Past Winners

2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards Winners

We received more than 120 entries in 2010. Check out the winners by category, with links to their full entries, on the Empowered blog:

Business to Consumer North America*: Listening

Sweet Success: Godiva Gems and Communispace

By Godiva and Communispace

Godiva Chocolatier, known for over 80 years as the leader in premium chocolate, uses Godiva Chocolate Talk, their private, invitation-only community created with their partner Communispace, to listen to the changing attitudes and behaviors of its customers. They gather feedback about their members' lifestyles on a daily basis, helping Godiva develop compelling new products and programs that enhance the Godiva experience. In addition, the member-to-member conversations in the community provide Godiva with a unique way to learn how their chocolate fits into members' lives.

By listening to their customers' mindset during the tumultuous economic environment of 2009, they learned that they needed to develop a product line that could deliver on affordability, accessibility and year-round relevance -- evolve beyond Formal Gifting. Godiva was able to take these foundational insights and develop a new product line that would mark a ground-breaking moment for Godiva.

Business to Consumer North America*: Energizing

U by Kotex

By Organic, Inc.

Kimberly-Clark (K-C) decided it was time to break through the outdated feminine care category and help stop all the weirdness about periods. It's time we all started to talk openly about periods and stopped the unhealthy attitudes.

K-C spread this message digitally by leveraging an integrated approach across three primary platforms:

Branded website
Primary social platforms
The larger social web

The U by Kotex* campaign is the first consumer packaged goods campaign to use social media to drive education and advocacy in the feminine care industry. Unlike traditional broadcast and print ads, the flexibility and effectiveness of the digital channel are unrivaled in reaching the teen girl and young women demographics.

The team singlehandedly replaced a half-century's worth of marketing miscues, outdated beliefs and campaigns built on euphemism — with new products brought to market through genuine campaigns built on directness and honesty.

Business to Consumer North America*: Supporting

Distributing Social: Widget Delivers Free Tax Help

By Intuit, Inc.

How does a seasonal business with 800 employees scale help to meet the needs of more than 20 million customers? Simple. Create a community that enables customers to help each other. Since its launch in 2007, the TurboTax Live Community has helped more than 10 million unique customers get free tax help.

Business to Consumer North America*: Supporting

IBM developerWorks

By IBM

IBM developerWorks is the premier web-based resource and social network for millions of developers and IT professionals worldwide. Members of our community want to stay ahead of the latest trends in open standards, open source, and IBM technical resources. Eight million developers worldwide use developerWorks, with language support in English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

Available at no charge, developerWorks provides an extensive, easy to search library of resources, and a social media community around those resources, both of which help users maintain their professional edge and improve their productivity. Users can get up to speed quickly on the most critical technologies affecting their profession and easily learn or find the answer to questions by reviewing our extensive library of forums, blogs, wikis, groups, and how- to articles.

Business to Consumer North America*: Supporting

Improved Customer Satisfaction and Cost Reduction Through Community: The HP Consumer Support Forum

By Hewlett Packard

The HP Consumer Support Forum is a global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another and exchange insights, tips and answers to each other's questions. HP built the community to engage customers where, when, and how they prefer to communicate, leveraging the growing popularity and use of social networks as a support channel worldwide.

HP launched the consumer support forum, powered by Lithium Technologies, in seven languages for over 20 countries. More than 4.6 million HP customers have had their issues resolved through the forum to date.

While the Forum helps customers resolve one another's issues quickly and conveniently, it also helps bring HP employees closer to the customer. HP actively monitors the Forum to identify common support issues and to gain customer feedback and insights. This customer input is fed back into the organization and used to improve future products and support.

Business to Consumer North America*: Embracing

IHG and Chase Enlist their Best Customers to Create a New Credit Card

By Chase Card Services, IHG, and Communispace

In 2009, IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) and Chase Card Services embarked on a mission to create a new credit card for members of Priority Club Rewards, IHG's customer loyalty program. The goal was to make this credit card product the first one out of the wallet for these customers, both for travel and everyday purchases. They knew they needed their customers' involvement all along the way to get it right. By hearing directly from them, in their own words, IHG and Chase believed they could develop the right features and benefits to break through the clutter of a crowded marketplace.

IHG and Chase turned to Communispace to create a private online community of Priority Club members who also owned the current Priority Club Rewards Visa card product from Chase. Together with these members, they embarked on a 12-month process of exploration, ideation, development and testing of product features and marketing strategy optimization to create an ideal credit card product for frequent travelers, designed by frequent travelers.

Business to Consumer North America*: Mobile Application

USAA enhances its top-rated iPhone app with tools to simplify the car buying experience

By USAA

Auto Circle puts car buyers in the driver's seat by making the vehicle purchase process simple and transparent. The program provides new tools that give USAA members access to find, finance and insure a new or used car.

The integrated Auto Circle experience is available at autocircle.com and through USAA's top-rated iPhone application. The app allows USAA members to:

Find the car of their dreams all on their phone.
Research makes, models and features.

Search for automaker cash-back incentives.
Get a great deal on a new car.
Members get a guaranteed lowest price through one of the more than 3,000 certified USAA dealerships, resulting in an average savings of $4,508 off MSRP.

Members can secure an auto loan from USAA with member-only rates for new cars. USAA then transfers the money to the dealer electronically.
Insure the vehicle without calling USAA.

USAA auto policy holders can check insurance costs before they buy and easily update insurance coverage from the dealer's lot.

Business to Consumer International*: Listening

Listening for Orange -- identifying insights, super contributors, and sentiment

By Synthesio

Orange is a leading telecommunications company in Europe that has partnered with Synthesio, an international web monitoring and research company, to actively listen to and engage consumers online. Synthesio uses its automated tool to identify top influential forums for Orange conversations and eliminate a large part of the noise that comes from monitoring a company with the name of a fruit. They then analyze forum comments for sentiment and topics and pass this information to Orange's team of specially trained "web consultants".

These consultants are customer service specialists that have been specially trained for social media participation. They identify "super contributors" for each forum and encourage their participation and help by only intervening when necessary.

Business to Consumer International*: Talking

Audi A1 -- The next big social thing

By Audi AG

How do we spread the love for the new Audi A1 and build up a community of fans beyond common platforms?

People like to talk about cars. As soon as the first sketch of a new concept car finds its way into public, conversations begin, in bars, at work, online. Instead of trying to tell the target what to think, we decided to listen. So we created a tool to round up whatever was said about the new A1 and to encourage others to take part in these conversations and join the fan community.

In addition to integrating isolated contributions from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and various blogs within one large community hub, we offered sharing elements like configuration and styling tools, that enabled users to create and show their unique, personal versions of the new A1.

Business to Consumer International*: Energizing

Microsoft Windows 7 Launch Party

By House Party

In 2009, Microsoft engaged the in-home marketing company House Party to help launch the Windows 7 operating system with consumers around the globe. In all, House Party executed over 40,000 Launch Parties in 12 countries and seven languages, delivering the most potent results yet from a House Party event. Deploying the sophisticated House Party system of consumer engagement and activation, each host was selected from a much larger pool of applicants clamoring to be selected for the opportunity to host one of the parties. Those chosen received a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and became among the very first to experience Windows 7. Hosts invited a group of 10+ friends into their home to experience Windows 7 via a carefully sculpted in-home party, and used House Party's proprietary online tools and resources to plan their parties, document their activities and share their experience online and via social media, exponentially increasing the reach of their in-home parties. All e-mail and online activity is highlighted within our entry link as well as party and party pack photos.

Since 2005 House Party has been engaging consumers on behalf of its Fortune 500 clients, consisting of some of the world's largest and most prestigious consumer brands. Each House Party program is a carefully choreographed sequence of events that combines a precisely deployed set of logistics, a proprietary suite of online consumer-facing tools, a back-end program management infrastructure, a team of uniquely experienced in-home marketing experts and a sophisticated measurement and reporting methodology that documents the impressive results that Fortune 500 marketers require. To document the results of this global campaign in the most rigorous terms possible, House Party added a new feature to its industry-leading measurement methodology: a third-party research firm was engaged to augment House Party's measurements and field a carefully selected control panel so that results could be empirically compared to a control group.

Each House Party program consists of thousands of in-home parties hosted by carefully selected consumers. At each party, the host's friends and family are engaged to sample, experience and learn about the sponsor brands in a trusted, clutter-free, authentic environment. The parties and their online extensions reliably drive deep engagement, broad reach and strong lifts in awareness, favorability, advocacy and purchase-intent, among both partygoers and their "conversation partners." Additionally the programs drive purchase, traffic to retail, opt-ins, extensive product trials and peer-to-peer endorsement at unparalleled levels and with very strong price efficiency and ROI, especially when executed in conjunction with a broader media and marketing campaign.

Business to Consumer International*: Embracing

Vincent Boon

By giffgaff

"giffgaff" is an old Scottish term that refers to the process of mutual giving -- a fitting name for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable users are not only the front line of customer support but also a driving force in the running of the company itself. In fact, for this UK-based mobile phone operator -- who's tag line is "The mobile network run by You" -- there are no huge call centers with agents, instead the expert "giffgaffers" rely on a growing user-generated pool of knowledge in the Lithium-powered community to get help fast and shape the company's service offerings. As a thank you, community members are rewarded with kudos, elevated reputation and Payback Points which can be applied against their monthly mobile services, taken as cash or donated to charity.

Business to Consumer International*: Social Impact

The U.S. Department of Defense's APAN Community

By Telligent

The Department of Defense's APAN was identified as the primary information sharing platform during Haiti earthquake relief efforts. APAN swiftly launched an emergency response community, powered by Telligent, to leverage unstructured information sharing. The use of the APAN community during the Haiti relief operations signaled a fundamental shift in US military communications from "top-down" structured data architecture to a more horizontal collaborative, unstructured data community technology. Throughout the Haiti response efforts, the importance of unstructured data quickly became evident. The success of APAN has forever changed how emergency response personnel share information.

Business to Consumer International*: Social Impact

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's Knowledge Bank

By The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative

90 percent of the world's wheat has little or no protection against Ug99 wheat rust. This plant disease could quickly spread and annihilate a crop that provides a third of the world's calories.

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) was formed to systematically reduce the world's vulnerability to wheat rust diseases through a first-ever international agricultural collaboration in wheat research.

Only a handful of organizations (five world wide) have expertise on wheat rust. It became necessary to quickly bring together a global community of scientists, biologists, universities and agricultural organizations in over fifty countries in order to quickly understand and counter this threat.

The BGRI community portal links the public, research community, BGRI staff and sponsors. Its content ranges from fresh field data to scientific papers, workshops proceedings and event pages to allow the BCRI community to help organize and advocate a global response to a global threat.

Business to Business: Listening

Adobe uses eCairn to discover key influencers outside the Flash community

By eCairn Inc.

eCairn's unique technology maps virtual social communities (groups of passionate people experts on a topic) and ranks key influencers within a specific community.

eCairn Conversation(TM) was designed as a tool for enabling influencer and community marketing. It relies on social network analysis, a technique to understand the interconnectedness of a group of people. The community explorer allows users to track rankings and map their communities in terms of the relationships between blogs.

The user-friendly interface of eCairn Conversation(TM) makes monitoring virtual social communities highly effective and accurate. By manually selecting sources, eCairn Conversation(TM) cuts down social media noise to focus on conversations that matter. Keywords then enable marketers to dive into the right conversations.

While the tool has been mainly used for monitoring and tracking, the engagement aspect sets eCairn Conversation(TM) apart from other social media monitoring platforms.

Business to Business: Talking

UPS: POPURLS Brown Edition Delivered by UPS

By Federated Media

To position UPS as a business solutions organization and not just a partner for shipping packages, the brand collaborated with Federated Media to reach business decision makers, help them seize post-recession opportunities, and be more efficient in growing their organizations.

Leveraging the popularity and functionality of POPURLS (http://popurls.com/) the business news dashboard POPURLS Brown Edition (http://brown.popurls.com/), was created to curate the most timely, relevant and popular stories across the categories of utmost importance to UPS' target audience for this campaign. Working with FM publishing partners Mashable, VentureBeat, TechDirt and Small Business Trends, original educational video content was created to mirror the UPS "Whiteboard" strategy. The two-minute "Whiteboard" videos by the editors of these publications focused in on themes like taking risks, successfully utilizing social networking, avoiding over-communication, and understanding the economics of abundance. The videos were promoted and distributed via co-branded ad units in addition to being housed on brown.popurls.com and the corresponding YouTube Channel.

Business to Business: Energizing

Spiceworks Users Spread the Word and Create SpiceRex -- Who Says Business Users Can't Be Social?

By Spiceworks, Inc.

Spiceworks Users Spread the Word and Create SpiceRex -- Who Says Business Users Can't Be Social?

The Spiceworks Network is a community of over 1 million IT pros from SMBs in over 190 countries that use the free Spiceworks IT management application and online community to manage and collaborate on everything IT. For many, working as the one-man IT shop is a thankless job that is often times only recognized by co-workers when the email server goes down.

In the Spiceworks community, these folks find answers to problems, as well as camaraderie with other like-minded professionals. The members help each other do their jobs, share best practices, rate products and solve technology problems, while providing a valued outlet for collaboration. So much so that community members asserted their own identity by naming themselves "SpiceHeads." Through word-of-mouth efforts referred to as "spreading Spiceworks," SpiceHeads have helped attract 1-in-5 IT pros to the community. SpiceHeads also recently created their own mascot -- SpiceRex, a fierce yet friendly orange T-Rex -- to help represent and promote their fast-growing network that is adding over 1,500 new IT pros everyday.

Business to Business: Embracing

Embracing Our Customers for Software Development

By National Instruments

At National Instruments (NI), we understand the importance of embracing our lead users and other customers when developing new product features for our flagship software platform, LabVIEW. While social innovation has been a hot topic among technology companies recently, we truly embrace this notion of co-innovation and have built user feedback into the development process. LabVIEW Idea Exchange is a product feedback forum where users can submit and vote on features concerning topics like user interface enhancements, performance improvements, computation capabilities, and hardware integration. Another way the community shapes R&D efforts is through NI Labs, a virtual research center that showcases new technologies that aren't quite ready for release. Many NI R&D engineers also blog regularly about LabVIEW best practices and new software features. Finally, we use "secret groups" on our NI Developer Community to engage with lead users before a product launch.

Management: Collaboration System

CEMEX Shift

By CEMEX

CEMEX introduced an internal collaboration platform called Shift, designed to innovate and help make the company more efficient and agile by leveraging employees or groups of employees with similar objectives to share opinions, thoughts, information, experiences, knowledge and best practices, while promoting transparency.

Shift was deployed throughout the company with a three-part mission:

Encourage collaboration among all CEMEX business units and functions.
Build on the knowledge and experience of all of their people.
Develop initiatives to better serve customers, improve productivity and be better prepared for future challenges.

Shift offers a set of software components and software services that enable individuals to communicate and work together to achieve common business goals.

The core elements of Shift as a collaboration platform are: messaging (calendaring and scheduling, and contacts), team collaboration (file synchronization, discussion forums, ideas and notes in form of a wiki, task management, full-text search, brainstorming sessions), real-time collaboration and communication (e.g., presence, instant messaging, Web conferencing, application/desktop sharing, voice, audio and video conferencing), Social Computing tools (e.g., profile status posts to see what employees are working on, networking, blogs, wikis, tags, RSS, shared bookmarks and videos).

Management: Innovation System

Intuit Brainstorm: Empowering Employees to Bring Great Ideas to Life

By Intuit Inc.

Brainstorm is a web-based collaboration platform focused on workflows specific to innovation. It enables innovators to grow their ideas, build a team, and get the help needed to move the idea forward within an organization. It also gives management the tools they need to focus on the most relevant ideas for the company and then help advance those ideas.

About Forrester

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 27 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.