Winners of the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards: Consumer North America

The consumer division, North America was the most hotly contested division, with 98 of the 205 entries. Every year I send out the congratulations notes ... and every year I hear back how excited the winners are. If you're building a social technolgoy application, this is the place to look for models -- these are some of the most impressive applications we've ever seen. We recognized them on stage at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago. We'll be announcing the international winners in November at our European Marketing & Strategy Forum.

 

Listening (Consumer North America)

Finalist

The Power of Online Listening and Understanding by Kindercare

Winner

The Dell Social Media Listening and Command Center by Dell

Dell has created this dedicated facility to respond with speed and effectiveness to all its customers seeking help or commenting in social environments. Dell's partnership with Radian6 provides technology to collect conversations and analyze real-time data. This information identifies conversation trends and issues, serving as an early warning and feedback system.It has served 20,000 customers, with a 99% resolution rate. It accomplished goals including quicker customer response times, improved issue recognition, mitigation and management, and enhanced internal coordination and more consistent responses. The command center also serves as an early warning system for developing crises around its products and services.

 

Talking (Consumer North America)

Finalists

Parallels Social Interactivity & Engagement by Banyan Branch 
BC Salmon Facts by DDB Canada
Bacardi: Like It Live, Like It Together by Blast Radius
VH1's Single and Liking It Photo Contest by Invoke and memelabs

Winner

Building a Connected Brand by Ally Bank & iCrossing

Ally bank, a new, online-focused banking entity spun off from GM, needed to generate awareness. Its strategies included a Web site, a blog featuring how-tos and industry experts, 2000 articles on its site, Facebook posts, tweets, and infographics that spread virally. The result of all this content was to generate inbound interest from search engines and social sites. Since January, this activity generated 3 million site visits, a 64% increase over last year, and $128 million in deposits that originated with content visible in natural searches and social.

 

Energizing (Consumer North America)

Finalists

Random House's "Random Buzzers" by Affinitive 
Tweetlevel and MTV by Edelman
Mercedes Benz Tweet Race by Razorfish
Kirkland's Finders Keepers Campaign by redpepper

Winner

Radio Shack's 2010 Holiday Campaign by imc²

Imc²’s campaign for RadioShack had three parts. First was a promoted Twitter trend for #UNeedANewPhone, those who searched saw a tweet with offers for new iPhones from RadioShack. Second was a campaign called Holiday Heroes, connected with the hashtag #IfIHadSuperPowers. If users tweeted a picture, Radioshack turned it into a photo featuring them as a superhero.  And third was a partnership with FourSquare. The results were impressive: a double digit increase in total wireless sales, 68.4 million impressions on Twitter, and Foursquare users becoming heavy purchasers of mobile devices and accessories.

 

Supporting (Consumer North America)

Winner

Get Satisfaction Social Business Platform by Mint.com 

The personal finance site Mint.com was facing a support crunch from rapid growth. It worked with GetSatisfaction to create a solution as the front line of support, a customer community in which customers support one another. Within 90 days, the company saw a 75% reduction in support tickets, got 50% of its traffic from SEO, and engaged with 90,000 registered users across 15,000 topics.

 

Embracing (Consumer North America)

Winner

Co-creation Invigorates Hair Care by Alberto Culver & Communispace 

Communispace created a private online community for Alberto-Culver called My Beauty Café. The community revealed that women struggle to feel fresh and rejuvenated on the days they don’t shampoo. This led to the launch of the TRESemme Fresh Start dry shampoo product, which became the number one brand in the dry shampoo mass channel. By the end of 2010, the product had achieved retail sales topping $7.7 million. It’s now the 6th best selling product in the styling category in mass retail channels.

Social Impact (Consumer North America)

Finalist

Secret’s Mean Stinks by imc²

Winner

Love A Local Business by Intuit

Love a Local Business is a socially enabled competition that allows fans to vote for a small business deserving of love – in the form of a $25,000 business grant. Some of these awards saved local businesses from bankrupctcy. The campaign has generated 80,000 nominations in one month, and 60% of its traffic comes from Facebook. Intuit has recognized 125 local businesses in the US over the last two years.

Mobile Application (Consumer North America)

Finalists

Six Flags "Skip the Line" Game by Ask.com 
Starbucks Mobile Applications by Starbucks

Winner

Relationships + Rentals by Redbox & Signal

Redbox, which runs DVD rental kiosks, offered discounts for people who texted them. The Redbox texting program was a smash success. This program generated 3.7 million new email customers. It pulled in over 400,000 unique people, helped generate 34% in year over year revenue growth, with over 6 million downloads of its app on iPhone and Android. The program gained them over 200,000 new Redbox customers. 

 

 

 

Winners of the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards: Business to Business

If you've heard that social media doesn't work as well in Business-to-Business settings -- don't believe it. We had 44 entries this year, and picked the winners you see here -- just as impressive as any consumer application.

Listening (Business to Business)

No winner

Talking (Business to Business)

Winner

Spreading the Word of the 2011 IBM Impact Conference by IBM

The Web and Social Media team for IBM WebSphere software leveraged social media to drive registrations and enhance the value of attending the brand's major conference, Impact 2011. The team spread the news through the most effective avenues: attendees, fans, and influencers on Twitter, blogs, Livestream, Flickr, and Slideshare. IBM leveraged the reach of 147,000 followers to spread the word via Twitter. This helped exceed its registration target by 33%. Additional social media and live streaming extended the conference to more than 8,000 viewers from around the world, effectively doubling the event audience.

 

Energizing (Business to Business)

Finalists

Commonground Social Network by Environmental Data Resources 
PlanetPTC Community by PTC

Winner

"Trade Secrets": Energizing SMB Influencers by Zocalo Group and Dell 

Zocalo developed the Trade Secrets campaign to introduce the Vostro V130 a laptop designed for small business. Zocalo identified 150+ Influencers in the US and UK, with areas of expertise ranging from entrepreneurship to social media to technology and distributed Vostro V130 laptops to enable hands-on interaction with the product, energizing SMBs to share recommendations and encourage trial among others. Two SMB consultants hosted separate 1-hour Tweet chats asking people to tweet advice for making a positive first impression; eight SMB, Social Media and Tech experts "road-tested" and wrote reviews of the Vostro V130. This campaign also delivered 82 individual blog posts featuring the Vostro V130 and/or the Trade Secrets campaign, 300+ attendees at two Dell-sponsored, offline events, 1,647 tweets containing #tradesecrets, and 5,086,230 total earned digital impressions.

 

Spreading (Business to Business)

Finalist

Bosch: What is the Value of Facebook Fans? by Globalpark

Winner

National Facebook Program To Help Salons Market by L'Oreal Professionnel USA

The Salon Facebook Program allows L'Oreal brands and their salons to partner in a marketing and communication effort. L'Oreal partnered with Buddy Media to provide a set of tools with which salons could begin enhancing their Facebook Pages, allowing L'Oreal to measure traction and furnish content for all of its salon locations. By year-end, the combined salon participation is estimated to exceed 6,000 salons reaching approximately 1.7 million clients. Combining brand reach and assuming weekly outreach to this audience, the current eCPM is $8.91 with a projected $3.04 eCPM by year-end, far below magazine advertising.

 

Supporting (Business to Business)

Finalist

LexisNexis Investigators Network by LexisNexis

Winner

Cisco Support Community by Cisco Systems

Cisco launched new technical support channels on leading social media in late 2009 to build a more social and persistent community for peer-to-peer support. These new communities on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube provide direct access to Cisco experts for learning and knowledge sharing, foster issue resolution among customers, and serve as vehicles for critical technical support announcements and updates from Cisco. Since the introduction of social media technical support, the Facebook app had over 15,000 installs and 7,000 monthly active users, and 70% of Cisco users on a Facebook survey expressed satisfaction over the responses they had received for their questions posted on Cisco's Facebook community. Cisco estimates that its community-based support on Facebook and Twitter is saving more than $400K+ annually.

 

Embracing (Business to Business)

Finalists

The Marketo Community by Marketo 
IT Professionals Embrace Spiceworks by Spiceworks 

Winner

Ideas Community by Ultimate Software

Ultimate Software's Ideas is an online community where customers can share, collaborate, and provide direct feedback to its HR technology product, UltiPro. Ultimate's strategy & development teams are extremely active in Ideas, commenting on customers' ideas, providing updates, and soliciting opinions on their own ideas. Since  January 2010, the Ideas Community has grown to 5,469 users, creating 1,992 ideas, with 2,456 comments and 12,374 votes on those ideas. As of July 2011, 72 of these ideas have already been implemented into UltiPro. Another 35 ideas will be included in UltiPro's next release - Fall of 2011. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to pick a winner

by Josh Bernoff

I've been picking a lot of winners lately. I helped pick our next Forrester book from eight candidates (you'll hear more about this soon enough). I helped pick the winning entries in the Forrester Groundswell Awards (North America winners to be announced on Friday). And within Forrester, we're running an idea contest for improvements to our business on our sharing site, the HERO Platform.

I've learned a little about what works well and what doesn't with all these contests. If you have to run a contest, maybe this can help you. What I learned can be broken down into before, during and after:

Before the entries come in.

• Know why you're doing this. We do the Forrester Groundswell Awards to showcase excellence in social applications, strengthen relationships with people who create it, and generate fantastic case studies. We solicit ideas for Forrester's business not just to improve the business, but to help employees feel they can create positive change. Knowing your objectives will help you make decisions about how to run your contest.
• Set the rules carefully up front and publish them. Your entrants will need to know how you're judging -- and so will your judges. Write it down. Post it. Think of what could be misinterpreted and clarify. Fairness is important; so is clarity, if you want good entries.
• Plan to promote. How will people find out about this contest? There are so many awards and contests, yours has to stand out. That means you need to promote it -- and spreading the word through social is a powerful technique. For the Forrester Groundswell Awards, in addition to a blog post, we and our account folks contacted many technology vendors and agencies who are motivated to participate.

During the entry period.

• Get the entries posted in a public place. It generates a lot of interest to allow people to view the entries -- in all three of these contests, the entries went up where people could see them, either on the open Internet or on our internal sharing system. We encouraged people to vote on, rate, and comment on the entries. This makes the entrants your publicists -- they'll drive people to the site for you. I saw lots of tweets about the Forrester Groundswell Awards entries, for example.
• Panic effectively. Based on only a few dozen entries coming in with a week to go, we got worried. I did videos and we did a bunch of other things to beat the bushes. Maybe it wasn't needed -- we got 204 entries, of which more than half showed up on the last day. This right-at-deadline activity seems to get worse every year. All I can tell you is, if you have only a few entries and there's a week to go, there's no way to know if they'll all come flooding in late . . . or not at all.
• Don't shift the deadline. It's a sure sign that your contest is in trouble, and moving the deadline later doesn't tend to generate more quality entries. What it does do is invalidate the effort of the people who did meet the deadline. I got many pleas to move the deadline on the awards -- but keeping in mind the other entrants, I turned them all down.

During  and after the judging.

• Recruit and manage a judging team. The time to recruit a team is well ahead of the judging, not after. Get the judges together, virtually or in a meeting, and make sure the criteria are clear. We have different judging teams on different divisions of the Forrester Groundswell Awards, but a few of us review everything to ensure consistency. I scored the book candidates on various criteria and together with Forrester management, we made the decision. And I have a set of Forrester managers lined up to judge the business innovations. If the team knows the criteria, they typically do a good job. If you have too few people, not only will they be overworked, but they won't benefit from a diverse set of viewpoints.
• Keep track on a shared site. The Forrester Groundswell Awards judging, the book selection, and the idea contest are all on our HERO platform. This works way better than emailing stuff around, and it's crucial to keep everything organized for the next stage.
• Allow time between selecting the winners and announcing. For an external contest (or even a big internal one), you'll want to inform the winners and give them time to prepare. We give winners about three weeks notice. Longer and you risk leaks. Shorter and it's not fair to expect them to react appropriately and come to the event where the winners are announced.

Recognize publicly

• A token is nice. We've done certificates in the past -- this year we're springing for lucite. People like to show off that they won.
• But public and personal recognition is more important. We announce the Forrester Groundswell Awards at our events. We announce the internal winners at our company meetings. When I'm involved, I contact the winners personally by email, and try to make sure the emails are personal. The 23 emails I wrote for the award winners took a little time, but not nearly as much time as they put in creating the applications and submitting them -- they deserve a little effort on my part. We also allow people to put a graphical "badge" on their sites so people can see that they won.
• Involve PR. While I do the contact, our PR staff take over quickly from there. They also run the recognition at our company meetings. PR people (at least the ones I work with) do this professionally, can help make sure winners don't make inappropriate announcements regarding their wins, and are great with details. There are a dozen ways to screw this up. Our PR staff not only catch and fix them, they make suggestions that make the whole process worthwhile.

If you're running a contest, whether its for ideas in your company or recognizing winners in your industry, I hope this is valuable to you. And pop by on Friday to spy our next round of winning social applications.