This post is to announce and describe the 2011 Groundswell Awards, specifically the internal "management" category: innovation, collaboration (including social), and mobile. As my Empowered coauthor, Josh Bernoff, writes:

"We had this idea in 2007 that we could surface the best, most interesting, most effective social applications with an awards program. At the time, I never realized just what a fascinating variety of programs we'd encounter. So we kept doing it."

"The purpose of this post is two-fold — to officially announce and open up the site for entries to the 2011 awards, and to celebrate some of the most amazing entries of the last five years."

Read Josh's recap of the award's five-year history here.

Starting last year, we expanded the field to include three internal “management” scenarios in line with our book Empowered. The awards this year are for:

  • Employee Mobile Application:Help employees solve customer and business problems using smartphones and tablets.
  • Employee Collaboration/Social Application:Help employees connect and work together.
  • Innovation System:Surface and develop new ideas.

We will present these management awards on September 22nd or 23rd at our Content & Collaboration Forum in Boston.

Entries for the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards are open here. If you want to win, start by reading the rules here. The most important thing to remember is that your entry is public — the text of your entry is available for everyone to see and vote on — and that the judges here at Forrester Research are far more impressed by results than sizzle. So be sure you include the facts and numbers that prove your application accomplished a business goal. Remember that you can include a link to any additional information you want, anywhere on the Web.

The entry deadline is August 3.Fair warning: don't bother appealing for an extension. Get your entry ready and in before then. And if you're a vendor or agency, avoid one embarrassment: be sure your client is ok with your submitting the work you did for them before you turn it in. Only your client can be given the award.

Besides the management awards, there are three other divisions — for Business-To-Consumer applications North America, for B2C applications globally, and Business-To-Business applications. Within the divisions are categories classified by business objectives. You can see all the categories on the left nav of the awards entry page. Choose your category by your objective, but be aware we sometimes reclassify entries to put them into the category where they are most likely to win.

We'll be announcing the winners of the B2C NA division at our Consumer Forum in Chicago, and the winners of the B2C International Division at the Marketing & Strategy Forum EMEA in London.

We can't wait to see what you'll be sending in for the 2011 awards.

(Thanks to my colleague Phil Karcher for penning this post.)