Congrats to the 2008 SEMMY Winners!

Roll out the red carpet: We have winners in the inaugural SEMMY Awards, honoring some of the best content from the search marketing industry. We started with 127 authors representing 111 blogs/sites, and now we have one winner in 15 categories.

The 2008 SEMMY Winners will be announced at 12:00 pm ET/9:00 am PT today at www.semmys.org. (I’m tempted to list each winner here on SBS, but that wouldn’t be right.) Each category winner will be revealed one-at-a-time, and I’ll cut the drama this time: There’ll only be one minute in between each winner announcement.

Congrats to all the winners!

This has been a lot of fun putting together, and I hope the search marketing industry will support doing it again next year. I’m all ears for ideas on how to develop a better list of nominees; the SEMMYS can’t be based again on my favorite posts each month. A new system needs to be developed now, since we’re already 1/12th of the way into 2008.

Random Thoughts from the Organizer

1.) The overall vote counts by category were odd. I won’t reveal which category it is, but the lowest vote count in the public voting was just less than 20 votes. A couple others had less than 30. Meanwhile, the highest vote count in one category was close to 200 votes. I expected a range, but not that wide.

2.) In posting the winners, you’ll see a percentage breakdown, not a vote count. This is to show respect to the winners in the categories that didn’t get many votes. There’s no need to make a fuss over how few votes a couple winners received. Some categories are “sexier” than others, but all winners are equally deserving. Kumbaya. 🙂

3.) The finalists who asked readers to vote for them tended to do very well. Not in all cases, but in most cases — asking your readers to vote for you was a good idea.

4.) If you’re hoping to win a 2009 SEMMY, save your great content for late in the year. While posting the winners, I noticed this very strange fact: Only three winners were published before August 27. Isn’t that weird?

Thank Yous

First and foremost, thanks to David Mihm for the terrific web design on SEMMYS.org, and excellent ideas all around. Thanks to Logoworks for the SEMMYS logo.

Thanks to the 25 judges who went through a few hundred nominated articles and chose finalists. I’m honored that you volunteered to help with this, and hope you’ll be a part of making it better next time out.

Thanks to all who voted, wrote about, linked to, or otherwise supported the SEMMYS in any way.

Anyone with great ideas for the 2nd annual SEMMYS is welcome to contact me as soon as possible.