So, the Mashable Awards are like the Super Bowl of social media. Well . . . kinda. South by Southwest and a few other events are also right up there. Anyway, I was invited to attend the awards last night and if you didn’t see the live stream . . . below were the highlights, in my opinion. Additionally, I captured a few photos to document the festivities.
It was a night for the Birds and the Bed Intruders:
Angry Birds – They received the largest buzz from the crowd last night. Rightfully so, there were 50 million downloads last year. I was fortunate to sit next to the Angry Birds on their fancy ”winner’s couch”. They left me with this souvenir for the Digital Royalty office.
Hootsuite (Owl) – I hung out with Ryan Holmes, Founder of Hootsuite, throughout the evening. Rewind a year, Ryan and I went hiking in Runyon Canyon about a year ago and along the hike he told me about his plans for Hootsuite in 2010. Mission accomplished. With more than 1 million users and a platform we claim as our favorite at Digital Royalty, Ryan was deserving of his award. It just goes to show that everything’s a possibility.
Twitter – This was an interesting moment. Twitter won an award but nobody from Twitter attended to accept the honor.
TwitChange – Well deserved! Thanks to Eva Longoria and 150+ other celebrities who had a total of 97 million+ Twitter followers (many of which are Digital Royalty clients) half a million dollars was raised for children in Haiti. After months of communication, I was able to meet the guy who thought of the idea and made it happen, Shaun King. He accepted the award. Digital Royalty was proud to lend a hand during the campaign By the way, stay tuned for the next Twitchange during the Super Bowl led by Troy Polamalu.
Bed Intruder, Antoine Dodson - As for the Bed Intruder himself. If you’re not aware, a guy by the name of Antoine Dodson was on the news several months back. His serious situation and news segment has turned into an empire for him. See video above. The original Bed Intruder YouTube video has had more than 28 million views and there are countless spin-off videos with millions of views as well. The internet has allowed this to happen for Antoine. Recently, Antoine appeared in one of our client’s video blogs (Dana White).
More than 1,200 people attended and for the past five years, all of us have been saying “This is the year for mobile.” Finally, it happened. Also, the “Social Good” has become a buzz word which is a very good thing.
