National Instruments Wins Forrester Groundswell Award
Today, I was lucky enough to sit Front Row Joe (no, not that Joe) when Forrester Research announced that National Instruments won an award for our excellent online support community. The ceremony, which took place at Forrester’s Consumer forum in Dallas, recognized eight outstanding social applications from companies like Accenture, Intuit, and Starbucks. It was a huge honor to be named along side these outstanding businesses.
For those of you new to my blog, Forrester developed this awards program to support and recognize the principles outlined in the Forrester book Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008). Winners were chosen across seven categories: Embracing, Energizing, Listening, Managing, Social Impact, Supporting, and Talking. These are the main goals Forrester recommends companies consider as reasons to use social technologies to interact with customers.
As a community manager, I loved the fact that this year’s awards process included the ability for people to rate and comment on all 151 entries online on the Groundswell Web site and that Forrester took the community’s evaluations into account when selecting winners but chose winning entries based on proof of business value, not which applications ended up the most popular.
To learn more about how NI supports the Groundswell, read these blog posts or the formal National Instruments news release:
Also, check out the GREAT work done by companies in all the categories:
— Embracing: MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks
— Energizing: Hershey’s Bliss House Party by House Party
— Listening: Mattel’s “The Playground” Community by Communispace
— Managing: Borderless Workplace by Accenture
— Social Impact: Artshare, Click Exposition, and Posse by Brooklyn Museum
— Supporting: Nerd Network by National Instruments
— Talking: Young & Free Alberta by Common Wealth Credit Union
In addition, a special award was designated to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions of one particular organization. Intuit, Inc. was recognized for excellence in Company Transformation.
Here is a video of the announcement and I want to congratulate everyone at National Instruments who works on Community and Social Media as well as thank Emilie Kopp and Laura Feeney for their work on the entry and the passion they have for making an awesome NI community. Most of all, I want to give a big thank you to our awesome LabVIEW Community members and Champions who constantly remind me of the importance of team work in engineering.
The formal awards ceremony is in about an hour so I hope to have some cool pictures to post soon.
Tune In and Geek Out 