One of the most prestigious award programs in our industry is the Excellence in New Communication Research Award from the Society for New Communications Research. I was in San Francisco for the awards gala on Friday, where the winners spoke briefly about their award-winning projects, and I came away with a few blogging and video ideas that would be fun to replicate.

These are award-winning ideas, folks. The winners all saw real results with the programs described here, so take a minute to think about how you can apply at least one of these ideas in your organization:

1. Have a talent show. As part of their internal 25th anniversary celebration, Cisco held an employee talent competition and invited employees to record and submit videos of their talents and hobbies. The communications team was so impressed with the submissions that they made a compilation video of the talent winners and put it on YouTube as a proud display of the Cisco culture. The video has been very popular and helped humanize the Cisco brand.
2. Poach internal documents. Marketing automation company Eloqua shared its internal content marketing map and its social media playbook to the delight of readers and saw a large increase in sales leads as a result. These documents are great examples of content marketing done right. What documents do you use internally that your audiences could benefit from as well? What's stopping you from sharing them?
3. Use voice mail for podcasting and blogging. When Goodwill Industries wanted to increase awareness about its mission to help train and find work for individuals in need, it started a blog to share its best success stories. Since technology capabilities varied in Goodwill offices around the country, the PR team decided to set up a 1-800 number with a 5-minute voice mail to record stories. Anyone who has been helped through the job services of Goodwill can call in and tell his or her story after the prompt. From there, team members turn the stories into inspiration podcasts and blog posts.
4. Increase Facebook followers with the @ feature. This idea comes from the creative team behind the Rubik’s Cube Facebook page. To help raise awareness about their page on Facebook, they researched and “liked” Facebook pages from organizations with similar goals, such as math teacher organizations. Then, they periodically wrote messages on the Rubik's wall that included an @ note to the other organizations. This method inserts the Rubik's Cube page into the stream of the other organization, so fans of that page will become aware of the Rubik's Cube page as well.
5. Compare yourself to your competitors. This one comes straight from SAS and Katie Paine. We won the social media measurement award for our work with KDPaine & partners. One of the brilliant things that KDPaine provides is a comparison of SAS mentions in social media and the press with our competitors. These reports can be broken down by specific business priority areas, by sentiment, by channel - and many other ways. As a result, you know right away if competitor A is getting a spike in coverage for a topic area that you want to own - and you can shift your resources and strategies to help raise your awareness in that same space and channel. These reports require a lot of data analysis and natural language processing - but you can use Google alerts and Twitter search for a more simplified analysis of your competitive landscape.