 Alex Baxter Frank Cutitta Paul DeBraccio Judy Franks Dave Hendricks Marko Hurst Jay Lauf Daniel Lagani Karen Macumber Diane Salvatore Ken Sonenclar Domenic Venuto Marta Wohrle Matthew Yorke |
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By Marta Wohrle, President, Accord Media
The first ever Shorty Awards took place on Feb. 11. I went down to the Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and stood in line (well, it was more of an untidy gathering), unable to get in because the building was already full. The crowd (me included) eventually began to get impatient in a fairly good humored kind of way. I was getting chilly. This despite the fact that I had a VIP ticket. This despite the fact that I am an investor in the company, Sawhorse Media, that dreamt up and launched the Shorties. This was a lot bigger than we’d expected.
Hmm. This could become, I mused (perhaps fantasized) as someone stepped on my foot whilst tapping a message frantically into his cell phone, the Oscars of the digital world.
The Shorty Awards were set up to “honor the best producers of short content—140 characters or less—on Twitter.” The whole idea seemed to have been devised in an afternoon, got incredible press attention within days and galvanized the Twitter community like nothing else.
I am trying to work out what it all means. And I don’t just mean all those incomprehensible tweets that make IM-ing look like the Queen’s English. I mean, what’s going on? And, as someone, trying to make businesses in digital media, what should I make of it?
The first thing is we didn’t let thinking about it get in the way of a good idea. Greg Galant, the talented twentysomething who founded Sawhorse and managed to inveigle me into being a lead angel in a company whose first business idea is a Web site called Musebin (music reviews are written by an active community and are never more than 140 words in length, a la a tweet), called me one afternoon about three months or so ago. “We’ve got this idea,” he said, and elaborated on the Shorty Awards.
I immediately concurred that it was a great idea (mostly because I see my angel money best working if I keep out of the way) and he should go for it. He had little more than Godspeed. No budget, no sponsors, barely thought-through rules of how to compete, no idea of how to leverage its success if it did work, no track record, no reputation as a Twitterati…
I really believe that if we had had a meeting about it, we would have talked ourselves out of it. I remember doing a lot of that when I worked in and with big media companies. A meeting was the default starting point for anything and everything. There was rarely much creativity, let alone risk taking. But there was a lot of talk.
Secondly, there is such a thing as viral marketing and free publicity, if something is truly of the zeitgeist and firmly in context. There is no doubt that there is something to Twitter with its 2 million or so users. The Shorties, in which 30,000 of them participated, hit on one of things that makes it tick. Tweeters are a wee bit self-obsessed. And so, of course, they would be attracted to an award like bees to a honey pot.
Within one day of launch (if you can call it that), the Shorty Awards were the most-searched-for term on Twitter. The whole point was that tweeters would send a tweet to all their followers and lobby to get everyone to vote for them. It was viral, free and fast. Mainstream media quickly followed and Sawhorse was written up in Wired, Ad Age, the FT, on the BBC.com, the New York Times, Mediabistro and others. And it’s still going on. The third thing I’ve been thinking about is that there is, within the apparent chaos and randomness of a tweet (a bit like the awards night itself, a kind of discipline.
Brevity in age where speech is punctuated by utterly redundant “likes” and “you knows” (even if you’ve had the education of a Kennedy) is really hard. And, if you are an editor or writer in conventional media, you believe yourself to be honing a craft that only really matters if the word count goes way above 2,000. Old media bemoans, more than anything else, the loss of pages and the reduction of space, the slashed budgets that mean they don’t have time or the people to agonize over semicolons.
In this new digital age, new communication skills will be required that will—and already are—turning old editorial mores on their heads.
So, as I come to the end of my allotted words, I wonder how I could have said all of this in 140 characters or less.
Perhaps something like: Be short, be relevant and, above all, get the hell on with it.
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