They embody the passions of earnest inventors and the dreams of budding business builders. They are the products of industries both old and new, from organisations large and small. They are the spoils of skunkworks and represent the rigours of R&D. Above all else, they sure have a lot of friends!

The Readers’ Choice Index was created to provide an opportunity for Anthill readers to vote on SMART 100 applications, in one of three ways:

1. Hit the VOTE UP button: Placed on the top left of each applicant’s profile page (1 point)
2. Trigger a Reaction: Re-Tweet, Like on Facebook, Reactions to comments, etc (2 points)
3. Leave a Comment: Words of encouragement. Anonymous comments were excluded (3 points)

At the conclusion of the Readers’ Choice component, we promised to tally up the results and create an Index according to the votes of our readers.

What we didn’t expect to receive was a lesson in social media marketing.

Why did we conduct the Readers’ Choice this way?

Let’s be frank. Readers’ Choice Awards are usually conducted for two reasons.

The first is to provide readers with a voice. This is obviously a good thing. It takes the decision making process away from a few and gives it to many.

The second is to raise awareness. In our world, that could also be interpreted to mean, ‘get more traffic’.

As such, we acknowledge that many award programs often end up becoming (for want of a better description) media sanctioned popularity contests. And with acknowledgement comes acceptance.

So, rather than rail against this hard fact (Oh, the inequity!), we decided to ignore our internal cynics (the ones in our brains, not just the ones in our office) and reward voters according to the effort they put in to reach their own networks.

That’s right, we empowered our entrants to kick start the marketing for us.

And, to state the obvious, if success is built on marketing flair (even partially), these 10 are likely to have a bright future.

And the winners are…

To read more about Cardlimbo, click here.

Next week, we intend to reveal the full list along with the final ranking for the SMART 100 Index. What is interesting for now is the observation that four of our Top 10 Readers’ Choice Winners also feature within the Top 20 of the final SMART 100 Index, as determined by our ‘maven’ judging process. (We’ll tell you which ones next week.)

The reach of these bright sparks

A surprising observation was that the Top 10 Readers’ Choice winners generated almost twice as many social media reactions than the remaining participants in the SMART 100 combined.

Top 10 Total Reaction: 2,151
Remaining Participants Combined: 1,259

To see how they ranked according to our maven judges, click here.