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October 04, 2009

See you at the Forrester Consumer Forum, Chicago, October 27 and 28

Forrester’s Consumer Forum  is a very special place for me, because it's where the ideas for Groundswell were launched in 2007. It was your warm and positive reaction that gave us the confidence we were on track.


At the 2009 Forrester event, our analysts will present research on how evolving consumer online behavior demands that firms step up efforts to engage them, and executives from major companies will share their companies' best practices for creating breakthrough multichannel relationships.

If you haven't been to one of forums, you'll see that we do things a little differently. The two Forrester presentations, which lead off each of the two days, are distilled for maximum value (we put a lot of effort into getting only the best, newest research into these presentations and them delivering them with a little panache). And the industry speakers, while they are just the people you want to hear from, spend more than half of their time answering questions from our analysts and vetted questions from the audience. That makes sure the attendees get their money's worth.

We'll also be presenting the results of the Forrester Groundswell Awards. Together with the rest of the Groundswell team, we've completed our review of all the entries, and the winners have demonstrated some impressive accomplishments. For the first time, this year, you'll be able to meet the winners at a party right after they receive their awards.


This year's outside speakers include:

  • Brad Brooks, Corporate Vice President, Windows Consumer Product Marketing, Microsoft
  • Michael Darviche, Chief Marketing Officer, Acxiom
  • Prasanna Dhore, Vice President, Hewlett Packard
  • Barry Judge, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Best Buy
  • Bob Kraut, Vice President, Marketing Communications, Pizza Hut
  • Michael Menis, Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing, InterContinental Hotels Group
  • Sophia Stuart, Executive Director, Mobile, Hearst Magazines Digital Media
  • Virginia Suliman, Vice President, Web Design & Development, Hilton Hotels Corporation
  • Paul Vienick, Senior Vice President, Long-Term Investing and Customer Experience, E*TRADE

The Forrester speakers include

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts — see Forrester.com for more information. If you’ve already signed up, here are some great ways to maximize your experience:

See you in Chicago.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 07:22 PM in Events, Forrester Groundswell awards, Groundswell Awards, Josh's posts, Meet Me | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

September 16, 2009

A review of 147 entries to the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards

It's been two weeks since the deadline for entries for the Forrester Groundswell Awards. You won't know the winners until we announce them at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago on October 27 (and yes, the famed green bowtie will once again make an appearance).

You can still review every single entry. (Is there anyone else who does this?) We encourage you to continue voting on the awards and leaving comments. (For those who found the bugs in our voting system, we apologize -- votes entered now will register the correct number of stars regardless of the browser you use.)

The winners will hear from us in the first week of October, including an invite to the Forrester Consumer Forum for those in the five consumer categories plus Managing and Social Impact. But while you're waiting, here are a few fun facts to keep you entertained.

  • While we gave people an extra month to prepare their entries this year, 100 of the 147 entries came in within the last 24 hours of the deadline.
  • Talking was the most popular consumer objective, with 34% of all the consumer entries. Talking and Supporting each received 25% of all the business-to-business entries. Embracing is hard -- only 18 of the 147 entries were in the embracing categories.
  • 29% of all the entries were from technology companies. This included 31 business-to-business entries and 10 consumer technology entries. Somebody at SAP really wants to win -- SAP created eight separate entries.
  • Other industries submitting many entries included non-profits and associations (12% of entries), web sites and tools (10%), business services (7%) and financial services (7%). Despite the recession we got three entries from auto companies.
  • Only half of the Social Impact entries were from non-profits. The rest were from companies using social technologies for good.
  • We really just did not know how to categorize this one.

Overall, the quality of entries is similar to last year, with many good application and a few that are outstanding . . . but you'll hear more about that in October. Watch this space

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 05:25 PM in Forrester Groundswell awards | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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July 25, 2009

Forrester Groundswell Awards -- I love the diversity

by Josh Bernoff

The third annual Forrester Groundswell Awards have been open for nominations for a month and a half. As in past years, the nominations will come flooding in at the end (the deadline is September 2, folks, don't be late), but I wanted to draw your attention to what we've gotten so far from an extremely diverse crowd of submitters.

Bacon brownies What do bacon, the United States Government, and a town in Australia devastated by brushfires have in common? They're all represented in this year's crop of nominations. If you're interested in seeing all the nominees so far, go to the Awards tab and you can review or vote on them. Don't forget to click on the submitter's name in each full entry, since that takes you to a spot on the Web where you can see anything they want to show off.

On the business to consumer side, we've received two entries for listening and one for talking. Oscar Mayer and Networked Insights are showing off "Bacon Lovers Talk" (BLT), a community that's delicious for everyone except bacon-hater Seth Godin, had reach #9 in search results for "best bacon," and attracted 197 daily visitors. Communispace, which won in the listening category the last two years, is back with a strong entry from Interncontinental Hotel Group. I like the way IHG uses not just insights but quotes and photos from its Communispace Community in its marketing -- the entry attributes a 24% lift in revenue to this.

Twitterusagov In the talking category it's your tax dollars at work -- the General Services Adminstration of the US government shows off its site usa.gov, organized not by department but by task -- the right idea when your users are citizens. USA.gov has 9,500 Twitter followers and the GSA's Office of Citizen Services is helping government agencies work with MySpace, SlideShare, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook.

We have four entries so far in business-to-business categories, three for supporting and one for embracing. Publisher Meredith Corporation has attracted 1,700 members to its Farmers for the Future community on ning. A council for credit union managers is connecting people with peers across the country. And to help environment professionals whose careers have been affected by the recession in commercial real estate, Environmental Data Resources created a support community that is up to 3,900 members. We've also got an embracing app from Definiens for geospatial analysts.

Flowerdalevimeo The Social Impact category always surfaces some of the most fascinating and unusual applications. In a heart-rending story, you can read about the brushfire-devastated community of Flowerdale in Victoria, Australia, reached out with social apps from video to Facebook and raised over a million dollars. And you can see how last year's entry "The Mistake Bank" has evolved in this year's awards, it's now a ning community with 500 contributors sharing their biggest mistakes.

It's interesting to see how the early entries have bunched up. If you're interested in entering, not only is there still time to get us an entry, but whole categories like B2C supporting and energizing and B2B talking are still wide open. And while you can wait until the end, you'll get a lot more traffic and votes if you submit early -- we received over 150 entries last year. Remember that the winners will be those who are not only creative but can show proof of impressive business results in their entries. This year's B2C and social impact winners will get a free ticket to the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago where they can show off their skills at our awards cocktail party. So get those entries in!

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 04:32 PM in Forrester Groundswell awards | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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May 29, 2009

Nominations are now open for the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards

For the third year in a row, we will be recognizing the most effective social technology applications at the Forrester Groundswell Awards.

I have to say, these awards are one of my favorite things. First of all, the people submitting entries really care about the work they did and spreading the word about it. Second, the applications we've gotten the last two years were fantastic -- creative, effective, and clever -- and they make it easier for me to tell the story of the power of social applications. And finally, I think it's great that anyone can win -- whether you're Accenture or Starbucks or a tiny credit union in Alberta, Canada.

So, starting now you're free to submit an entry for the Forrester Groundswell Awards. The submission form is here. If you're going to enter, we strongly recommend that you read the Forrester Groundswell Awards Rules before submitting your entry. You can submit each entry only once, and once submitted, you cannot modify it.

We've added a new twist this year, too. We've divided the categories for the prototypical groundswell objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) into business-to-consumer and business-to-business. And we've added a new business-to-business category, "spreading," to recognize social applications in which you sell ideas or products to employees of a company, then get them to sell others at that company. We've still got the category for pro-social applications ("social impact") and applications within an enterprise ("managing"). That's 13 categories, folks, so while I expect even more entries than the 150 we received last year, there are more ways to win.

A few key facts to remember.

  • Be smart. Read the rules first.
  • The entry deadline is September 2, 2009. But the earlier you submit, the more time people will have to review and vote on your work. (If three months is not enough time to prepare, you'll have to wait for next year.)
  • On your own site or elsewhere on the Web, create a “My Forrester Groundswell awards submission” page or document describing your application. Also include a single screenshot that represents the application.You'll need to put these into the application.
  • Only submit your own work. Agencies and vendors can submit work they do for clients, provided they have obtained permission from the client. (This is your responsibility, please don't embarrass yourself in front of the client by posting without getting permission.)
  •  Anything in these submissions becomes on the record. Submissions go live immediately and are open for ratings and reviews.

If you are a winner in the business-to-consumer, social impact, or managing categories, we'll present the award to you in a new, expanded awards ceremony at the Forrester Consumer Forum 2009 in Chicago on October 27 and 28. We'll be having a nice party for all the attendees of that event, so they can meet and learn from the winners. We'll be awarding the B2B awards separately.

Go ahead. Impress us. Enter your application. We're looking forward to it.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 12:02 PM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Groundswell | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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October 30, 2008

Forrester Groundswell Awards: How we picked the winners

by Josh Bernoff

Since the competition was so intense this year for the Forrester Groundswell Award winners, I wanted to create as much transparency as I could around the judging process. This is in response to questions from some of the entrants, who clearly put an enormous amount of effort into their submissions.

Q. What exactly was the judging process?

Three people at Forrester were involved in the judging: Zach Hofer-Shall (a researcher on our interactive marketing team), Jeremiah Owyang, and me. We took a first pass to separate the most promising applications in each category, then we spent more time on those promising applications, looking for those which we thought were good enough to win. For an application to win, Jeremiah and I had to agree it was the best in the category. We were looking for both innovation and proof of business (or non-profit) results -- the winners in each category were excellent on both counts.

Q. It looks like some of the entries ended up in a different category from where they were submitted.

In working with clients, we have found that deciding on objectives is often difficult. Successful applications often start off meeting one objective, and end up delivering on others.

In this process, we looked at each application and asked, in what category would this application be most likely to win? Usually, but not always this was the category in which it was entered. But we made some changes as well. In the case of the Brooklyn Museum, there were three entries in different categories, but taken together we thought they demonstrated excellence in the Social Impact category, which is the category in which they won. "In the Motherhood" by LiveWorld was submitted for Supporting, but we thought it was an excellent Embracing application, since the actors in it acted out scripts suggested by the groundswell, and that's why it was a finalist in the Embracing category.

Just like last year, there was one company that stood out for its transformation. We felt this year's entries from Intuit were best recognized together, rather than as separate applications, which is why we gave Intuit the Company Transformation award. I don't know if we could make this a regular category, it just seemed to emerge from the other entries.

Q. How much weight did you give the evaluations from the community?

We were pleased at how many entrants sent their followers to our site, and the reviews that were generated. We all have to acknowledge, though, that the people coming to the site through that kind of promotion were much more likely to say very positive things. Partly because of the potential for this sort of gaming, we weren't going to pick the winners based on a popular vote.

However, many of the comments added insights that we might not have noticed otherwise. So the main value of the reviews, from my perspective as a judge, is that they helped to enlighten me. Taken together with all the other information in the entries and the sites they linked to, this gave us a clearer picture of what was outstanding (or in some cases, flawed) about the entries.

Q. Does this process favor large companies?

Absolutely not. It favors excellence. A small company can deliver outsized results with a small budget, as the Common Wealth Credit Union of Alberta did, and as the Brooklyn Museum did. National Instruments was a medium sized company with an incredible Supporting application. On the other hand, big companies and their agencies or vendors, like Hershey's with House Party, Mattel with Communispace, Starbucks with Salesforce Ideas, and Accenture deserve to be recognized for excellent work, too. It's not about how much you spent; it's about how effective and creative you were.

Q. What exactly does it mean to be a "finalist"?

Finalists are basically applications that could have won, except that somebody else was even better in the category. The 44 finalists this year were a lot, but they reflect the number of excellent entries. However, there's a clear distinction; the winners deserve to be recognized as the best of an excellent group.

Q. Will you do this again? What will you change?

We will definitely do the awards again in 2009. One thing we changed from last year -- making all the entires publicly available -- was a big plus, I expect that to continue. I expect us to make changes based on what worked well and what didn't this year; for example, I hope to start the process a little sooner to give people a longer time to prepare entries and vote on them. I welcome your suggestions.







Posted by Josh Bernoff at 12:05 PM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Josh's posts | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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Some fun from Alberta

by Josh Bernoff

One of the best parts of judging and awarding the Forrester Groundswell Awards is that we pick companies based on the power and success of their applications, not their size. This means that sometimes the winners are big companies like Starbucks and Mattel, and sometimes they are small companies with big ideas and excellent execution.

This was most visible this year in the Marketing category, in which a small credit union in Alberta vaulted over some of the biggest brands in the world. The reaction from Tim McAlpine, whose agency Currency Marketing created the campaign, was gratifying to say the least.

Tim's Groundswell Awards entry page on his site is itself is a masterpiece of exposition for what they did and how they did it.

But even more fun is the YouTube video he made about his experience and how hard it is to keep a secret. And Tim, I promise, you don't need to suck up to us to get noticed, all it takes is wit and the skill to create an application as good as the one you did for Common Wealth Credit Union.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 10:46 AM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Josh's posts | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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October 29, 2008

2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards Winners

by Josh Bernoff

We've pored over all 150 entries. These were difficult choices -- the quality of social applications improved markedly in 2008, and many were excellent, with real proof of business value. Today we announce the best of the best -- the winners by category. Here they are, with links to their entries:

Listening

Mattel's The Playground Community by Communispace. A private community of 500 moms, created by Mattel and Communispace. Paid off when Mattel had a series of product recalls of popular toy brands in Fall 2007. They used this group as a sounding board for advice on how to handle this crisis. Result: despite the recalls, Q4 2007 sales were up 6%.

Mattel_communispace_3

Talking

Young & Free Alberta by Common Wealth Credit Union. A credit union in Alberta started a campaign to generate more young customers. They conducted a contest to find a young spokesperson, who then used a blog, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with other young people in Alberta. Result: 2 million impressions, 2,300 new accounts, and $4 million Canadian in new deposits.

Young_free_alberta

Energizing

Hershey's Bliss House Party by House Party. A campaign to introduce a new line of little chocolates. Pitch: sign up for a party, get bags of the chocolates, share the product. Those who participated got to do a party blog or upload photos or videos. Result: They energized 10,000 parties, reached 129,000 people, and say their campaign was seen by 7 million people. Overwhelmingly positive response, most people hadn't seen the product before, but after the parties, most said they really like it.

Hersheys_bliss

Supporting

Nerd Network by National Instruments. Highly active community of 110,000 people who use National Instruments’ LabView software. Community members answer 46% of all support questions. This is no ordinary forum – it also includes areas to generate new product ideas, a champions program for LabView experts, and even an area for mentoring high school students.

Nerd_network

Embracing

MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks. Among many excellent embracing applications, this one stands out. It includes thousands and thousands of participants. They have 75,000 ideas suggested. Some of the suggestions have changed the way the Starbucks company does business – including new products and service ideas already implemented by Starbucks.

Mystarbucksidea

Managing

Borderless Workplace by Accenture. Accenture is a huge company with thousands of consultants. With its new sharing applications, 100,000 of its 180,000 employees use its "People" Facebook-like app, 60,000 every month. The application logged 3,450 questions from these staffers and 4,157 responses in the last quarter. There are 577 pages in its knowledge-sharing wiki. Over 100 clients using the company's extranet pages to keep up on projects and status.

Accenture_borderless

Social Impact

Brooklyn Museum for all three entries:

Among many companies using social technologies for the greater good, we recognized a little museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum. Why? Because of the multiple ways they have used social technologies to put their visitors in charge. They created a Facebook application in which 2,000 people identified and shared the bits of art in the museum that they liked best. They created a community curated exhibit – 3,000 people chose which art pieces to put on display, based on a total of 400,000 votes. And the museum has put the whole collection online, where the community tags it with identifying terms, allowing you to see pieces of art similar to the ones you like, or on specific topics.

Brooklyn_museum

Company Transformation

Intuit for four entries:

Intuit transformed the way it  does business based on social technologies. We recognized this as a category of excellence beyond individual applications.

Intuit puts social deeply into every one of its products. Let’s start with the Quickbooks forum, which gets 3 million page views a year. 90% of visitors get their questions answered. Then add the TurboTax live community, which is built right into the front screen of TurboTax – the product connects you with the community on the home screen. This cut support costs for TurboTax by 40%. TurboTax has assembled a panel of 17,000 people into its “Inner Circle” – internal product teams often run product ideas by this panel and get instant feedback. Finally, I’d like to cite their “Just Start” contest for Entrepreneurs, who could submit videos and compete for startup money for their ventures. They received 2,500 contest entries and through this program distributed 300,000 sample CDs for the QuickBooks product to qualified prospects.

Intuit

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 09:54 AM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Josh's posts | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

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Finalists for the Forrester Groundswell Awards

by Josh Bernoff

The quality of this year’s Groundswell Awards entrants was very high – we were very impressed. Many of these entries deserved to win and would have won last year, but this year the competition was much tougher. To recognize these excellent entries, we’ve listed Finalists in this post. Winners are shown in green.

Listening

  • ABC Studios Community for "Lost” Emmy Nomination by Passenger
  • ACT! Online Community by Sage Software
  • Mattel's “The Playground” Community by Communispace
  • MY M&M'S Mbassador Community by Satmetrix

Talking

  • Acuvue Wink Facebook Application (Australia)
  • American Express OPEN Forum by Digitas and LiveWorld
  • “Colonel Tribune” by Tribune Interactive
  • Cubby Bernstein, “Xanadu” Tony Campaign Manager by Undercurrent
  • iGotShotgun by General Motors
  • Intel Tudou 07 User Generated Advertising (China)
  • Travel Channel's Kidnap Facebook App by Rapp
  • Young & Free Alberta by Common Wealth Credit Union

Energizing

  • ABC Lost Theories by Mzinga
  • “Do You Deliver” by OPI and SheSpeaks
  • EA Skate Reel by Blast Radius
  • Hershey’s Bliss House Party by House Party
  • Oracle “The Customer Collective” by Oracle Passenger
  • Next Gretsch Greats by Jackson Spalding
  • (Re-) Meet Martha Stewart by Reprise Media

Supporting

  • allicircles by imc2
  • Dell Community Forums
  • Fitness Magazine “You Can Do It” Site
  • Hubspot Customer Forums
  • Men’s Health “Belly Off! Club” by Neighborhood America
  • Nerd Network by National Instruments
  • Open Port Community by Intel
  • Recommendations on The Knot by Baynote
  • Reebok Run Easy by Molecular

Embracing

  • In The Motherhood, sponsored by Sprint and Suave, by Mindshare and LiveWorld
  • JC Penney “Ambrielle Team” Community by Passenger
  • Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy by WhittmanHart Interactive
  • MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks
  • MTV.I.P.s Community by Communispace
  • Swarovski Enlightened Watch Design Community by HYVE AG (Austria)

Managing

  • Borderless Workplace by Accenture
  • cubeless by Sabre Holdings
  • Greater IBM by IBM
  • “Limo” Social Network by Universal McCann
  • ORT Argentina Digital School Project (Argentina)

Social Impact

  • Artshare, Click Exhibition, and Posse by Brooklyn Museum
  • AstraZeneca Breast Cancer Celebration Chain by Digitas Health
  • Fanista “Burma: It Can’t Wait” by Digital Influence Group
  • Knowmore.org Corporation-Watch Search Engine
  • su2c.org Cancer Awareness by WhittmanHart Interactive

Company Transformation

  • Intuit

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 09:53 AM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Josh's posts | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

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October 06, 2008

Top 4 reasons to come to Forrester's Consumer Forum, Dallas, October 28 and 29

by Josh Bernoff

  1. Something incredible always happens. Last year I flipped Harley Manning on his back to prove a point about social media.
  2. Top quality content plus a great venue (the Gaylord Texan) means you'll remember this event long after the wine, beer, and food is consumed.
  3. Find out who won the Forrester Groundswell awards. The level of entries this year is amazing, and the winners will be, too.
  4. Have you seen the speaker lineup?

David Armano, Critical Mass
Robin Beers, Wells Fargo & Company
Larry Cost, AT&T
Debra Coughlin, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Citi Brands
Dave Finnegan, Chief Information Bear, Build-A-Bear
Daniel P. Garton, Executive Vice President, Marketing, AMR Corp. and American Airlines
Seth Greenberg, Director, Online Advertising & Internet Media, Intuit
James W. Keyes, Chairman & CEO, Blockbuster
Helmut Kirchner, Cybertec
Meredith Lind, Momentum Market Intelligence
Patricia Seybold, Author, Outside Innovation, Customer Revolution, and Customers.com, Patricia Seybold Group.
Tim Suther, Senior Vice President, Digital Marketing Services, Acxiom
Paco Underhill, Founder and Managing Director, Envirosell
Vivi Zigler, President, NBC Universal Digital Entertainment, NBC Universal

Plus, from Forrester:

Lisa Bradner, Cindy Commander, Michelle de Lussanet, Moira Dorsey, Carlton A. Doty, Dave Frankland, Charles S. Golvin, J.P. Gownder, Paul Jackson, Carrie Johnson, James L. McQuivey, Sucharita Mulpuru, Sarah Rotman Epps, Jackie Rousseau-Anderson, Adele Sage, Suresh Vittal, and me.

If you're attending, you could sign up on our Facebook Event page, or Follow us on Twitter.

See you there.

Groundswell_tie P.S. the Green Bowtie will make another appearance.

 

 

 

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 04:40 PM in Events, Forrester Groundswell awards, Josh's posts, Shameless plug | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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September 12, 2008

140+ enter the Forrester Groundswell Awards – see them all for yourself

by Josh Bernoff

I’m actually vacationing in an undisclosed location right now – all right, it’s Northern Italy – so I’ll keep this short (Internet access here is really slow).

We’ve gotten an incredible response to the Forrester Groundswell Awards. The final tally is 149 151 entries, about twice what we got last year. Half of these came in during the last couple of days of the entry period, which ended September 9.

While the entry period is over, you can still add your own ratings and reviews for the next several weeks, or at least see all the applications even if you don’t want to comment. Click here to see all the entries.

As with last year, the Talking category attracted the most entries, with 34. We were also amazed by the very high participation by entrants in the Social Impact category – clearly non-profit and pro-social organizations and individuals have begun to realize the amazing power of the groundswell.

Here’s how the entries break down:

Talking 23%
Energizing 18%
Supporting 18%
Embracing 13%
Social Impact 11%
Listening 10%
Managing 7%

Our Web team has been working overtime getting all the entries posted, so if yours took a little while to show up, we apologize for the delay. All the entries should be up soon.

We’ve begun to evaluate the flood of entries and we’ll be announcing the winners at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in Dallas, October 28 and 29. We look forward to seeing you there.

Posted by Forrester Admin at 03:51 PM in Forrester Groundswell awards, Groundswell Awards | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

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