One of the many cool things that happened down in Austin this year was that I got a chance to win a “Texas Social Media Award.” In general, I’m not a fan of pointless awards to celebrate arbitrary career or avocation accomplishments. They always tend to conjure up, in my mind at least, the silly badges and awards that were intensely prevelant during the ‘90s on the Internet to make people feel funny and function mostly as marketing vehicles for those giving the award (“cool site of the day,” or “featured on Geek Site of the Day,” or what have you).

In the case of the TSMA, though, I do feel pretty honored to have been awarded this year for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the list of other fellow award recipients was pretty impressive.  I know we’re not all doing brain surgery, and in general, there’s not a lot of room left to innovate in the realm of social media.  That doesn’t mean that the projects that many of us are engaged in aren’t just hands down cool (and see what I did there? because I’m a fellow award member, their coolness is transferrable to me).

For instance, last year’s crop included many folks you know, and many folks that worked with me on the various projects I engaged with during SxSW this year: Paul Terry Walhus (of Texas Coworking), Aaron Strout (of Powered.com, sponsor of this year’s broadcast), and Michelle Greer (SiliconANGLE member and now a Rackspace employee).

This year, fellow nominees, many of which I hadn’t met face to face but had seen their name bandied about, included folks like JR Cohen, Grace Rodriguez, Hugh Mcleod, Shawn P. Williams, and Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams.  There were many others there who’s names you know and I know (and worth checking out), because the name starts to read like a who’s who of blogging, podcasting and social media after a minute. Getting to sit face to face with people like Grace and her Houston friends like Tim deSilva (designer and organizer of their local TEDx) provided a fascinating look into the emergent Web2 scenes in other cities.

The Austin-American Statesman: Heritage Media Transitioning to New Media

The other reason I feel a bit honored to be included in these numbers this year is that the judges thought I was worthy of inclusion.  The rules for voting on the awards, while rather nebulous in my memory, didn’t seem to be based on a crowdsourced or openly democratic model. If you were nominated by the public, you went on their list. After the list was compiled, a set of judges which included a few award winners from last year and the staff of the Austin-American Statesman judged you on your merits. If you passed muster, you went on the list.

I say it’s something of an honor because these folks at the Statesman seem to have a grasp on what it means to be a social media-savvy publication. They’re one of the only newspapers in the country successfully making the transition from Old Media to New Media.

Just before they started handing out the nifty little glass stars to us, the Statesman had a couple of staff members up on stage to talk a bit about their social media strategy, and how they regard the new medium with which they reach their readers.

“Some people may say that delivering a tweet at midnight is not a substantial enough way to deliver serious news on sobering times: like health care, or the marriage referendum,” they said.

“We disagree, and we are going to reach people where ever we can however we can, and you’re a big part of that,” he continued. “Whether it’s our Sunday newspaper, our iPhone application, or a tweet from our newsroom, we’re still doing what newspapers do, bringing you accurate, verified and timely journalism.”

He gave an interesting and poignant example of how they’re they’re not just utilizing social media, but letting it enter into their workflow.

“… let me take you back to February 18th.  We were in our normal routine, when a guy decided to crash his plane into the IRS building. We’ve got the fastest photographers in the state (and it look like half of them are here tonight), but before they could reach the scene, we were receiving photos from Twitter. Also, in a direct message on Twitter, we were’ tipped off on the manifesto/suicide not, and to our knowledge were the first to post that.”

Perhaps it’s because the bar for participation and utilization of social media is set so low for Heritage Media organizations, but that’s pretty impressive.  As they went on to say in the presentation, that level of engagement has paid off as well: “Attention was at an all time high that day, and was as a direct result, we feel from our relationship with our readers via social media.”

Amazing, right? Utilize social media, engage the capabilities of multimedia on the web, and pay attention how to smartly crowd source while still maintaining editorial standards of veracity and curation, and you have a successful news organization that isn’t crushed by the onslaught of the new media noise glut.

In other words, it can be done. Profitably.

[Note: All photo credits due to the Austin-American Statesman. Order prints and other photo related schwag here. –mrh]