on twitter. They both do great things.
A little family traveling the world on 25K a year and taking thousands of disadvantaged school kids with us virtually doesn’t stand much of a chance against that kind of competition. Heck, tech dummy that I am, I never even learned to do the 1click vote thing. I gave up on asking long ago as I found it a waste of my limited time & the shorty awards annoyed many people on twitter.
Despite being nominated, I even voted for many of the great people nominated in travel like Matador and Chris Elliott. I find it odd that i am the only finalist who is actually traveling in the travel category! Somehow I have managed to be #3 in Travel, all due to devoted followers. Some did see it in facebook & joined twitter just to vote for us!
I also think it is wrong that in order to vote, people had to give up their email addresses and twitter password. That keeps many from voting.
I do give credit to the wonderful people who went out of their way to go vote for us the hard way ( no 1click ease from me telling them why they were voting for us like most of the leaders have). I was very touched by the kind words about our blog and trip more than the votes. Many said it was the highlight of their day to vote for us, even though we had not asked.
If only it could have been about integrity, acknowledgment & gratitude instead of greed, begging and cheating. If only it could have been win/win instead of set up as win/lose.
I wonder if cyberspace will ever have that kind of contest or just continuation of the same. Personally, i think most people are really tired of these endless contests that always seem to be filled with cheating and unfair practices.