Paul and I first met Jen McClure (left) more than a decade ago and shortly after she founded the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) in 2005. Jen, who has been a frequent guest on Shel Holtz’s FIR main podcast, was one of the first people to see the potential of social media in business communications. SNCR merged with The Conference Board three years ago, and fortunately the awards program Jen created at SNCR has continued as The Conference Board’s Excellence in Marketing & Communications Awards. This week we discuss three outstanding winners of the awards, which will be presented in New York City on June 26th, in conjunction with The Conference Board’s 24th Annual Corporate Communications Conference. Two of our picks are B2B.

• SAP used Dynamic Signal to track and encourage employee engagement and brand advocacy. Staffers now share more than 15,000 social posts monthly and drive an impressive amount of traffic to the main SAP website.
• Southern California Edison adopted Sprout Social’s chatbot technology to supplement the two staffers who respond to customers inquiries. The utility has not only increased the volume of questions it can field without adding staff but has maintained high satisfaction ratings and is now able to respond more quickly to major power outages. The project succeeded on all metrics.
• Siemens used augmented and virtual reality technology to greatly expand the variety of equipment is can show at trade shows. These large and expensive machines are costly to ship and take up a lot of floor space. With AR/VR, Siemens was able to deliver a virtual experience that was in many ways better than a live demo.

Congratulations to these and all the other finalists and winners in this year’s awards program. The quality of entries keeps getting better every year. You can listen to our 16 min. podcast here: