“THE OSCARS OF TWITTER!” Winners Announced March 3

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is a finalist in the second annual Shorty Awards, which honors “the best producers of short (140 characters or less) real-time content.” Translated, that means the award is given to the person or company who uses and exploits the social network Twitter to its maximum effect. The Shorty Awards have been called “the Oscars of Twitter” by CNN and USA Today.

Well, who else should win a Shorty Award but a Reduced Shakespeare Company?! We’ve been producers of reduced content for years.

We Tweet mostly ‘cuz it’s fun. Twitter’s a great way to mini-blog about what we’re up to, to dialogue with our fans, and to spread the love about other things and people we see and love and want to proselytize about. But to get an award for it? That’d be awesome.

Shorty Awards are given in a number of categories (each designated by a hashtag), from #advertising, #apps, and #art to #tech, #travel, and #weird. We’re a finalist in the #culturalinstitution category, primarily because there is no #theatre category.

Final voting ends Friday February 5 at noon EST. Anybody with an active Twitter account can vote (you can’t just create a Twitter account to vote, they’re too clever to allow that). Finalists are judged not only on the quality of their Tweets, but also the number and quality of your votes!  So when you go to the Shorty Awards website and fill in the vote box (“I vote for @reduced for a Shorty Award in #culturalinstitution because…”), please make the reason cool and brief!

Numbers count too. As of today, we have almost 2500 Followers! If only ten percent of you vote, we’ll win.

Why You Should Vote For Us

Some of you might think we’re just chasing after a pot, a trinket to put on the wall. (We know some of you think it, because one of you tweeted it to us.) But what a Shorty Award will allow us to do is raise our profile. The higher our profile, the more well-known we are, the more likely it is a theatre near you will want to book us!

If you like the Reduced Shakespeare Company — don’t keep it a secret! Help us spread the word.

Plus, we’ll already be in New York City on March 3! We’ll be able to attend the ceremonies, and it’ll cost us nothing. In these budget-conscious times, you’ll be saving these other fine cultural institutions money. Really: a vote for our company is a vote for their wallet.

Why We’re Better Than The Other Nominees

Let’s take them one by one, shall we?

#1 (173 votes): Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. First of all…seriously? I’m sure they’re fantastic, and I like the idea of awarding a Shorty to something nobody’s ever heard of. And with close to 3000 followers, they’re doing something right. But we’re going to argue that an award for such a global phenomenon as Twitter should go to a company that travels all over the world. Having plants from all over the world doesn’t count.

#2 (209 votes; remember, they judge quality of votes, not just number): Phoenix Zoo. Again, not to take anything away from them. They’re nice people. They follow us, we follow them. We’ve played Phoenix before. We love Phoenix. But the song doesn’t go, “New York, London, Paris….Phoenix”. Having animals from around the world doesn’t count.

#3 (115 votes): The Royal Shakespeare Company. What?! True, just like we do, the “other” RSC does perform all around the world, but Twitter is a populist medium and there’s nothing less populist than the designation “royal”. On the other hand, since their royal monarch is only 5’4″, perhaps they should be given a Shorty for that alone.

#4 (123 votes): Editora Novitas. We honestly don’t know what this is. It’s in Spanish. Maybe Portuguese.

#5 (87 votes): Reduced Shakespeare Company. C’mon! We embody the spirit of Twitter! Less is more! Brevity is the soul of Twit! We have the best fans and followers in the world! (Although, seriously – only 87 votes out of 2500 Followers? That’s embarrassing. We’re gonna have to start learning Portuguese.)

Check out the Shorty Awards. Vote for @reduced in #culturalinstitution before Friday at noon New York time. Give a good creative reason.

And check out the other nominees, in all the categories. There are some fantastic folks out there.