“Pay us an entry fee of $500 and win an award”
How many times do we see awards flying around social media that make us think that someone has achieved something?
Not a day goes by that somebody isn’t flaunting an award for “Best cup of tea maker in the channel” or “Sleeping champion of the vendors” or some other random award that has absolutely no meaning.
The awards and recognition sector has been penetrated by so many companies that the value of any award is now diminished by the flood of awards that could mean something but don’t mean anything at all.
If we look at the companies that are handing out these awards and recognition, we can quickly understand why they do it.
There are four main reasons for giving awards:
- Genuine recognition for services rendered Very rare these days. We see the ones floating about that are supposed to mean something but it tends to be the same people on those lists all of the time. When voted by the general population, there is a flaw in the system. The companies with the most employees are the ones with the upper hand. The voting comes from the company who the person works for and thus increases their brand awareness.
There are awards that are genuine. The ones that are not pay to play and the ones that have
actual achievement attached to them. Please feel free to name the ones that are genuine in the comments
- To increase the reach of their own brand at the expense of the reach of the person being awarded We see this from companies that offer services / products. They will give out awards to their own customers and it’s typically the larger of their clients that win the awards so that they can amass shares and likes on social media from the most people. Pretty obvious to spot this one. If the giver of the award makes money from generating new customers for their own products and services, it’s a marketing exercise. Awards with share potential from their own customer is second only to a case study.
- To make money from applications for awards without any achievement being required
I would love to get a list of awards that you don’t need to pay to enter. I saw a post on an MSP forum a couple of months back about some local business award that was emailed out to every single company in the local area where they just had to pay a fee to enter.
To me, this should be labeled as fraud as it borders on receiving a bribe to be awarded something that isn’t deserved or earned.
If this happened in any other sector, there would be uproar. If a building contractor won a contract on giving someone of senior level within the council a bribe, people wouldn’t be happy right?
- It’s a start-up incubator and there is a vested interested in creating awareness for their companies
Collections of companies that come under the same investment group are banded together and fake awards are created in order to generate awareness for their companies. Typically more than one company will win an award here. The awards can be so vague that any company that enters will fit into the category.
Now if you want to win an award that is purely designed to increase our own reach, feel free to reach out to any of us on the Channelyze.io team and we will happily create an award for you as long as you share it around all of your channels 😀
Genuine awards
If you would like to help us curate a list of genuine industry awards that don’t have an ulterior motive and are designed to celebrate actual achievement, please feel free to list them in the comments.
If there are enough of them, we will publish the list of them in an upcoming blog.
Channelyze Blog 