2012 Shorty Award winners announced

The Shorty Award winners were announced at an awards ceremony on March 26, 2012. The Awards honor the best of social media, recognizing the people and organizations producing real-time short form content across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare, and the rest of the social Web.

Every year, millions of people visit the Shorty Awards site, www.shortyawards.com, to tweet nominations for their favorite social media content creators. All those tweets culminate in a highly anticipated awards ceremony that celebrates the winners in dozens of featured categories, as well as thousands of crowd-sourced community ones.

West Wing Report won the Journalist award. West Wing Report, @WestWingReport, is produced by independent journalist Paul Brandus, an accredited member of the White House press corps, and the White House Correspondents Association. According to the Shorty Awards, "Brandus provides reports for a variety of media outlets around the United States and overseas. Prior to creating West Wing Report (WWR), Paul spent many years on Wall Street and in network television. He was a producer and senior editor at NBC News, CNBC and helped launch MSNBC in 1996, where he supervised 20 writers. He was also senior prime time producer at Fox News Channel and a reporter for WTOP Radio, the all news station in Washington. Mr. Brandus also spent five years in Moscow. After working at the United States Embassy during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became a correspondent for NBC Radio and the award-winning business and economics program "Marketplace." In addition to traveling extensively across the former U.S.S.R., he has traveled to 53 countries on five continents and has reported from, among other places Iraq, Chechnya, China and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He began his career as a U.S. Senate staffer."

In the athletic arena, John Cena was the champion based on his Twitter account, @JohnCena. Cena is leader of WWE's Cenation and 12-time World Champion, in 140 characters or less, and has 1,746,539 Twitter followers. Also in the athletes arena of Shorty winners was Troy Polamalu who has 415,254 Twitter peeps.

Billionaire Richard Branson with his 1,917,027 peeps has only sent out 1,240 tweets but hailed a Shorty Award. Also receiving nominations in the Billionaire category were Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Oprah Winfrey

Butler Blue II, the official mascot of Butler University, managed to wolf down a Shorty. This dude has barked 20,188 times on Twitter, @ButlerBlue2, and has 9,196 followers.

The President of Ecuador was the winner in the World Leader category with President Barack Obama coming in second place. Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan came in third.

For a complete list of winners in all categories, visit the Shorty Awards site, www.shortyawards.com.

Published March 27, 2012