News & Announcements

The calendar has flipped to a new year, and that means it’s SEMMY Awards season. Our committee of eight search & social media marketers has spent the past year reading content from across the web and choosing the best articles to be nominated in this year’s SEMMY Awards.

What’s New

We have a total of 139 authors nominated this year, representing 99 different web sites/blogs. We’ll have 17 categories again this year, but the “LOL Funny!” category is gone and a new “Copywriting” category is taking its place. (Note: categories will come and go from one year to the next; there were no funny articles nominated this year, so no need for that category.)

Proposed Timeline

Here’s the schedule we hope to keep:

January 13: 2010 nominees are posted
January 20: Judges’ deadline to decide category finalists
January 25: 2010 finalists posted; public voting begins
January 29: Public voting closes
February 1: Winners announced

January 13 is next week, so I’m going to wrap up this post and get busy. You can bookmark SEMMYS.org, subscribe to the RSS feed, and/or follow @SEMMYS on Twitter for the latest updates over the next few weeks.

– Matt

Once again this year, we have a fantastic lineup of judges working on the SEMMYs. These are the folks who will review the nominees and choose the finalists in their assigned categories. The voting public (that’s you) will then get to choose a winner in each category. Here’s our 25 judges, listed alphabetically by first name:

• Aaron Wall
• Adam Audette
• Andrew Shotland
• Andy Beal
• Barry Schwartz
• Brad Geddes
• Chris Winfield
• Christine Churchill
• David Mihm
• David Wallace
• Deb Mastaler
• Donna Fontenot
• Eric Enge
• Jeff Quipp
• Jennifer Laycock
• John Andrews
• Lee Odden
• Lisa Barone
• Michael Gray
• Michael Jensen
• Rand Fishkin
• Simon Heseltine
• Tamar Weinberg
• Todd Malicoat
• Todd Mintz

Huge thanks to each of you for volunteering your time on the SEMMYs.

The nominees in our 17 categories will be revealed next Monday, January 19, and these judges will have a week to determine the finalists. For more on our schedule, please see the How It Works page.

The 2009 SEMMY Awards are just around the corner, and here’s some news to share with the online marketing community:

1. Launch Date

We’re planning to announce the nominees on Monday, January 19. That’s just less than two weeks away. If all goes well, winners should be announced on February 4. You can learn more about the process, and see our planned timeline, on the How It Works page.

2. 200 Authors Nominated

With a group of 8 people nominating articles/content throughout the 2008 calendar year, we have a larger and more diverse pool of nominees. For this year’s awards, we have 200 authors nominated representing 157 blogs/web sites. That’s a huge increase over the first year (127 authors from 111 blogs/sites).

3. New Categories

Due to the diversity of nominated content, we’ve added two new categories: Design & Usability and Industry. All 15 categories from last year’s awards are back, so we now have a total of 17 awards categories.

That’s the latest from SEMMYS.org. Stay tuned for the announcement of nominees on January 19th!

The SEMMY Awards will be back soon to honor the great online marketing content produced during the 2008 calendar year.

This will be the SEMMYS second year, and we’ve completely changed the way great content gets nominated for an award. Last year, all nominees were discovered by me, Matt McGee, during my regular reading of marketing web sites and blogs. That produced a nominee list of 127 authors from 111 different blogs and web sites; those are strong numbers, but I knew we could do better this time around.

And we are.

For the 2009 SEMMYS, we have an eight-person committee that’s been nominating great content throughout the year. The nominee list is still being put together, but I can tell you that there are dozens of first-time authors and blogs/web sites nominated this year. I also expect we’ll have some new categories in this year’s nominees, and a couple categories from last year may not be represented at all.

Stay tuned for the announcement of nominees, which should happen in mid-January, 2009.