The Shorty Awards just wrapped up, and TV was well-represented in the annual event that honors the best producers of “short, real-time content.” For starters, the Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi hosted the show.
Conan O’Brien — who’s been on Twitter since February of last year — won the lifetime achievement award. Instead of an acceptance speech of 140 characters or less, Conan chose to read “The Power Broker” from cover-to-cover (edited for video, of course.)
MTV won the “best integration of social media with traditional media” award for its use of Twitter during the Video Music Awards. Working with Stamen Design, MTV tracked the number of tweets that mentioned various people in the awards show in real time, displaying it in “bumps” scattered throughout the broadcast and continuously online.
Bravo TV won an award for “best location-based marketing.” Back in September, Bravo held the “Top Chef Just Desserts Day.” Fans could get free deserts from participating bakeries, retailers and from Top Chef-branded food trucks in NY, LA and Chicago. To find out where — you guessed it — you follow Bravo on Facebook or Twitter. And when you checked in from one of the locations on Foursquare, you win a “Just Desserts Day” badge. Digital marketing agency 360i helped with the campaign (metrics here).
And Discovery’s MythBusters, which has a rockin’ Twitter account with nearly 500,000 followers, won the Shorty Award for science (beating out @nasa).
“I really had no idea what was going on tonight,” joked Mandvi at the end of the show. “I’ve officially lost 422 followers.”