About the Shorty Awards

If you've been following me on Twitter, you may know that I am a finalist for a Shorty Award. The Shorty Awards were created by Sawhorse Media and recognize "The best producers of short content in 2008". Short being the operative word. On Twitter, you can say what's on your mind, socialize with other tweeps, market products, provide information and more, but it has to be within 140 characters or less (counting spaces, periods and exclamation marks!). Hence, "short content". Another way of saying it is "A way for those who wax poetic on Twitter to be recognized for their witty banter."

To get to the Shorty finals, I first had to get enough nominations to put me in the top five of one, or more, of the 26 different categories (categories range from Advertising to Weird with interpretations left to our imaginations). Now, I love contests and I'm comfortable with competition. Not sure if it's because I'm an Aries, or because I grew up playing competitive sports or what, but I'm always up for a challenge. In fact, I seriously want to compete in "The Amazing Race"! So, I threw my name in the ring for what I thought was the best category fit, "Brand". After all, I joined Twitter to tell active outdoor/sports folks about Action Wipes and create a network of peers that would help me spread the word to others about them.

To get to the finals, I asked my network of tweeps to vote for me and therefore made it to the number one position in the Brand category. Which put me against four other great brands that have used Twitter to gain greater product recognition as well: Marvel Comics, Savvy Auntie, Assistu and Surpass. (You can check out the other 25 categories and their finalists by clicking here.)

But I have to tell you something... I'm hearing rumblings from one of the other finalists that I shouldn't be here because my user ID is not a brand. You see, I use my personal name (@marthavan) as my ID instead of "@Action Wipes". I did this purposefully when I joined as I wanted folks to know my brand (Action Wipes) as well as the person behind it. So they're right, my ID is not a brand, but the competition is not about user id's, it's about "the best producers of short content". To that end, because of my poetic 140 character tweets, 900+ people know about Action Wipes, and those 900+ people are telling hundreds more and so on and so on. So have I built a brand by using Twitter? You betcha (yup, you can find her on Twitter too)!

So the race is on - the tweep with the most votes in each category at 12am (PST) on January 23, 2009 wins. Winners get to a $1,000 grant to attend the awards ceremony in New York on February 11 and deliver our acceptance speech - in 140 characters or less. More importantly, to a small business like mine, the awards will give us greater recognition, thus help us continue to build our brand and reach our goal of world-wide distribution.

If you're not a Twitter user yet, join the fun and follow me!

RT: @yoga_mama Alright, on that note...good night! I love Twitter, and you all are what makes my Twitterverse sweet. Gr8ful for u! #gratitude