Every year, we look to surface the most creative and effective ways in which companies are using social media and recognize them with our Forrester Groundswell Awards. Since I have a focus on serving B2B marketing leaders, I want to make sure that you are aware that we have an award category just for B2B applications. Many B2B marketers come to me because they struggle to come up with ideas for interesting social marketing applications that target business buyers, which makes for far fewer B2B success stories, so we need your entries.

The entry deadline for the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards is August 3rd, so I encourage you to go here if you'd like to nominate one of your own initiatives, or if you are an agency, you can submit something you've done for a client. Josh Bernoff, one of the original authors of Groundswell, wrote a great blog post highlighting the history of the awards that you should read if you're not already familiar with the program. 

One of my favorite things to do here at Forrester is judge the Groundswell Awards. Started by Josh Bernoff as a way to drive increasingly practical discussion regarding the real benefits that derive from exploiting social media, judging these Awards is among the most collaborative things we do within Forrester's research community. Moreover, as we compare submissions across years, the Awards give us a chance to ask, "How is the state of the art changing in the world of social media?" Finally, each and every submission becomes a case that we can use over and over as we help clients navigate the turbulent waters of the social sphere. Very cool stuff.

Imagine the Forrester analysts that help role clients with social media -- Josh et al. -- sitting around a virtual table discussing the details of each individual submission. We consider all the POST attributes -- people, objective, strategy, and tools/tactics -- highlighting what's innovative, what's working, and what's generating returns. It reminds me a bit of being a kid and getting the Sears Catalog in the mail at the beginning of the holiday season. For those that weren't around before Lindsay Lohan was born, the Sears Catalog was the compendium of every toy, sporting good item, musical instrument, etc., that could possibly emerge from that big box from Grandma. Like me with my siblings, we analysts metaphorically sit on the sofa with the Groundswell Award submissions in our laps, pointing at the examples that we think are most cool and worthy. I say "like," of course, because I haven't yet found myself bouncing off the walls, screaming gibberish, like I did when I first saw the red bicycle I got when I was nine years old.

Yet.

[Originally published by Josh Bernoff on the Groundswell blog.]

We first started the Forrester Groundswell awards in 2007. What a great run! We've seen applications like the one that the amazing Pete Williams used to raise a million dollars for recovery from Australian brush fires and the one that remade the rules for NASCAR. And for the people who created these award-winning applications, the awards have given them the recognition that helps them justify the great work they do.

This year, we're expanding them to match up to the expanding role that social applications play in business. It also means you have more ways to win.

We've got: