Online Media Awards, hashtag winning

Last night saw 20 awards and 28 commendations presented at the Online Media Awards. The evening was in the plush Emirates stadium and the improvement on last year’s ‘basement’ location was highlighted as an example of how the awards are on the up.

So who were the real winners of the night? With five awards, including Website of the Year, and one commendation, The Guardian can be seen as triumphant. But this triumph goes even further as we look at online mentions in relation to the Online Media Awards. The following conversation cloud, created using Cision Social Media, shows the main words being used in conjunction with online posts on the topic of the awards:

@PaulLewis won Best Twitter Feed and so appears quite prevalently (as the largest source for this cloud is Twitter). @Channel4News and its @FactCheck, which won Best Commentary/Blogging, and @CarlaBuzasi, who won Online Editor of the Year to much ovation, are the only Twitter feeds outside of @guardian (and @PaulLewis) that had enough mentions to be included.

While ‘times’ and ‘bbc’ also make the cloud, for the other nominees in a ceremony celebrating the use of online, their absence, particularly in favour of words such as ‘riots’, ‘finally’ and ‘congrats’, come as somewhat something of a surprise.

The other area of interest is the sponsors and their online mentions. Using the following graph, again made using Cision Social Media, we can see how The Drum, as organiser, has the most mentions (105) in relation to the awards but when compared to The Guardian’s 654 mentions a clearer picture is formed.

So what have we learnt? The Guardian does online media very well and gets recognised for its efforts and then proves its worthiness by dominating again post awards. Winning an award will get you greater coverage than sponsoring one. Online media is on the up: the accolades, the recognition and the respect are all rising, and an award ceremony that started in a basement and then rose to the first floor, will undoubtedly reach new heights in 2013.