Forrester Groundswell Awards: Supporting

Farmers for the Future social network

By Agriculture.com/Successful Farming magazine, Meredith Corporation

The Farmers for the Future is a social network for young and beginning farmers. The goal: Help them grow their farms and be successful through networking with others facing similar issues and challenges. It's a network that provides the ability for members to connect with one another through member pages, forums, blogs, photo-sharing and video. We have had a series of feature articles in our magazine, Successful Farming, as well as web features on our website, www.agriculture.com, for some time. We recognized the young and beginning farmer group as both a key target demographic for existing features and assets, as well as one that would be the most web-savvy of our entire readership and viewership. We chose the Ning social network platform for two reasons: It is simple to use, yet has the range of basic features we were looking for in building a social network like this; and it allows for considerable manual page design manipulation and feature management.

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(7 votes)
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CME Group

By CME Group

CME Group operates three global financial exchanges -- Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade and New York Mercantile Exchange. We are using social media, and in particular the 800,000 followers we have on Twitter, to focus on building customer loyalty, building a "fan" base among people interested in finance/economics, and to build advocacy around issues that matter to us. Twitter also allows us to build a new channel for our brand in order to promote market integrity, financial innovation and customer service. In addition, we are using it to build a groundswell of knowledge and information sharing that CME Group is a trusted source for news and information on the global economy. We do this by employing a number of strategies. For instance, we have a 70/30 rule of content where 70% is indirectly related to our products from other sources (media, blogs, tweets) and 30% is directly from us. We also answer questions and engage in conversations by interviewing followers (#exchtalk) and responding to inquiries from customers, media and the general Twitter population.

http://twitter.com/cmegroup

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CUNA Councils Connect

By CUNA Councils

The CUNA Councils are a membership organization that provides resources, information, networking and professional development to credit union professionals across six key areas of credit union management. Previously, each council's networking and idea sharing centered around six separate list serves, annual conferences, and file libraries. Council leadership asked, "How can we use new technologies that are out there to enhance member networking and idea sharing? How can we make it easier?

Enter CUNA Councils Connect - a private community where members have access to:

- a cross-council, extensive member directory (that they can search by demographics, 125 areas of expertise, 32 categories of vendors, and much more.)
- targeted online discussion groups
- member blogs and more to find solutions and advice.

CUNA Councils Connect leverages social media to both enhance and build on existing resources/tools available to our members to help them find answers, saving them valuable time and money.

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(7 votes)
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commonground - The Global Community for Environmental Professionals

By Environmental Data Resources, Inc. (EDR)

commonground is the award winning, global social network for professionals involved in all aspects of environmental and commercial real estate property due diligence. Members include environmental lawyers, health & safety, lenders, appraisers, insurers, builders, and consultants.

The commercial real estate market is off more than 70% in 2009 vs. 2008. As a result, environmental professionals are turning to EDR's commonground social network for help with difficult questions, jobs searches, education, advice, and business opportunities. For many members, commonground has become an important part of each and every day.

In just over a year, commonground has grown to 3,900 members from more than 1,600 companies, all 50 states, and 67 countries. There are over 600 blog posts and 3,000 discussions ranging from US & International environmental due diligence, green building, and climate change, to business issues, risk management, and even travel tips for those in the field.

In February 2009, commonground was recognized by the Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) for a 2008 EBJ Business Award for its innovation, contributions, and value for all environmental professionals. It is also frequently recognized and referenced in many leading environmental industry publications.

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(23 votes)
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NetApp Commuity

By NetApp

Just a little over a year ago, we launched our external NetApp user community to provide a safe place for customers and partners to engage with their peers and NetApp experts. With over 21,000 community members to date, NetApp community is having a positive impact on how our customers engage with their peers and NetApp experts. Customers leverage NetApp communities 24X7 to get answers to their technical questions, resolve simple support issues, and learn more about NetApp products. Customers and partners are consistently sharing their ideas and leveraging communities when creating or enhancing their own storage architecture.

Customer Quote:

* “I only discovered the communities since moving to my new job… and it is a fantastic tool.”- Anthony Feigl, TD Securities, End User
* “VDI Ask the Expert session was brilliant…a real eye opener…one of the most frequented bookmarks I have”- Chris Kranz, B2Net, Reseller

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(69 votes)
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Aflac's Field Force Buzz - A Private Community Centered around Sales Agents

By Aflac

Aflac is the industry leader in guaranteed-renewable insurance. We strengthen our bond with customers through a geographically diverse community of sales agents. Aflac Worldwide Headquarters provides these agents with a wide array of support, ranging from tools to generate business and retain existing customers to call center lines and everything in between.

As a result of the growing population of active Aflac agents, it became clear that they needed something more - a vehicle to share their knowledge and to support one another.

And that is how the Field Force Buzz was born.

Agents use the Field Force Buzz to communicate with one another through forums that range from discussion on how agents grow their business to classified ads. In addition, Aflac Worldwide Headquarters provides valuable sales information using whimsical video blogs by company executives that are entertaining as well as informative.

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Pitney Bowes: Supporting and Engaging Customers with Online Community

By Pitney Bowes, Inc.

In January 2008, the Global Online Group at Pitney Bowes began to consider how emerging social networking technologies could help us meet one of our major business challenges – supporting users though the annual USPS Postal Rate change. Pitney Bowes provides postage meters to over a million businesses across the U.S. and almost all of them have to be updated whenever the USPS changes rates. Such postal events typically generate several hundred thousand customer support calls over a 3-4 week period. Traditionally, we have handled that peak volume by setting up and staffing temporary call centers.

We decided to meet as much of that demand as possible with an innovative customer community, based on the Lithium Technologies platform. Our two goals were to create a more highly-leveraged support channel and to provide a better user experience for Pitney Bowes customers. We were able to launch our community just three months after initiating this project and had a vital community in place in time for the May 12 rate change event.

The online community, known as the Pitney Bowes User Forum, provides discussion areas where customers engage with one another and with Pitney Bowes employees concerning various mailstream topics, including postal rate changes, equipment, software, and postal regulations. The community also hosts week-long "Ask the Expert" forum events and a "Think Tank" forum where customers can post and vote for ideas regarding Pitney Bowes products and services.

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PGiConnect.com

By Premiere Global Services, Inc.

As a global provider of applied, on-demand communication technologies, Premiere Global Services (PGi) allows organizations, businesses and users to connect and collaborate anywhere, anytime.

PGi launched PGiConnect, a software developer community, in October 2008. The community enables employees, customers and partners to collaborate and build applications in near-real time. With capabilities to tag and search for appropriate content, PGiConnect provides it’s registrants quick answers and access to the company’s full API Suite, development materials and code samples to create business applications using audio conferencing, voice, e-mail, fax and SMS messaging technologies.

PGiConnect is geared toward PGi’s enterprise customers, system integrators, resellers and partners worldwide. Sharing knowledge in a virtual workspace allows PGi to embrace ideation and collaboration using Web 2.0 tools.

As an example of how this community supports customers, partners and developers, when a client recently posted a question about sending voice notifications in foreign markets, answers and code samples were available in a matter of hours. This highlights how rapidly a developer went from thinking about a concept to deploying a test application. Not only is this a great example of the speed with which clients can build and deploy custom applications, but also an insight into how PGi streamlines its support resources in one community where sharing information is the standard. PGi’s core team of API support specialists are answering fewer help calls and now able to focus on providing their knowledge and expertise in the online forum.

Embracing Web 2.0 social media technologies has given PGi an advantage and helped the company more closely align with a key audience – software developers. Connecting people and connecting thoughts in the online community allows developers to build and deploy applications in real time.

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(14 votes)
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Helpstream: Innovative Social CRM Solution Helps Customers Help Themselves

By Helpstream

Helpstream is a Social CRM system that combines advanced social Web technologies with robust customer service workflows. Its comprehensive customer engagement platform helps companies reduce overall customer support costs while increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

Delivered as an on-demand SaaS application, Helpstream is designed to help customers help each other and to allow companies to better leverage their internal customer service resources.

Helpstream’s comprehensive customer service portal features include a robust customer community with Q&A and Discussions, an Idea Exchange for sharing and voting on new ideas, A Knowledge Base that supports virtually any file type, federated search capabilities and the ability to submit and track support requests. Helpstream has tight integrations with existing CRM systems from salesforce.com and Oracle.

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(10 votes)
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Infusionsoft Goes Social to Boost Customer Satisfaction

By Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft, leaders of small business sales and marketing software, has encouraged 'the groundswell' by using social technologies to connect with its vast user and prospective customer community, as well as to make its own organization more efficient. The hub is the Infusionsoft Fusebox, a customer portal powered by Helpstream, and is dedicated to the education and support of its community. Here, customers have access to a wealth of articles and videos on topics important to their best use of Infusionsoft: from things like how to write effective marketing copy to best ways of boosting e-mail deliverability. Any feedback for Infusionsoft can be submitted through the robust 'ideas forum,' which is monitored by the Infusionsoft product development team. Infusionsoft is super active in the social media sphere as well - including Facebook, the Infusionsoft blog, LinkedIn, and Twitter - in order to be an active part of the largest community possible.

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The Moderator Community

By Starfish Community Group S.L.

The Moderator Community is one of the key places for community managers, group moderators and social media experts to go to find advice and relevant information for community creation and management.

We support community professionals by enabling them to easily find the information they need to succeed in their role. The community has a dedicated research team indexing information publicly found on the web as well as creating white papers around the topics of community management, community development and social media basics. The Moderator Community also aims to provide a place for self-help, where community managers may receive support from their peers and exchange experiences through various social networking and conversation tools.

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(9 votes)
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element14

By Premier Farnell

element14 is a new, innovative information portal and eCommunity specifically built for electronic design engineers. It provides product data, design tools and technology information, whilst incorporating web 2.0 functionality to facilitate communication, interaction, collaboration and information sharing between colleagues around the world.

element14 provides countless product data, numerous design tools, technology information with the added benefit of allowing users to contact and share ideas with colleagues. Engineers are encouraged to post their design challenges and invite community members to help come up with a solution. The site also has a roster of technical experts available for engineers to seek out individually and ask questions or advice relating to their work.

element14 is customizable to each individual user, so they can display information that suites their unique needs. There is even a translation module that allows users of different languages to converse in real time. This is one example where element 14 is making a difference in the electronic distribution industry and increasing resources to further educate and allow engineers to develop technology with information that was otherwise not previously available.

Users can also secure quotes, discover industry trends, post blogs, articles and comments in this forum.

Since its launch in June 2009, element14 is already attracting 6,000 electronic design engineering customers each week.

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(2 votes)
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SAP Forums Speed Time to Value

By SAP AG

For the 1.7 million members of the SAP Community Network (SCN), the ability to interact with peers and experts in their subject area drives business value by enabling them quickly solve challenges and to identify opportunities to improve or fine tune their specific SAP project via best practices appropriate for their own SAP installation. Leaving solution landscape and mission critical application support to be handled by SAP's global support organization, the SAP Forums let technologists and business process experts interact with peers in their industry, role and product area on questions or tips that improve their SAP solution experience and speed time to value. Addressing topics ranging from SAP Business Objects to Service-Oriented Architecture and more, SAP community members can post questions in the forums to solve issues and share information across boundaries for their shared success.

With response times under 20 minutes and >6000 posts per day, the SAP Forums are a proven model of success in bringing SAP users around the world quality answers and speed of information exchange that enables them to do their jobs better and faster.

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(1 vote)
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CRM online community in SAP's Community Network (CRM@BPX)

By SAP

The SAP CRM online community (CRM@BPX) is part of SAP's community network with more than 1.7 million members. Customers, partners and CRM experts connect with their peers, share their experiences, best practices and insights, read or post blogs, get or give help in multiple discussion forums, collaborate in building a CRM wiki, and get the latest news and product updates on the CRM homepage. SAP also provides community members with convenient access to whitepapers, articles, demo videos, e-learning content, customer case studies, benchmarking statistics, webcasts and much more. A powerful platform for customer engagement BPX enables customer-to-customer interaction and networking and serves as an innovative channel for news, implementation support, education and customer feedback. Launched in December 2007 CRM@BPX is now a vibrant and fast growing online community through the commitment and dedication of SAP customers, partners, and mentors as well as the engagement of SAP employees.

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