The MTV Movie Awards are putting their… um, prestige… at risk, but definitely cementing themselves as the awards show of a young tech-savvy generation. Tonight’s awards show added a big element of social media to the night when Twitter announced this week that the Best Hero category would be voted on entirely by hashtags and votes tallied through the microblogging site.

The MTV Movie Awards is offering its first-ever live social voting category for one of the night’s coolest categories: Best Hero. All votes are being cast by fans, and only through Twitter. MTV has created special voting hashtags for you to pick your favorite heroic character. They’ll tally the Tweets with each hashtag and announce the results live during the show.

Cast your vote here, or by tweeting:

• #votepotter to vote for Harry from “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2”
• #votekatniss to vote for Katniss Everdeen from “The Hunger Games”
• #votethor to, well, vote for Thor from “Thor”
• #votecaptain to vote, yes, for Captain America from “Captain America”
• #votejenko to vote for Jenko from “21 Jump Street”

In case you were wondering, nominees are chosen by MTV executives and producers, and usually voted on by anyone through the award show’s web site.

The move represents a huge coup by Twitter, which continues to market itself as the current dominant social media site, especially for younger users; this traffic easily could have gone to Facebook. Twitter continues to reach out to other demographics too, recently announcing partnerships with NASCAR and the Country Music Awards.

Unsurprisingly, Harry Potter currently holds a healthy lead, with his votes increasing by the second. But Katniss Everdeen is in a relatively close second.

What do you think- is this savvy tech marketing, or jumping the social media shark?

[via TheNextWeb]

Bookmark to: