We’re excited here at LG Towers… Why? Because the nominations for the Forester Groundswell Awards 2.0 have been opened, and we loved the inspirational entries that we saw last year! With much talk about social media being the future, but with few solid examples of success stories, it’s nice to see pure, objective success in this challenging and exciting field.

While we have a few social media irons of our own in the fire, we’re not quite ready to show them off yet, so we thought that praising the good work of others would also be useful for our readers.  Unfortunately, the winners won’t be announced until October, so in the meantime we’re going to highlight the ones we liked best from the last awards and explain exactly what we admired about each one – and a possible application for the travel industry!

What it is: Salesforce.com created this website to give their members (made up of customers, partners and industry personalities) the chance to create, vote and comment on new features for the company’s products. By voting up and down, the best ideas crept to the top and became integrated with the company’s product range.

Why it’s great: It’s great because it takes the pressure to innovate off the marketing department and onto the consumer. The user voting means that the wheat is separated from the chaff organically! The Idea Exchange spawned 4500 ideas and accumulated 82,000 votes in its first year, meaning that half of salesforce.com’s new features that year were based on user-generated content!

How it could be applied to travel: Allow your users to tailor-make their own itineraries based on your product range including attractions, where to stay and transfers. If you allow the users to share their dream holidays and vote on the most interesting sounding ones, you get a good idea of what your customers want, and you can add a competition element by making a “Limited Time Customer-Itinerary of the Month” to book…

What it is: A Nike brand, so one with more money to play with than most – and it really shows. Jordan Brand’s Breakfast Club is an interactive online training community where customers can create, view and share their work-out routines. With several hundred thousand registered members, this is a social media success story to shout about.

Why it’s great: The social element is very much the icing on the cake. The website has ‘peer assessments’ that tap into the fact people are more likely to stick to a fitness regime when doing it with others.

How it could be applied to travel: A commercial travel based social network where people could construct their dream holidays using a simple drag-and-drop interface sounds like a good idea to me. Code in the ability to share them, and partner with several tailor-made travel companies who can supply a quote for user-created itineraries and you’re onto a winner.

What it is: A great example of crossing online social media with offline advertising, Chevrolet launched a redesigned Chevy Aveo and targeted students with a great campaign: two students on each of seven US colleges were selected to see who could “live the largest” inside a Chevy Aveo for five days. They were allowed to leave the cars for classes and 10 minute breaks to document their adventure online. The response was phenomenal, with the participants creating YouTube videos, Facebook groups, photos and blogs, accumulating an amazing 217,000,000 audience impressions.

Why it’s great: Whether or not you agree that students are the prime target for a car, getting so much enthusiasm together in just 5 days to make the user generated content create itself is an amazing feat, and the success is richly deserved. As a brand awareness exercise, this is one of the best campaigns we’ve ever seen, and successfully taps into the same mindset that has seen Big Brother become one of the world’s most popular shows.

How it could be applied to travel: Don’t underestimate the power of harnessing the power of brand evangelists! Our idea is for an overland adventure company to “hire” some students, putting each one onto a 2 week overland adventure trip going to different regions of the world, under the condition that they create blogs, podcasts and videos of their experiences and lessons learned whenever they reach internet cafes. Site visitors would then be able to follow their experiences and vote for the most entertaining – who would win the chance to become the company’s star blogger for a trip the following year.

If you’re feeling inspired by this, we’d love to talk to you and help make your social dreams become reality. With more opportunities to help build the social web, we intend to be amongst the nominees this time next year.

If you would like to volunteer your site up for assessment in our upcoming newsletters, please contact us on marketing@leadgenerators.co.uk