Today, at Forrester's Consumer Forum, 2010, we presented the winners of the Forrester Groundswell Awards. With social and mobile applications exploding in both number and creativity, we've added a bunch of new categories. In this post, I'll note the worthy winners and finalists in the business-to-consumer division, North America. )Finalists are good enough to win, except that we selected another entrant as even more impressive.

In this post, we list the winners of the business-to-business division. Much more than in previous years, the B2B entrants tried a wide variety of interesting strategies. I get asked about B2B all the time in my travels and make no mistake, business customers are open to social technology marketing at least as much as consumers are. So if you sell to businesses, learn from these winners!

My colleagues have taken over the analysis of social participation, but if you read this blog you're most likely still interested. Briefly, here's the 2010 update of the ladder of social participation in the US. Compared to our previous update , Joiners )social network participants( continue to grow rapidly. The rest of the categories are stable or declining. For the first time, Spectators are down and Inactives are up.

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler The Cluetrain Manifesto was an incredibly prescient book. It still amazes us that a book written in 2000, when blogs were novelties and Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, was able to identify the shift towards customer empowerment. Combine that with the insight that employees must directly engage with those customers, and you have a truly visionary work. Because of when it was written, Cluetrain was not practical.

by Josh Bernoff That smile on my face means that after a year of research and preparation, Empowered is now available to everybody . Check your local bookstore. And from the people I'm speaking with and the reviews I'm reading, some of you are feel like we hit the mark. When Groundswell was published, the challenge for companies was to figure out how to deal with social technologies.

by Josh Bernoff )Reprinted from Ad Age DigitalNext .( This is a big week for me. Our book Empowered , with advice about how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, is about to hit the shelves. We've put in place a bunch of word of mouth programs and as I reflect on them, I am hoping there is a lesson regarding generosity for marketers selling just about anything. Giving out free stuff is a time-honored marketing technique. It can also be very expensive,

by Josh Bernoff Starting today and continuing until this Friday September 10, you can download Empowered to your Kindle at no charge . You want to know how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, don't you? If you've got a Kindle, what's stopping you? Now to the other question. Are we crazy? Some people have told me that giving away Empowered on Kindle makes it seem worthless. Or that I'm giving up revenue. But I'm gambling on a different outcome.

We'd like to come to where you work and talk to you about Empowered . All of you. All on the same day, Friday September 10, at 12:00 eastern time. Feel free to bring your lunch. We want you to embrace the innovation that come from Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives - HEROes , within your company. As part of the launch of Empowered, we're presenting a free Webinar . In this Webinar,

by Josh Bernoff Here's what I think about Brian Solis' book Engage .  You should buy it. And you shouldn't necessarily read it start to finish. But you'll find yourself diving in again and again when you need help with . . . just about anything social. To be fair, I was intimidated. I had promised Brian a review, but the thing is 382 pages long.

The Empowered book tour is beginning. Here's where you can meet us - and we'll be adding more events around the ones in these cities as we get closer to the dates: Josh, San Francisco/San Jose, August 23-27. Josh will be speaking at the ANA Business-to-Business Marketing Leadership Conference in San Jose on August 26. Topic "B-to-B Social Media and The Dynamics Of Peer Influence.

by Josh Bernoff The Forrester Groundswell Awards entry deadline is in two weeks, on August 27. As usual, most of you have waited until the last two weeks to enter. If you haven't entered yet but plan to, this advice is for you. Our awards process is transparent, and so are our criteria. So in interests of helping you spend your time wisely, let me tell you how to win. I'll use examples from entries already submitted, and from previous winners.

by Ted Schadler )Cross-posted from Ted's blog ( We are getting many requests for help on iPad strategies for the enterprise. It's clear why. iPads are a tremendously empowering technology that any employee can buy. My colleague Andy Jaquith has a report coming real soon now on the security aspects of iPhones and iPads, and I'm launching research on case studies of iPad in the enterprise. I am currently hearing about three business scenarios for iPad and tablets,

by Josh Bernoff Maybe you've noticed that our Web site has become Empowered . This is in preparation for our book launch on September 14, and it means a lot more than little lightning bolts in the graphic design. We have a few new tools for you to play with now . You can think of this as a tour of the new site )go ahead, poke around( or a bunch of new goodies intended to help out companies and highly empowered and resourceful operatives - HEROes - within them.