by Josh Bernoff
We've received a lot of response on the awards post from last week. Based on that I thought I would clarify a few things. Here it is in Q&A format:
Q. Didn't you set an awfully short deadline?
A. Yeah, good point. To be more fair in letting people get entries ready in time, we're extending the deadline to September 1. Send your entries to [email protected].
Q. What's the most important criterion in judging the entries?
A. Accomplishing a measurable business goal, with proof that the application worked to reach that goal.
Q. Is this open to companies outside the US? How about B2B companies?
A. This competition is open to anyone anywhere in the world who accomplishing business goals with social technologies. (Sorry, but we have to insist that the descriptions you provide to us are in English, even if the original site was in Korean or Portuguese.) We're interested in applications from consumer companies and B2B companies. Non-profits, too. And this includes companies accomplishing internal goals with employees -- those would get considered in the MANAGING category.
Q. What are those categories and what do they mean?
A. Since you might not have seen our original post on goals of social technologies, we'll repeat it here.
LISTENING. Finding out what your customers are really saying. Best tools are brand monitoring, private communities like Communispace, ratings/reviews.
- SPEAKING. Connecting with your customers in new ways, extending PR and marketing. Best tools are blogs, podcasts, participation in MySpace/YouTube and other user-generated media.
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ENERGIZING. Getting your best customers to evangelize your products. Best tools are public communities and ratings/reviews.
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SUPPORTING. Helping customers solve their own and each other's problems. Best tools are blogs, forums, wikis.
- EMBRACING. Working with your customers to make products better. Best tools are communities, user-generated media.
We also added a sixth goal:
6. MANAGING. Using social technologies with your organization to make employees and managers more effective
Q. Another award? You've got to be kidding.
A. The world is full of awards for prettiest blog or most popular YouTube video. We want to recognize business value. We haven't heard of anybody doing that. The people doing that deserve to get recognized at our Forum events in Chicago in October and Barcelona in November.
Tags: Groundswell awards, Forrester Research, Groundswell
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