Contest ranking question - how to rank entries in multiple categories?

Question

I'm currently developing a video contest web application using Ruby on Rails. It integrates closely with YouTube, which it uses for submitting videos, comments, average rating, and popularity stats. The application will also count Twitter and (possibly) Facebook mentions, and count the number of times visitors have clicked an "Add This" social network button.

Instead of direct voting it will use each video's YouTube rating and social media presence to pick a winner.

My question is: What is the fairest method for ranking the entries?

My basic idea is to just find each video's ranking in each category separately by sorting the results of an ActiveRecord query, then compute the average of all these numbers and use it as the video's master rank. Then I'd sort all the entries by this rank, with the lowest number coming in first, etc. Is this a fair way to rank the contest entries?

Answer 1

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. However, it seems to me that the social media score is pointless. The net result is that someone bothered to watch and/or rate the video on YouTube. Those scores alone should tell you if someone is "doing a good job" on the social media front.

Answer 2

Shouldn't the contest organizer be telling you how they want everything rated?

I would personally count the number of youtube submissions, add the score for each, then divide by the number to get their average score, and then suppliment that somehow by social media mentions, but it is up to them to tell you which should carry more weight. They have to understand that you can design the app to do whatever they want, but they are in charge of letting you know what precisely they want. That sort of decision should not be left up to the designer. Let them wrestle with it in committee for a bit, don't sweat the actual algorithm until they come up with the answer for you.