It’s that time of year again! That is, it’s time to look back at the very best social programs your company has run in the past twelve months, and to prepare your entry to the Forrester Groundswell Awards. This year’s entries are due on September 5, 2012 – and you can enter using our online form. We’ll be presenting the awards at Forrester Forums in October.

We’ve been lucky enough to recognize some fantastic social applications since we started these awards back in 2007 – and we’d like for you to have a great chance of winning, too. To improve your odds, we recommend you focus on two key points:

1.       Enter in the right category.This year we’ve got 17 categories spread across three divisions: Business to Consumer, Business to Business, and Business to Employee. (If you’ve entered in previous years, you’ll notice that our two B2C divisions – North America and International – have been combined into a single global division; and that our Management division has been renamed Business to Employee.) Choose the division that best describes your program’s audience (B2C, B2B or B2E), and then choose the award category that best describes the objectives of your program (for instance, Listening, Talking or Supporting). If you’re not sure which category fits best, you can review the descriptions of each category on our FAQ page.

Twitter content visibility ages quickly — yesterday's news is todays chip shop wrapping paper. However, not all Twitter content of value ages badly. Yes, Google, Bing, and the like use Twitter for social signals but current content is mostly favored over older tweets. Outside of time-bound announcements there is wealth of content from brands that tips over the Twitter waterfall into oblivion — top tips, cool videos, white papers, quotes, free music tracks, and other media goodness that has a much longer shelf life than the perpetually scrolling Twitter feed can keep up with.

There are many services that offer an attractive magazine-style landing page that aggregates all activity on your tweet stream, such as paper.li, but the problem from the brand perspective is that it is all content on your tweet stream — not just your own posts. That approach is fine for broad curation of ideas and topics but not for promoting a brand or individual. Other services like news.me provide magazine-style presentation of your Twitter content, but the problem from the marketer's point of view is that the content is locked up inside a smartphone app that doesn't garner search engine attention — it's a private reader not a public profile.

Last week, a few Forresterites and special guests took a break from the end of quarter crunch to participate in a panel event in our beautiful San Francisco office. The theme of our panel was "The Top 5 Social Media Trends You Should Care About." Our audience included tech marketers (mostly from Silicon Valley). We had a great mix of companies in the audience, which included both large enterprises and small startups. I moderated a great panel of local Bay Area thought leaders, including:

Microsoft’s announcement that it is launching its own first-party hardware for a family of Windows tablets is welcome news: If you want a job done right, do it yourself. While Asus, Lenovo, Nokia, Samsung, and Toshiba are expected to launch their own Windows RT products this year, other major OEMs are notably absent from the list, either because they’re focused on x86 devices first or because they were locked out of the launch like HTC. Microsoft's Surface tablets will run on both chipsets.

Microsoft has so many assets to bring to its own hardware: Smartglass, a “Kinect camera,” Skype, Barnes & Noble Nook content, Microsoft Office (although that won’t be exclusive to Windows), just to name a few. While skeptics rightly criticize past Microsoft hardware failures like the Zune player, Xbox is a more recent example of resounding success. With the next generation of the Xbox “720” due out soon, Microsoft will have ample opportunity to bundle and promote the two products together and sell its tablets through the same consumer retail channels — although to start at least, the Surfaces will only be available at Microsoft Stores and online, which certainly limits adoption potential.

This product line marks a crucial pivot in Microsoft’s product strategy. It blends the Xbox first-party hardware model with the Windows ecosystem model. It puts the focus on the consumer rather than the enterprise. And it lets Microsoft compete with vertically integrated Apple on more even ground.