Last night, The Riverfront Times held its 2012 Point+Clique St. Louis Web Awards at the Old Rock House. We were nominated in two categories:
1. Our own Chris Reimer (me – @RizzoTees) was nominated in the category “Best Use of Twitter to Promote a Personal Brand.” Unfortunately, I came up a bit short this year. Cue loser music. However, there is no shame in losing to Erica Smith, who not only has an awesome personal Twitter account, but deftly handles the Twitter account for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Weatherbird. This is a victory well-deserved, and congrats to fellow nominees Nick Gilham, Angie Ortmann and Evan Benn.
2. In the category “Best Use of Social Media for a Civic Campaign,” our Save Pratzel’s campaign was up against Save St. Louis Del Taco. We took home the circuit board trophy! The judges said:
From the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the Occupy Movement in the United States, this was the year that social media morphed from a million little vanity projects into a cohesive front for change, or — in St. Louis’ case — for keeping things the same. Last summer thousands of Facebook users rallied to help save the Del Taco “saucer” building in Midtown. But it was the smaller “Save Pratzel’s” campaign that exemplified the true power of social media. Alerted that the cherished Pratzel’s Bakery was closing shop after after 98 years, the brand communication firm Falk Harrison sprang to action with a tweet and a blog post announcing its plans to provide a new owner for the bakery a year’s worth of social media if they kept it in business. Soon other local companies (24 in total) would offer similar volunteer services to anyone willing to purchase the kosher bakery. Meanwhile, the social-media fury (hashtag “savepratzels”) spawned dozens of local news stories that brought further attention to the cause. And the result? Within a few weeks that buyer — Jon Mills — emerged, inspired by the outpouring of social-media support for the old bakery.
We are thrilled to have won. This is the second award we’ve won on this work, with the first being last year’s BMA-TAM award. Here’s a link to the page describing our award, and here’s a picture gallery with 33 photos of last night’s event. Thank you to the Riverfront Times and to the judges that worked so hard on this year’s awards.
