If there is a prize for the most votes then dirty tactics will always be used – The Shorty Awards are no exception.

Friend, blogger and twitter user (read: addict) John Williams (@mcawilliams) has made it into the final of the Shorty Awards – a competition designed to recognise those who bring usefulness, value and entertainment to Twitter in various categories such as business, design, humour, science, photography, tech and others.

When John’s tweeting rates increased dramatically we said (yes some of us really did), “What the fuck is he doing! He’s going totally nuts on twitter these days”. Hell, he was – but it was always good fun, good back-and-forth banter (the word is growing on me). He also has TTQT (Tuesday/Thursday Twitter Question Time), where he asks a question each evening, generally shortly after finishing work for the day, and gets lots of great answers in the form of @replies then blogs the replies later that evening.

John is in the finals, though he isn’t leading the Personal category, one Aloha Arleen is in fact the current number one. But who is Aloha? In short, she is a marketer, or, according to her Twitter bio: “Create, write, design market campaigns w/ integrity&results. New marketing&sales speaker, trainer, coach, copywriter. SM/SEO traffic specialist w/.”

In other words another bullshit social media expert (aka “zombie“). Nothing personal about that!

Arleen Anderson, from Hawaii, joined Twitter on 16th Oct 2008 and has simply followed, as many people as she could, currently following 26,300 and with 25,204 followers, with little purpose than getting as many followers as possible and attempting to win. Pathetic really.

Having emailed the guys at ShortyAwards they don’t seem to have a problem with her being in the running.

In contrast, John, who started with 240 followers before the ShortyAwards, now has 766 followers, and following 725. He isn’t promoting a business, a talent or skill, nor his photography. So why not vote for John and help him win. An Irishman winning something like this wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

All you have to do is click this link and hit ‘reply’ – easy.
Voting ends tomorrow, 24th January at 8am GMT (midnight UTC/GMT -8 hours)

Don’t let this woman win!

Tagged: Twitter | 1 comment »