A Shorty Awards How To

The third annual Shorty Awards are under way and as has happened in the first two years of the awards there is some confusion about how you nominate someone (or support an existing nomination). More on that in a moment …

The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter and social media and are presented in early March by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences – made up of such luminaries as Alyssa Milano, actress and philanthropist (@Alyssa_Milano), David Pogue (@Pogue), New York Times columnist and author of The World According to Twitter and Alberto Ibargüen (@ibarguen), President and CEO of the Knight Foundation (@knightfdn), one of the awards’ sponsors.

Nominations are now being taken in dozens of official categories may be made through Twitter or the official Shorty Awards website. There are also thousands of crowd-sourced categories. For the first time this year, the Shorty Awards will also honor the industry's best agencies and social media professionals

And, although the awards site insists you can nominate someone simply by tweeting out a nomination, it seems some or many of these do not get caught by the awards site. Therefore to be sure you successfully nominate your favorites on Twitter and in social media, you should follow these steps:

1.Go to the official Shorty Awards website and locate the turquoise “Shorty Voting” bar mid-page.

2.Enter your nominee’s Twitter name and pick the appropriate category.

3. Complete the sentence “I nominate @TwitterUser for a Shorty Award in #category because....”

4. Click the “Tweet Your Vote” button (where you will be asked go through a Twitter authorization page).

If you don’t follow the protocol for the tweet your vote will not be recorded.

And you need to do this soon because in February, the nominees will be narrowed down to six finalists in each category. Winners will then be determined by a round of public voting and by the members of the Real-Time Academy.

So, what are you waiting for? Get nominating and contribute tom this great social media event.

Big Changes Coming in Social Media in 2011

In 2011 there will be monumental changes in social media. And by monumental I don’t mean anything that has to do with new platforms or new tools. No, I mean there will be monumental changes in the way people use them.

Here then are my 5 Big Changes in Social Media for 2011

1. People will want more real experiences: It will no longer be acceptable to interrupt real, in-person conversation to check-in, tweet or update your status. Those of us who have had it up to here with this kind of rudeness will start calling people on it. We’ll all be looking to take social and other web experiences and find some real aspect to them.

The opportunity: Real Foursquare badges anyone? Any marketer who can take an online experience and add entertainment or some other real-world value will reap big rewards.

2. Social networks + email = marketer’s dream: Email is newly resurgent as a marketing tool. Combine this with the ability of social networks to help identify groups of interested customers and you have a winning combination.

The opportunity: Marketers will use email to encourage the sharing of content on social networks and use social networks to encourage engagement via email – a win-win for both email and social marketing.

3. Social network growth will slow: Facebook will continue its inexorable march to get everyone (and their pets) signed up and Twitter will continue to explode as a newsfeed. However, everyone will become a lot more selective about who they follow, friend, fan and like. This will mean a slowing in the growth of social networks.

The opportunity: The percentage of active participants on networks will rise meaning those you engage with are more likely to respond.

4. We’ll all watch the clock: How much time we are willing to spend on a given social platform will become an issue. So many people signed up on Facebook in the past 12 to 24 months, for example, that the newness of the network kept a lot of them on it for hours at a time. That, will change rapidly in 2011 as the newness wears off and we reconsider the utility of two or three hours per day spent on a social network.

The opportunity: Anyone who operates online and can simplify processes (from the sign-in to the check-in to the posting of a comment) will win big.

5. We’ll reach a saturation point: “Social media saturation” will become a catchphrase and as a result we'll all start trimming if not wholesale chopping down the number of social sites we visit to only those most-relevant to us.

The opportunity: With the crowds starting to form around fewer networks it will become increasingly easy to figure out which platforms and social network members are truly influential.

So, what do you think? Can any or all of this come to pass in social media in 2011?

5 Foursquare apps you may not know

Foursquare is one of social media’s fastest growing tools. Here are five web-based apps to help you get more out of your time on Foursquare:

checkinmania.com This is an app that tracks who is checking in at various locations around you using Foursquare. And although it also offers data on check-ins on Gowalla, Brightkite and Twitter, its data is most comprehensive for Foursquare. It uses Google Maps-like functionality to show where you are in relation to various locations. In Venue mode it lists those nearby locations already identified on Foursquare. In Tips mode you can read what others have said about a particular location.

foursquarebrands.com This site allows users to manage the brands they're following and not following. And, as of this writing, there were 343 brands on Foursquare – many of them offering rewards for being followed.

ubermayor.com If you are anxious to become the mayor of more Foursquare venues or looking to get a SuperMayor badge this is the web app to use. It makes it easy to find out how many more check-ins it will take to become the mayor of a venue and is also a good tool for visualizing your Foursquare history.

fourcourt.com This app has the slogan “See who’s playing” and answers the question: If you’re in front of a computer and want to know where your friends are before heading out what can you do? Sign into Fourcourt with Foursquare sign in and see where everybody you know is (or has been recently).

4squareoffers.com A site that says it has more than 20,000 offers from around 79 countries. It allows search by name of a business, tags, category and location (within 25 miles). Note: Outside major metropolitan areas there may be a limited number of offers.

Know of other useful Foursquare web-based apps? Please help others in social media get more from Foursquare by adding them in the comments area below.

Social media branding: Discovering the real you

Before you can successfully plan a strategy for personal branding in social media you need to understand the real you.

This is the fifth part of an ongoing series looking at personal branding (links to previous posts in the series below). Today I offer some suggestions on how to discover your own inner strengths and interests.

It sounds easy enough right? Just think about what really lights your fire and what you love to do? But it’s a little more complex than that.

We humans lose track of our true selves and we stop seeing our own strengths and weaknesses. So what to do? I’d like to suggest two relatively inexpensive tools that can help you get on the path to self-discovery.

Strengths Finder

This little book may be the best $10-$15 you’ll ever spend.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, Strengths Finder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths.

The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists as it helped millions to discover their Top 5 talents. In Strengths Finder 2.0 Gallup unveiled a new and improved version of its popular assessment and sorted strengths into 34 themes.

You read the first 30 pages of the book and then submit to an online test. A computer-generated report is then emailed to you. Based on your Top 5 you can quickly see what approaches come naturally to you and which will likely give you the greatest satisfaction.

My strengths as determined by Strengths Finder are (in order):
• Ideation
• Learner
• Context
• Achiever
• Includer

And while none of this was surprising, the way these strengths play off each other and people with different strengths was a huge insight.

KolbeA Index:

The Kolbe A Index is a little more expensive (about $50) and measures a person's instinctive Method of Operation (MO), and identifies the ways he or she will be most productive. It is only taken once, because these innate abilities do not change over time.

The index was developed by Kathy Kolbe and identifies four human instincts used in creative problem solving. These instincts are not measurable. However, the observable acts derived from them can be identified and quantified by the Kolbe A™ Index.

These instinct-driven behaviors are represented in the four Kolbe Action Modes. For each you will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10. The combination of these scores tells you where your strengths lie.

My KolbeA Index results are:
Fact Finder: 8
Follow Through: 3
Quick Start: 8
Implementer: 1

What all of this means is that I now have a solid sense of what my natural tendencies are and what really gets me fired up. Armed with this I’m ready to start planning my social media personal branding approach.

What do you think? Are these outside tools helpful?

Earlier posts in the series:
1. Personal Branding in Social Media: First Steps
2. Social Media Optimization for Personal Branding
3. Words to live by in social media personal branding
4. Blogs are the cornerstone of personal branding

Offering social media thanks

Thanks for the great platforms that make social media part of every day of my life.

Thanks to Twitter for being my No. 1 source of news – and this from a guy who worked for more than 20 years in the newspaper industry!

Thanks to Linkedin for hosting such great groups – places I learn something every time I check in.

Thanks to Facebook for allowing me to stay connected to people I would have lost touch with years ago.

Thanks to YouTube for showing me aspects of life and this world I would otherwise never see (and the fact that so much of what I see on YouTube is funny doesn’t hurt either).

Thanks to foursquare for getting me to explore the planet – or at least whatever part of it I happen to be on at a given moment.

Thanks to Social Media Today for being the best aggregator of serious and accurate insights into the developing world of social media for business.

Thanks to Mashable for being the quickest and flashiest aggregator of news about social media.

Thanks to Alltop for allowing me to set up a social media feed tailored to my particular interests.

But, most of all, thank you to everyone I interact with daily, weekly or ever on social media you teach me so much and make every day insightful – I can’t thank you enough.

Related post:
A Social Media Feast for Thanksgiving