Past Winners

Forrester Groundswell Awards: Business to Consumer

NASCAR "Fan Council" - The Engine that Drives Insight into Avid Fans, powered by Vision Critical

By NASCAR and Vision Critical (Listening)

With TV ratings and attendance slipping after a decade of growth, NASCAR refocused attention on the avid fan and worked with Vision Critical to develop a private online community to engage with core fans. Known as the NASCAR "Fan Council", this pre-qualified online community of 12,000 fans is a foundational element in NASCAR's competition, business and marketing decisions. On average, NASCAR engages members at a minimum twice a month on input specific to all industry stakeholders.

There is no incentive to participate as these passionate fans feel honored to be a part of this exclusive club. It's this enthusiasm that helped fuel a recent major rule change within the sport. After fan sentiment within the community ran high for a new restart format where drivers raced side by side as opposed to single file, NASCAR picked up the comments and pushed the feedback to senior management, who initiated a new double-file restart rule - to overwhelming positive reviews. It's a great example on how vital NASCAR views the "Fan Council" as a channel for fans to voice their ideas and opinions. And something NASCAR President Mike Helton supported when referencing on national television, cementing the value of the "Fan Council" as a vital listening agent.

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Rewriting Branding Rules: Aflac Duck Tweets the Truth

By Aflac (Talking)

Millions of Americans are aware of the Aflac Duck. Unfortunately, those same Americans are far less aware of Aflac's specific products, value propositions, sponsorships or philanthropic efforts. We saw a unique opportunity to extend the Duck's influence beyond the traditional :15/:30 TV format. By giving the Duck a voice on Twitter, we were able to capitalize on the momentum that Aflac has built up over the past ten years, and launch him into a sphere where he has the opportunity to engage users legitimately as Aflac's number one brand acolyte

We combined the natural element of humor of an intelligent spokesduck who observes the advantages and disadvantages of being a duck in a person's world with messages of brand awareness. And, Twitter being what it is, followers have delighted in the ability to engage in a real time conversation with their favorite duck whenever they want.

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(8 votes)
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Energizing Norton Advocates

By Zuberance (Energizing)

Symantec, the security software company, has energized Advocates of the Norton consumer brand to spread positive Word of Mouth and increase sales. This is one of the largest and most successful examples to date of how a company can turn its highly-satisfied customers into Word of Mouth machines.

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(9 votes)
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Redfin Forums

By Redfin (Supporting)

Redfin’s a customer-focused tech savvy real estate brokerage.

Redfin’s forums connect customers with each other so they can ask questions and get advice as they tackle one of the largest and most considered purchases of their lives.

There are other real estate message boards out there, but Redfin’s forums are the only broker-hosted message board. This means they draw a smart, data-driven, DIY crowd with fewer gawkers and more folks embroiled in deals who want to know what to offer or how to negotiate. They also bring much-needed transparency to an industry notorious for hoarding information from its customers. In keeping with Redfin’s no-pressure sales approach, they are ad-free and encourage free opinions and debate. People are free to criticize Redfin, its business and to propose other alternatives.

With over 51,000 posts the Lithium-powered forums are growing; visits have increased 417% year over year.

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(76 votes)
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Justin.tv adds a couple thousand new members to their product team... their users

By Justin.tv and UserVoice (Embracing)

Justin.tv is the largest online community for people to broadcast, watch and interact around live video. With more than 41 million unique visitors per month and 428,000 channels broadcasting live video, Justin.tv is the leading live video site on the Web, enabling users to create real-time connections with others around the world.

With the traffic numbers the site gets daily, the team needed a large scale yet simple to manage solution to reach out to its customers. The constantly evolving product needed a realtime solution to stay ahead of its competitors, but emails and messages boards weren't scaling. In early April 2009, Justin.tv found UserVoice to help the harness the power of its throngs of users. A few days later launched a new innovative way to gather the comments of its users: instant crowd sourcing of ideas and an easy way to reach out and connect with their growing social network.

"UserVoice has changed the way we interact with our users at Justin.tv. Not only did it help us discover what requests users want most, it's also allowed us to leverage community power users to help other users solve problems."
- Emmett Shear, Justin.tv CTO

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