Honoring excellence within your industry is a highly valued way to stay competitive in your market and meaningful to the attendees of your event. Yet, when delivering recognition through an awards program year over year, the content of the program can get stale, leading to decreased ticket sales and diminishing the importance of the awards significance overall. SC Magazine, a publication for information security professionals, has designed a program to honor industry leaders that focuses on engagement for its core base.

“Over the past 15 years we’ve tried to build an awards program that allows vendors and professionals to seek recognition that calls out the strength of what they’re doing,” says Illena Armstrong, editor-in-chief of SC Magazine. “The accolades of winning these awards have become very important not only to the vendors, but fortunately enough for our readers.”

The black-tie awards event, which is held every February, boasts a cocktail reception, ceremonial dinner and an after-hours networking party. An individual reservation for the ceremony costs $420, a reservation for a group of five $2,100 and $3,990 for a group of 10. SC Magazine promotes its awards program throughout the year through social media and a blog dedicated to details of the event. There are three major sections that make up the main awards program—the Reader Trust, Excellence and Professional categories, which in total comprise more than 30 distinctions. There is also an Editor’s Choice Award, which is decided by the SC Magazine editorial team.

Deciding who should be bestowed with an award takes a multipronged approached to ensure engagement is high, a key part of the awards program. The finalists and winners in the respective categories are decided in a couple different ways. For the Reader Trust award, the end-user readers—such as chief security officers, chief information security officers, CIOs, etc.—cast their votes through a secured, online system at SCMagazine.com. A panel of judges, which consists of industry luminaries and experts who the editor invites to participate each year, decides the winners for the Excellence and Professional categories. By having end-users and spectators of the awards provide input, the recognition program gains steam both online and for the in-person event.

“We try to do innovative things around the program as much as possible,” says Armstrong. “We rely pretty heavily on the Web site, the hard copy publication and our social media pages.”

Leveraging Bloggers

One other section has been added in recent years—the SC Social Media Awards, which are voted on by visitors to and readers of SCMagazine.com. This section includes Most Popular Security Blogger, Best Corporate Security Blog and Five to Follow on Twitter categories. While the main categories mentioned earlier see their finalists announced at the end of each year on the Web site, the nomination and voting process for these three categories takes place completely online a mere month or two before the black-tie event in February, helping the publication to maintain and further build upon buzz for the February gala. Bloggers looking to score an award write about the designations, something that also creates buzz and excitement for the in-person event, in which all SC Awards winners are announced.

On-site during the gala, a professional team of press representatives are Tweeting the winners of each award and posting results to Facebook. Professionals are also on hand shooting video and taking photos of the winners accepting their accolades. The planning for the ceremony goes year-round to ensure the content sticks in the minds of these business professionals.

“As soon as we’re done with the event, we come back to our office and maybe take two weeks off and immediately start planning for the following year,” says Armstrong. “We get feedback from the judges, from individuals from the party and we’ll start looking at the different trends happening in the market to ensure that we really do cover everything we should and to see what we need to include the next year.”

Additionally, at the beginning of the process, the staff uses major social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to send out important dates and deadlines for the awards program—at one point the group Tweets every 30 minutes throughout the day announcing award finalists to generate buzz.

“This is a community that is very engaged in what is happening,” she says. “At the live event itself, it’s a huge networking event and we get well over 400 people coming together every year in San Francisco at our black tie affair, wanting to see who the winners are. I think it’s exciting for all of the professionals, the folks who are supplying the end-user community but also the security professionals working in the trenches, too. You’re able to see your peers and colleagues called out for the huge strides they’re taking to fight cyber crime.”