So the post many have been waiting for, my feelings and opinions on my main rival in the shorty awards! As I say these are opinions only!
Well as I said in my previous post Arleen for me should not have been included in the personal category, she is a marketer and traffic specialist as she blatantly promotes on her bio and even in Tweets and as such had plenty of other categories to be nominated in. I personally believe though that she targeted this category because real personal users, who use twitter to chat, meet people with similar hobbies and have a laugh, will obviously only have a limited amount of followers compared to those who offer advise in business, tech, music.
It was a very clever thing for Arleen to do and in the end she got what she wanted to spread Aloha in New York City, whatever that means.
But how can someone who has only just begun using Twitter for the past 3 months have such a following? I have checked her blog and read her tweets it really confused me, I saw very little of interest to warrant such a following and obviously others were the same since so many times I have seen tweets like this coming from her, why does she need to explain herself so much? The answers began to arrive via direct messages in twitter by dozens of people who had seen what she was doing. According to many of these DM’s basically she follows people on the public timeline, at one point she added over 40 people in less then a minute claiming to have read each and everyone of their profiles, how? well looking at her tweets she reveals her secrets a bit. By using this tactic of following anybody, she gains a lot of followers back, because people will check and see she tweets, she is not selling stuff like the spammers on twitter do, they see that other people are following her so trust she is a legitimate person, and they are right, she is I suppose.
This has been done for her own good as a traffic specialist and marketer, but as you can see it would also have a great benefit for the shorty awards. Now there is nothing in the rules to say she was not allowed employ these tactics but at the same time it is wrong.
Looking at the Twitterhollic stats for all five finalists reveals a lot.
And finally BadEvan
It was always going to be impossible to beat her in this category, 3 of us have less the 1000 followers! can you now understand what I am talking about.
A very good article from fanboy.com was brought to my attention in relation to people like Arleen and is well worth a read.
When you look at the end result after the audit last night, she had 463 votes with a following of 26,036 thus getting just 1.77% of her followers to vote whereas looking at my result of 338 votes with 878 followers I got 38.49% of people to vote for me, surely this is all wrong, yet as of this morning she has been made the winner.
It really has angered me that the organisers of the shorty awards allowed this happen, she is far from real, if anything she has shut up quite substantially since winning which says something. I am looking forward to looking at her twitterstream over the next few months when hopefully we can see the real Arleen or maybe not!
At the end of the day I am happy to see the back of this competition and the petttiness of quite a lot of folk in the finals, it is the shorty awards first year and I do hope that the organisers have also learnt a lot if they plan to do it again next year.
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Very articulate and well written. I’m with you on this and I think we should hold our own “fringe” awards ceremony. As a nod to the inequality and unfairness, I shall un-friend whats-her-name immediately (although please RT if I’m missing anything!!)
This is a great article and it was actually someone else’s article (sorry I can’t remember which right now!) that let me know what happened. I think this was a rookie mistake on the part of the organizers and I hope they adjust things for next year. I hope you take comfort in knowing that most people realize your loss was ridiculous and feel good about the fact that so many of your followers took the time to write and back you up. As a personal user myself, I’d rather have a smaller number of people that I actually interact with than 20,000 people that obviously don’t pay attention to what I write.
I still think the best man won if only morally
well researched John. I do think she shouldn’t have won in the way she did, so, if nothing else you’ve shown something both about the awards and about twitter itself.
I’d really like to know if you’ve thought of trying to work out how you got so many votes and followers since the competition began and how the votes/numbers matched with your own “marketing” activity. Your tenacious pushing was interesting to watch and it’d be great to see what methods worked best.
Well done on a great campaign, toughly fought.
@mcawilliams I agree with you that she shouldn’t have been in the personal category, but what really pissed me off was her tactics. Follow follow follow, Aloha, follow follow follow, Mahalo, etc. etc. Well Aloha Arleen enjoy your hollow *victory*.
It does seem very unfair that they don’t factor in the votes to followers ration, or scrutinise the categories more carefully. Maybe they’ll take this into account for next year. Lookit, we all know who the real winner is! It’s a real achievement to have come so far.
The measure of success of a twitter member being in the number followed and the number following is a false metric. Surely, the success in twitter is the usefulness of ones tweets to ones community - and that’s a damned hard thing to measure. Also, I would contend that people follow but rarely manage their followership, particularly when the content isn’t of use or interest to them. Tweetdeck amplifies this problem by allowing a filter to be applied, removing to the need to ever actively manage your followers/followees.
The number of tweets is also a bad metric, because a tweet such as ‘good morning’ or ‘good night’ is mostly useless (though one could argue that it announces an active or inactive status). Much of the difficulty in being a twitter user is in filtering the noise and accounting for the time this takes. I think that this is the main reason blogging will survive.
For what it’s worth, I followed you on the basis of your blog (not your tweet stream), having been redirected through your twitter profile (from someone else) and not the other way around. I foolishly voted for you in this aware thing, because I thought it was protocol (like being asked to have someone endorse you on LinkedIn), but I realise this was illinformed and poorly educated on my part - not that I have anything against you, I just have no clue who you are or what you stand for (yet). I have absolutely no idea why you followed me though
Twitter can be genuinely uself, anyone who has used it properly can get a very strong sense of the power it has, but it can also be a simple noise generator.
As to the criteria for the Shorty Awards, well, this leaves a lot of open questions and I would be inclined to question its relevance. I certainly wouldn’t (a) want 1,000’s of followers because I have a human brain and human attention span and (b) want my success measured by the size of my flock but rather the quality of my content based on the feedback I receive.
Hope this doesn’t come off as a cynical rant, that’s not my intent. It’s merely an attempt to wrap my cerebellum around this latest ’social phenomenon’ (jeez, I even hate that term!)
To be honest winning was never actually an issue for me, but I do believe a lot of flaws have been shown, as folks have said hopefully these flaws will be taken into account for next year lets wait and see!
Darragh I got so many followers because when people saw me up in the top 10 during the nomination process for quite a while then ending in 28th place, people wanted to know who the hell I was for a good part of the nominations I was ahead of @stephenfry!!!! which was insane.
In relation to my push that happened in the first week mainly so the majority of votes for week one were due to me pushing, last week was a different kettle of fish with the majority of votes coming from followers pushing me out to friends, work colleagues etc. As for what method worked best to be honest throughout the 2 weeks the way I saw voting increase was when I went on and pushed. I probably should have pushed harder but did not want to annoy everybody!
Lastly having a prepopulated tweet (which for week one I was under the assumption was against the rules) made a massive difference, during week one I was asking people to give reasons people found that took time so did not do it, once I had the prepopulated tweet in week 2 the numbers soared, its so easy to get people to click a link and hit update, and as I said in my previous post is something that should not be allowed. I wanted people to vote for me because they knew me and would be able to give a reason, just think this way was a joke!
I am annoyed that Arleen feels my opinions are incorrect and I do hope she comments here with her side of the story as I have said throughout the post these are my opinions aswell as opinions of dozens of people from all over the world that I had received in the past 2 weeks.
nonsequitr thanks for commenting, why did I follow you, I follow everybody and if they want to converse etc through twitter I keep following, I would love you to read this post it explains more about why I did this, seems we may have a bit in common when it comes down to this whole social phenomenon.
You have made very valid points and to be honest its another post for me to write since I totally agree with you.
John,
This is a damn good post. You have set the record straight here. I know it’s not all about the winnind and blah blah blah, but she really did fuck you (and the other “personal”s) over by choosing the personal category. She may not be a bot, but she acts like one which is just as bad. Here here for your effort dude. Looking forward to buying you a pint at the blog awards.
Joe
Sounds like she was following Guy Kawasaki’s guide to grabbing lots of followers. (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html)
As Joe mentioned it’s basically doing the work of a robot manually. I see very little merit in that sort of thing.
Mca,
My man, this post right here is why you should have won…. You embody the spirit of the award. I,for one, feel that the shorty awards only are a source of derision in the community. They divided people quite nicely. I had quite a bit of problems in my category, and was told that votes I received from people not having ’stocks’ in their profile were illegitimate because I lobbied for them via DM. To me the lobbying efforts are valid. Its when a category finalist is vapid when the lobbying seems shady. If all that came from the shortys was a chance to link up with some cool peeps a la my man McaWilliams….well, then, you know what…it was worth it.
Totally agree Alamo, a good few friendships have been forged from the whole process. I did sent them a mail with a few of my insights on how it was organised and I do seriously hope that the guys who organised what could be a great competition take heed.
As for that no mention of stocks well thats just bullshit! that should make no difference look at the iphone it has a stocks thing preinstalled on it, people are becoming more and more interested in stocks and shares, at the end of the day they dicate a lot of what happens on a daily basis! That is pathetic!
Anyhow really nice of you to comment here and as we have both said long live a real friendship!
nonsequitr, I have to agree with John when he said others pushing their friends for him. I can agree with that because I did just that to get him to shut the hell up once in a while about those dam awards!!! But John is my one of my buddies and I would have gladly done it for him anyway. But next year, I am duck taping his fingers togather behind his back to the inside of his shorts when it starts up again.I Am already stocking up on my ducktape supply! (Insert evil laugh here)
John. I agree with the others. You were rob dude. But at least you are a good sport.
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Is there anything ethical that this @alohaarleen does? Now come to find out…she is writting bad checks in Hawai`i?? How “aloha” is that?? The aloha in her name means good-bye…
When she would go on the Andy Bumatai show…she would beg for people to go..because “it would mean so much to her”… check out some of the you-tube videos where she is on the andy bumatai show..she sounds just like Charlie Brown’s teacher…”whah whonk wha wha wha whonk”…
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