Howard Givner Blog

So I’ve been nominated for an event industry blog and I need your vote.  My blog is one of 7 up for best “Thought Provoking Blog” in the eventprofs blog competition.  I know what you’re thinking, and there was no category for “Most Irreverent & Sarcastic Blog”.  Believe me, I checked.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE, (I’m on question #4)

I’ll say up front that I am not a big fan of popularity contest style awards.  And not because I’m a cretin who has no friends.  I do have friends in the industry; trouble is most of them are top-of-the-food-chain folks who are running businesses or departments and have less time for online voting than others.  Read another way, you could say that many of my supporters are, well, older, and don’t find as much fun in online voting as they do in, say, finding novels that are published in large print.

But I am making an exception in this case, because the contest is run by none other than Lara McCulloch-Carter, proprietor of Ready2Spark.com, who, among other things, created eventprofs, a bi-weekly twitter chat that pulls people together from all over the world to discuss random event topics, make connections, and hatch grand schemes.  Lara taught me about tweet chats and hash tags.  (I know, there’s got to be an off-color joke in there somewhere, but nothing witty comes to mind.)

Lara’s one of what I call ‘smarties’, people in our industry who are quite clever, push the envelope, and otherwise drag the event industry (often kicking and screaming) to bold new places.  She brings both a professional big-company marketing background, as well as experience running her family’s tent business, to bear in her social media consulting business for the event trade.

So we like Lara and what she’s doing and want to support her efforts, even though she’s Canadian.  How can you do so, you ask?  By voting for the blogs you think deserve the title of best in each of several categories.  And if you are a supporter of my irreverent thought-provoking insights, you can vote for me!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE.  (IT TAKES 14 SECONDS)

As a judging mechanism, I’ve already said that popularity voting is a flawed model.  If the Oscars used it, the Best Picture winner would be movies like Adam Sandler’s Water Boy, not Gandhi.  (Though lets face it, if you were stuck on a desert island you’d pick Water Boy over Gandhi any day of the week).  But as a marketing mechanism, it’s sheer brilliance.  You empower all your nominees to promote your site for you.  And in this case, the ends justify the means, because it also exposes everyone to a slew of new blogs, many of which people will find stimulating, inspiring, and yes, thought-provoking.

So, as Al Capone said, “vote early, and vote often.”

CLICK HERE TO VOTE