In the 14.1 release, we’re announcing the availability of Lithium Premium Gamification, which includes Lithium Badges as its first feature. While the Lithium platform includes a basic gamification foundation with rank and reputation, this offering extends the gamification mechanics you can use within your community and will continue to be an area in which we invest.

 

Lithium Badges is a visual reward system that recognizes community members for their actions on and off community and can be used to onboard and engage new and casual community members by giving them immediate, positive feedback for their contributions. This system is natively integrated in the community, which means it works out of the box with key community features. You can set up your existing roles and permissions using familiar self-service workflows.

 

With Lithium Premium Gamification, we’re also excited to deliver on the vision of Science + Practice + Product with a strategic Premium Gamification workshop designed to help you scope and plan your Lithium Badges deployment and create a foundation for future Premium Gamification features. This 1 ½ day workshop is led by our strategic services team and is customized for each customer. This unique, combined offering builds on Lithium’s years of experience with the science of social and gamification to help you drive deeper engagement among casual users, your largest group of community members.

 

In 14.1 we are also releasing a new version of Reviews that includes authentication flow improvements designed to enable guests and other non-registered users to generate reviews on your product pages with less friction. Improved context for moderators when moderating reviews also ensures that only the richest and most relevant customer generated content appears on your site.

 

Lithium Social Intelligence includes new tools to enable you to further customize your reports, and the Lithium Developer Network team now offers a Page Initialization Script that enables you execute custom business logic within your community to meet new use cases.

 

New Features and Enhancements

 

Lithium Communities

• Lithium Premium Gamification with Lithium Badges
• Reviews Version 2
• Inline Email Template descriptions
• Page Initialization Script
• New REST objects and calls

 

Lithium Social Intelligence

• Customize how reports display
• Badging metrics
• New metrics for content and category reports
• Access to LSI Help

 

 

Lithium Communities

Lithium Premium Gamification with Lithium Badges

 

Lithium Badges is the first addition of Lithium’s new Premium Gamification package that introduces new gaming dynamics to build sustainable systems to engage and enlist customers over time. The spectrum of gamification runs from short-term rewards (points, badges earned over a period of days or weeks) to long-term reputation (often earned/acquired over a period of years). According to Aberdeen, organizations with gamification in place increase the level of engagement by 48% (compared to 28% for those that don’t have gamification in place).

 

A badge is a type of visual reward that community members can earn for performing specific community actions or for achieving important community milestones. You can use Lithium Badges to create badges that encourage the specific behaviors that bring more value to your community.

 

While all gamification tools recognize, reward, and reinforce specific behaviors considered important and useful for the brand, badges are most effective for accelerating participation among casual or new community members by rewarding first-time actions. For example, when Adobe implemented a gamification program for Photoshop, they saw a 4x increase in sales from free trial users who were exposed to game mechanics, encouraging them to learn the product and then rewarding them for developing new skills.

 

You can also use badges to re-engage members whose participation has slowed by giving them new goals to work toward and giving them a reputation boost by rewarding them for past contributions to the community. Community managers can choose to further recognize community members by creating special, one-time badges that can be awarded for both on-community and off-community participation (for example, completing a certification class).

 

Note: For pricing information and instructions for getting Lithium Badges enabled for your community, contact Support or your Account Manager.

 

In addition to the product, Lithium Badges includes a gamification workshop designed to help you understand gamification theory, how to apply aspects of gamification to your community to drive business goals, and to help you think through your first set of badges to have a successful deployment.

 

Lithium Badges Overview

 

When members earn badges, their profile is updated to reflect these accomplishments for everyone to see. From their profile page, members can see not only the badges they’ve earned, but also the badges they have yet to earn.

 

 

 

• Each badge has a unique name, description, and image associated with it that you create to match your gamification program goals and branding guidelines for your community.
• Each badge has its own custom single-rule criteria, and each time a member takes an action, has actions taken on their content, or is assigned a role, the gamification engine powering Lithium Badges calculates in real time whether they qualify for that badge.

 

Badge Notifications

 

Members receive email notifications when they earn a new badge, prompting them to return to the community to view their new achievement on their profile and creating another engagement opportunity.

 

 

 

Badge Administration

 

You perform most of the Lithium Badges setup tasks from the Community Admin Badges tab.

 

 

 

Setting up badges for your community is self-service, which means that you can create and tune your badges on your own schedule before making them live on your community.

 

With the help of your design team, you can create unique, custom images for each badge in your set, making them instantly recognizable, and add your own names and descriptions to congratulate and guide members toward what they need to do to earn each badge.

 

Since badges are also awarded retro-actively for community contributions that have happened in the past, and to help with tuning your badge criteria, the badge creation workflow enables you to get an exportable preview of the community members who already qualify for each badge before you make it live.

 

At a high-level, configuring, deploying, and managing your community badges involves these tasks:

 

• Adding the My Badges component to profiles
• Uploading images for your badges
• Creating your badges
• Calculating and refining badge rules
• Creating badges for multiple languages
• Setting badge permissions
• Making a badge live on the community
• Setting the order that badges display on profiles
• Editing live badges
• Deleting a badge

 

View live badges on your profile

 

After you make badges live on your community, they appear on profile pages. All earned badges are public to other community members. To encourage onboarding, a member’s unearned badges display only to them when viewing their own profile, where they can see what they must do to achieve them. Any member can see their unearned badges on their own profile page, but not on another member's page. You can see the badges other members have earned by viewing their profile.

 

To see earned badges:

 

1. Login to the community.
2. Click a member’s name to view the profile page.
   By default, the most recent 6 badges appear at the top of your profile in the Badges component (after it’s added to the View Profile Page using Studio). Greyed-out badges are ones that you haven’t earned. 


   
   
   
   
3. Click View all to see all earned and available badges.
4. To see details about a badge, including how to earn it, hover your cursor over the badge card.
   
   

 

 

New REST objects and calls

 

For the new Badges feature, Lithium has introduced two new objects:

 

• Badge: the object representing the badge
• BadgeAssignment: a list of Badge objects awarded to a user

Find them under the User menu in the REST API section of the Dev Network.

 

Additionally, Lithium has calls to retrieve badges for a community or user. Find these under the “reputation” category for the User and Community object pages in the REST API section of the Dev Network.

 

• community/badges/id/[badge_id]: Retrieves a badge by ID
• community/badges/list: Retrieves a list of all badges used in the community
• user/badges: Retrieves a list of badges awarded based on user ID or login

 

New “reputation” call category

We have grouped badge and ranking calls for objects that support them under a new category called “reputation”, shown here:

 

 

 

 

Lithium Badges is a large feature; as such, not all of its capabilities and options are described in these Release Notes. Complete documentation, including tips and best practices for planning out your badges, is provided in the Badges area for the Documentation Knowledge Base.

 

 

Renaming of Profile Badges to Profile Cards

 

To avoid confusion with Lithium Badges, the existing “Profile Badges” feature, which displays member stats on forum threads, has been renamed to “Profile Cards”, shown here:

 

 

 

Note: The labels for Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, and Website badges have also been changed to “profile card”.

 

Likewise, the tab in Community Admin has been renamed as Profile Cards:

 

 

 

Reviews

 

In this release, Reviews is designed to reduce the friction for your visitors and enable them to more easily post reviews and comments on reviews, resulting in richer content on your site.

 

Note: For pricing information and instructions for getting Reviews V2 enabled for your community, contact Support or your Account Manager.

 

With Reviews, you can enable guest (non-registered) users to write and publish reviews. Letting guests submit reviews (and comments on reviews) can increase engagement on your site. 

 

Reviews also supports inline SSO sign-in/sign-up and automatically generates usernames for Lithium users based on data in the SSO token.

 

Additionally, Reviews also includes several usability and moderation enhancements.

 

Enable Reviews

 

To use Reviews:

 

1. Go to Studio > Features.
2. In the Reviews drop-down menu, choose 2.
3. Click Save.

Enable guests to post reviews

 

Non-registered users (guests) can submit reviews on your community. Allowing guests (who might not want to register with your community) to provide reviews is a great way to get more valuable content to your site.

 

To enable guests to post reviews:

 

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Reviews.
2. Select the Enable guest reviews option.
3. Click Save.

Note: This setting also enables guest to post comments on reviews. The workflow for posting comments is the same as that for posting reviews, described below.

 

To submit a review as a non-registered user:

 

1. Go to the page where you want to write a review.
2. Click Write a review.
   
   
   
   
3. Choose a rating score, enter a subject, and write a review.
   
   
   
   
4. Click Submit.
5. To continue as a guest, enter your email address, click that you accept the Terms of Service, and click Submit.


   
   
   
   You see a message that instructs you to go to your email and click a verification link.
   
   
   
   
6. Go to your email client and open the email.
   
   
   
   
7. Click the here link or copy/paste the provided URL into your browser. You see a message that indicates that either your review has been posted or that it will be posted after a moderator approves it.


   
   

 

Improved SSO flow and auto-generation of usernames

 

In this release, Reviews improves the login and registration flows for users by enabling you to use the login and registration pages that appear inside the Product Reviews ActiveCast widget instead of the standard login and registration pages.

 

Additionally, in an effort to remove friction in the sign-up process, we now auto-generate usernames from the SSO token for partially registered visitors who have registered with your company but not necessarily with your community. Users can edit the auto-generated username after the fact. We provide default code to generate the username, but you can change it to better fit your needs.

 

To use the improved SSO login and registration experience

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Reviews.
2. Enter the URLs for the user login and registration pages that appear in the Reviews ActiveCast widget.
3. If needed, edit the XML used to auto-generate user logins for partial users (users who might be registered with your company but not necessarily your community). By default, this XML is used:
   
   <textGenerator><ssotoken value="profile.name_first"
   fallback="reviews.general.guest"/><text key="reviews.general.delimiter"/>
   <number min="1" max="10000" prefixZeros="true"/></textGenerator>


   
   For example, you might want auto-generate the user logins using the profile.name_last SSO token field instead of profile.name_first. 
4. Click Save.
   
   

Better context for reviews provided in Moderation Manager

 

When moderating reviews in Moderation Manager, moderators are now provided much more information about the content they are reviewing, enabling them to make better moderation decisions. Specifically, moderators can now see:

• What product the review was written for
• The rating given in the review
• Which posts are reviews and which are comments on the reviews

 

Inline Email Template Descriptions

 

From Studio, you can view and edit the templates used for Lithium email notifications. Previously, you had to refer to external documentation to learn about the exact purpose and triggers for each template. Now, this information is provided in Studio on the Email Text screen.

 

To view descriptions of the email templates:

1. Go to Studio > Text Editor.
2. Click Email Text.
3. Choose a template from the Select Email Template menu.

The description, triggers, and configuration options for the selected email template display:

 

 

 

Page Initialization Script

 

Lithium now offers a Page Initialization Script that enables you to execute business logic using FreeMarker early in a request prior to any HTML being rendered. The script runs once each request, server side, and is often used for redirecting to a different page and re-skinning pages in the community.

 

Caution: The Page Initialization Script is an advanced tool, and in some cases might contain code that has been created for you by Lithium Professional Services for community customizations. Do not edit any code that you might see by default without first consulting Professional Services or Support. We strongly recommend consulting with Lithium before using the script.

 

The script is accessed in Studio, but the tab is not displayed by default. See this article to learn more about the script and who to contact in order to have the feature enabled.

 

 

Lithium Social Intelligence

 

Customize how reports display

 

You can now choose which columns to display in Lithium Social Intelligence reports and the order in which they display for more customized viewing of what matters most to you.

  

To customize Lithium Social Intelligence reports:

 

1. Log into the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Navigate to the report you want to view.
   
   
   
   
4. Open the tools menu and click Manage Columns.
5. Check or click to clear the columns you want to show/hide in the report table.
   
   
   
   
6. To change the order of the displayed columns, click and drag (while the Manage Columns window is still open) any column in the table to the location you want.
   
   
   
   
7. Click Save.

 

Badging metrics

 

Lithium Social Intelligence badges reports measure member engagement on your community based on the number of badges that have been awarded since the badge was activated. For each badge in the report for the selected time period, Lithium Social Intelligence displays the badge's name, description, activation date, and how many members have been awarded each badge.

 

Note: Badge-related metrics are available only if you have purchased Lithium Badging. For information about purchasing Lithium Badging, contact your account representative.

  

To view badging metrics for your community:

 

1. Log into the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the BADGES tab.



   
   
   
   
4. (Optional) Select a time period to evaluate in the metric header.
5. Hover over any of the blue metric bars in the graph to view more details.

 

New metrics for content and category reports

 

Lithium Social Intelligence provides two new reporting metrics: 

• RSS Feed Views in all content reports
• Accepted Solutions at category-level reports

 

Access to Lithium Social Intelligence help

 

You can now access Lithium Social Intelligence documentation directly from Lithium Social Intelligence. Just click the Help link at the top of the page.

 

 

 

Clicking Help opens a new browser tab and takes you to the Lithium Social Intelligence section of the Lithium Documentation Knowledge Base.

 

 

You Found It. We Fixed It 

 

• RSS feeds used to display only the most recent 20 items, regardless of value set for the default count in the RSS configuration files. This problem has been fixed, and RSS feed includes all feed items up to the set value. (Community)
• Lithium communities now support full-language search for Japanese. (Community)
• Performing searches for users using the Change SSO ID tool no longer results in an error (Community)
• The logic that determines when the Top Choice percentage for a poll is displayed has been improved so that poll results now display properly for all users who have voted or are not qualified to vote. (Community)