Should you enter your business for an industry award?
I received a “Vote for Us” on-line request by a really nice individual from an organisation that we deal with regularly.
Their B2B initiative had been submitted for some European award and the mechanic for choosing the winner was the quantity of votes by the public.
A lot of competitions and award initiatives are now being operated in this way. In the last few months alone my email has been clogged with numerous requests to vote for different initiatives on-line.
With this particular initiative there was an extra twist to the voting as you can see explained below:
“Each person can cast ONE VOTE EVERY DAY (one per 24 hours) and it just takes a couple of seconds. We would be very grateful if you could VOTE for our initiative each day and/or on the various devices that you work on i.e. smart phone, PC, iPad, laptop etc. And it is legitimate to vote on each of the different browsers daily too, i.e. google chrome, internet explorer, safari, firefox etc.”
A major step too far – Not only was my vote requested but there was a further request to vote every single day on as many devices and browsers as possible!
With this particular initiative I received a number of emails, a number of times from various individuals in the organisation all asking me to vote.
Jesus …. what is after happening to the business world whereby “awards” are being decided by such meaningless criteria.
In this case the award will ultimately go to the team who have expended the maximum energy in chasing the widest possible network of contacts – I doubt this process has any chance of finding a deserving winner.
The winner will be the organisation that have wasted a fortune of time lobbying for votes as well as the time wasted by those who did the voting.
To make matters worse the winner and the other contestants who took the challenge of winning seriously will have run the danger of damaging their own brand as a result of so much lobbying (and quite frankly annoying people). If they don’t lobby (annoy) they won’t win – simple!
Very few people will take the awards seriously once they realise how the winners were chosen, in particular those who did the voting.
I don’t for one second blame the organisation who contacted me – The fault lies with those running and setting the rules for these competitions.
Anyone who is operating an awards initiative should protect the integrity of the competition ensuring that the awards go to the worthy winners.
Winning an award is great for any organisation and in Fuzion we encourage all of our clients to enter credible competitions, which will demonstrate that they are best in class.
If the winning of an award is meaningless then don’t even bother entering.
Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion
Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Design agency in Ireland with offices in Cork and Dublin.
Tags: Entering awards, Fuzion, Greg Canty
Greg Canty Fuzion Blog 
November 17, 2014 at 11:21 am |
Couldn’t agree with you more Gre! Came across one where I was ‘nominated’ (no idea on what basis) and part of the same one where people asked for my vote- people by the way I had never worked with! – don’t get this approach.
November 19, 2014 at 2:56 pm |
Ronan/Mandy – you are so right , if you do win here you just win “the person who bugged more people than anyone else” award
November 17, 2014 at 1:34 pm |
surely you do have to blame the people emailing you a little bit, they are giving those awful competitions legitimacy?
and another element is that, or maybe it’s just me, people who win and then brag about those awards as if we don’t know they just lobbied and spammed to win it.