In July, Forrester Research put out a call to organizations using social media to submit their work for the what they called the Groundswell Awards. These were anything innovative by way of blogs, wikis, and communities to achieve some goal.

Last week, they announced the winners. In the seven categories (Listening, Speaking, Energizing, Supporting, Embracing, Managing, and Social Impact) there were unexpected winers. Meaning, some of them were probably so focused on their niche, we didn’t hear much about them.

Alli Research Community (Alli being a Glaxo Smith Kline dietary product) was a finalist in the listening category. In the Managing section, Avenue A Razorfish won for a wiki, and many may remember the ‘design a border fence’ campaign from Brickfish.

To me there were two lessons worth taking away. It was all about focus and participation. Marketing groups tend to lose sight of these two elements.

Focus: It’s easy to set aside the rifle and grab the shotgun because many people are still operating in the mass media/mas marketing mode. Also, there are often too many fish to fry. Too many goals, too many audiences to ping, too many middle managers to keep happy. Chevy Aveo’s Livin’ Large was focused on students. Narrowly focused on seven campuses, in fact.

Participation. Allowing people to collaborate is messy, doesn’t work to plan, and makes the ‘gurus’ look incompetent –especially when the best ideas come from people without marketing or design in their title. We cannot know what kind of content showed up on Avenue A Razorfish’s wiki (it’s a private wiki) but with 6500 pages of content contributed by employees, and 2000 blog posts, it was most unlikely to have been oozing in HR-speak.