... The Troops and those that support them, including Veterans, Troops, Blue and Gold Star Families, and Patriotic Citizens
Now, there was a few glitches in the event. A programming glitch erased the first 3 1/2 hours worth of data for the competitor with the most tweets, MsMarti with 841 #MilitaryMon tweets in the last week. Since two members of her team contribute to War On Terror News, I was somewhat relieved that they weren't the winning team, even though they were the Troublemakers that caused this thing to happen. See it started as a joke that the three of them would have to compete with @BostonMaggie and her best two troublemakers for the title, as all four were giving me a rash of it that night a week ago Monday.
A special shoutout goes to @TerriLPN who cheerled all the competitors! She's an amazing Supporter of Our Troops!
One Competitor was completely absent, missing because she was visiting Her Troop. Some Competitors had other things in play, including a Soldier fishing with his son while the internet gave him fits.
We learned that Protected Accounts don't show up in the 3rd Party sites used for scoring and a whole new account was created the first night, named ZoomieZingersCD. This tweeter still managed 25,252 unique views with an account that I was the 2nd or 3rd follower to during the competition.
Several Tweeters demonstrated amazing results. @ThankASoldier attained 80,811 unique reads and 1,257,081 potential total views while his sole teammate received 73,301 unique readers and 492,337 total potential readers, no doubt due to the proliferation of RT's. But adding any other free agent to their team wouldn't have put them over the total of the winning team, nor did the formula of adding 50% to their score, which gave them an impact of 231,168 unique reads (adjusted.)
@MajaStevanovich was #2 for the week in most #MilitaryMon Tweets (behind Ms_Marti as my numbers don't count) with 490 compared to her #1 ranking with 145 last week. Though a teammate was in direct support (and unavailable) to a Troop, the 50% team addition was also insufficent to bring the team over the top.
The Squid Semantics suffered only from outside Navy commitments, not from a lack of quality. Evidently, "the Men's Department" was serving the team leader "milk & cookies" while the West Coast Aviator was required to get "crew rest" and the News guy was tuckered out from the Big Events his real job required. Still, they hit the twitterverse in waves, causing a respectable splash.
Unfortunately, a few competitors were disallowed by Tweetdeck from my appointed Troublemakers Group. This left them with the task of reminding me on a regular basis that they were out there so I could check their stream manually for RT's. At least one didn't get the message or I missed it and that may have decreased their participation. My apologies.
@VeteransAirLift achieved the single most unique readers of 120,728 lifting her team to 233,705 Uniques. The entire team performed well, but the 1,665,669 of Team OpCowa in their 802 #MilitaryMon tweets.
@KneeDeep dug in her stiletto heels and told some great stories of life as a Military Wife and Mom attaining more than a half million total impressions but she'll have to use other tricks to get a coffee cup and case of Sniper's Brew. Perhaps poker?
Eight of the Top 9 #MilitaryMon tweeters of the week were in the competition and providing quality reasons to Support Our Troops. And @Dovirma (sp?) is to be congratulated as the one who competed without be part of the competion.
At the end of the day, we achieved the real goals: positive, witty, respectable #MilitaryMon tweets that rose participation and awareness of the the reason for the tag. There were 9,236 #MilitaryMon tweets for the week compared to 3,126 last week. We were in the top 10 3x though it seems to have not shown up as such. There were 984 contributors compared to 644 the week prior. 42% came from the top10, compared to 27% last week.
Though I've mentioned a few of the highlights here, there are many more I should, except for time, space, and suspense. I've noticed some other things that can help this in the future, that may be the topic of future articles. Thank each of you for your time and hard work in making this a success and in your patience in finding out who actually won.
The Bonus Points did not come into play in determining the winner, at least not mathematically. Potentially, they could have been a deciding factor and it's likely that striving for the 9 categories resulted in more RT's which meant more Unique Readers.
The 9 Best Categories will be the subject of the first article of the newest contributor here, who judged the competion, but the winner is...
... with 277,606 Unique Readers Reach, combined the Cheesehead Coalition. This team had two members in the Top 10 Contributors, ranked #5 and #8 this week, one of which was ranked #4 last week. It demonstrated selfless service with 155+ RT's to Competitors (in addition to those to teammates and non-competitors). DixieDollBaby RT'd 31 to one non-team member alone!
That selfless service should as no surprise when one realizes the team was led by RTRviews, who has a reputation for Supporting Our Troops by reiterating the message of Milbloggers.
And the Coalition is finished out with ArmyMom101 who consistently tells the Military Message. In fact the only non-military tag I've noted from her is #FollowFriday and I'll bet she was pointing to the Military Bloggers and Military Supporters there as well.
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