Award-Winning Storyteller
Breadcrumb Trailblazer
Making YOU Googlicious & Unforgettable
Every week, I get emails from people asking me what I think of certain business awards.
The business awards that send you flattering emails telling you that you’ve won, and you can’t remember entering.
The ones playing your heart strings.
Or FOMO framing.
The business awards that look legit but have no judging process, vague as criteria and big promises.
Think about what an award is meant to promise. A business award means someone with standing looked at what you did, measured it against something, and decided you’d cleared a bar that not everyone clears. The judgement is the product. Take the judgement out and you’ve got a 100% genuine fake handbag from Garlic Lane.
Underneath the excitement, most people have a flicker of doubt about whether it’s real. They enter anyway. Not because they’re gullible, but because the alternative is going without the recognition.
Then the win comes and this is where it gets interesting. The dopamine hit from everyone congratulating you and they don’t have the foggiest idea whether the award is meaningful or not.
They hit the like button because they want to cheer us on. That’s not cynicism on my part, that’s just how skim reading works now. Nobody scrolls past a celebration and looks deeper into the process.
This ‘awards’ model is built to survive regardless of whether anyone digs deeper. Whether that’s deliberate design or just a happy accident for whoever’s running it, I can’t say for certain. I’d put money on deliberate, because it’s remarkably convenient for the people cashing the entry fees that the recognition economy runs almost entirely on vibes now rather than verification.
The win stops being the point. What people are chasing being the forty comments underneath the photo, and that crowd is reacting to a headline, not a body of evidence. I have messaged people who post about ‘winning’ these types of awards that it’s not in their best reputational interests. The response is either unfriending, or they tell me they’re just after the publicity.
When genuine validation is scarce, people stop asking is this real and start asking is this good enough, and that’s much sadder.
An award worth entering tells you exactly how it works, who’s judging it, and what you’re being measured against. A vanity award needs the opposite, you slightly confused, slightly hopeful, and moving fast enough that you never stop to ask the only question that matters, who decided this, and against what?
Before you enter, ask the award program for these details:
– Are the criteria clear? Not inspiring, clear.
– Is the judging process obvious, can anyone explain how an entry moves from nominee to finalist to winner?
– Do you have to pay before you see the questions and criteria?
– Who are the judges? If the judges turn out to be the sponsors, run. That’s not independent assessment.
– What are the extra costs once you strip away the free nomination that got you in the door?
– Does your entry hinge on an emotional story? A story about rebuilding your life is genuinely moving. It’s also completely unjudgeable at scale, which means everyone who tells one wins.
This is going to sound odd from someone who’s business is all about awards. Your story already has value. It isn’t diminished if you don’t enter an award. and it won’t lose value if you never enter a single award in your life.
Sadly, that’s how marketing and PR work now. Find the feeling, sell it back to the person who already had it and count on the fact that most people would rather buy a maybe than sit with a no. You don’t need an award to prove your story counts. What you might need, if you’ve never had it, is somewhere to tell it properly, to people who’ll listen without paying an entry fee or buying a marketing package.
As they say in Latin – Caveat emptor. Dig deeper. Do the due diligence half these award schemes are counting on you never doing.