­­­The 15.7 Release provides key features to drive increased community engagement.

We are excited to announce that the new Integrated Profile that was debuted at LiNC is now in closed beta. Connecting members’ community and Klout accounts with Integrated Profile enables you to understand your community members’ behavior both on and off domain. The Integrated Profile analytics help you identify top experts by topic, grow community engagement, and activate and increase members in social channels.

To provide more visibility to community questions that have been marked with accepted solutions, we now provide the ability to float accepted solutions just below the original thread. Finally, we have rolled out some new LSI reports and released several improvements to our Lithium-Klout SDK beta offering. The SDK enables developers to use their own source control and tooling to customize and integrate the Lithium platform. It makes it easier and faster for customers, integrators, and agencies to develop on the platform. To participate in the open beta program, see @JeffY’s post on the Current Betas board to get started.

New features and enhancements

• Integrated Profile (closed beta)
• Float Accepted Solutions just below original post
• Enable inline Doc Viewer from Admin
• LSI reports for Ratings & Reviews (open beta)
• Lithium-Klout SDK enhancements (open beta)
• Component caching

Integrated Profile (closed beta)

Lithium’s new Integrated Profile feature connects your community members’ community account to their Klout account. Enabling Lithium’s Integrated Profile on your community enables you to:

• Identify experts and influencers. Enlist members who are most qualified to answer other people’s questions based on their expertise.
• Grow engagement & vibrancy by gaining insight into members’ interests. You can then personalize content/experience based on your members’ interests and expertise.
• Activate and increase the number of your most loyal community members across all social channels. Expand your outreach in social networks that your community members are participate in.

What is Klout?

Klout has long been the leader in scoring online influence based on a person’s or brand’s reach and engagement across eight different digital channels. Users connect their social network accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, to Klout. Based on a user’s social activity on connected social networks, the Klout algorithm calculates a Klout Score, which is a number between 1-100 that represents a user’s online influence. The more influential a user is, the higher his/her Klout Score is. Brands have long used this score to identify key influencers.

In addition, Klout is able to evaluate a user’s topic expertise. Across Klout’s nearly 10,000 topics, users can now see experts identified in each topic area in addition to relevant topical content, see which topics an individual user is considered an expert in, and quickly discern the expertise of anyone throughout the topic ontology. The Klout Score is the first and only system representing the intersection of influence and expertise online, making it easier for everyone to know whom to follow—or find personally relevant—in a digital world full of noise and confusion. This brings digital participants two things that have been hard to find online: meaningful context to make better decisions and greater trust in whom to follow and on what topics.

Learn more about Klout and the Klout score. Here is a blog post about the topic expertise.

How to enable Integrated Profile

Before you can enable Integrated Profile on your community, you must contact your Customer Success Manager or email support@lithium.com to have it enabled.

After your CSM enables Integrated Profile, you can go turn on and configure Integrated Profile options as follows.

To turn on and configure Integrated Profile:

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Integrated Profile.
   
2. Select Turn on Integrated Profile.
3. Configure the remaining settings:

• Enable post-signin, one-time “Connect to Klout” pop-up: When selected, the community displays a one-time message for members (newly registered and returning) to connect their community account to Klout. This message displays the first time people sign in after you enable this feature.
  
• URL for Klout Welcome Emails: The URL to include in the Klout welcome email after a member connects their community profile to Klout.
  
• Community name to use in Klout: The community name to use on klout.com and Klout welcome emails.
• Show “Connect to Klout” calls-to-action to: Defines which community members (everyone, specific users, or specific roles) to prompt with the Connect to Klout message.
• Users/Roles list: Enter the comma-separated list of users or roles to prompt with the Connect to Klout message (if you selected “Specific Users” or “Specific Roles” above.

4. Click Save.

 

After your members connect their community account with Klout, their profile page indicates this connection:

 

We recommend employing some of the best practices when rolling out Integrated Profile to drive adoption by community members.

After you enable the Integrated Profile feature, we recommend adding the new engagement components to the appropriate pages on your site to encourage user adoption.

New Klout engagement components descriptions

Here’s the breakdown of the new integrated profile components, which are available in the Studio > Components > Klout folder, shown here:

After you enable the Integrated Profile feature, we recommend adding these engagement components to the appropriate pages on your site to encourage your members to connect their accounts.

Connect to Klout (Wide and Slim)

Creates a wide call-to-action widget (wide or slim) for a user to link his community profile to his Klout profile. After linking his community profile, a user's community interactions will influence his Klout score and reputation.

  

Connect to Klout (Tooltip)

Displays a tooltip describing Klout. The description includes a hyperlink so that a community member can link her community profile with her Klout profile. After linking her community profile, her community interactions will influence her Klout score and reputation.

Connect to Klout Footer

Creates a call-to-action widget for a user to link his community profile to his Klout profile. After linking his community profile, a member’s community interactions will influence his Klout score and reputation.

The component is sized to span the space of the footer in community pages.

Best practices to consider when rolling out the Integrated Profile to your community

Like any new feature being launched, we recommend following some basic best practices for communication and promotion to drive adoption:

• Announcement to your members and educating them on the benefits of connecting their Klout profile to their community profile
• Placement of call-to-action modules (community homepage, categories, forum pages, profile page)
• Promotional banners on key pages
• Highlight success stories—For example, members who are identified as topic experts after connecting their profiles and have had their Klout score boosted by their valuable community contributions

Incentivize your members to connect

Take the time to think about the incentives you want to offer members in your calls-to-action and marketing copy. 

Sometimes, these incentives should be intrinsic, focused on recognition, portable reputation, and learning more about their peers in the community. These types of incentives represent the foundation of the value proposition your brand should discuss. Depending on the distinct culture of your community, you may want to experiment with these messages to get just the right tone to drive the engagement you want. You should also engage your community managers as they understand their community members the best and will have a solid understanding of whether they’re predominately motivated by a need for recognition or perhaps a desire to better understand their peers.

If possible, consider offering extrinsic incentives--real-world benefits in the form of a reward. For example, you might want to consider adding a “Connected to Klout” badge.

Educate Members on Klout

Since many of your community members might not be familiar with Klout, we recommend including an announcement on your site about this new integration and why it’s valuable to your members and the community in general. For example:

Educate members on the benefits

Educate your members on the benefits that the Integrated Profile has for your company and community site, not just for the members. Your superusers want your company to be even more awesome, so make them feel like part of the team by understanding how your company benefits from Integrated Profile.

Launch with superusers first

Lithium does not recommend turning on the Integrated Profile feature for all users during your initial launch. Instead, we recommend you use the whitelisting function for specific user names or roles and enlist an initial group of superusers first. Offer it to them as an exclusive to make them feel special. In doing so, you’ll feed into the normal gamification mental processes among superusers. It’ll get them talking and make them more active. After you have a good core of connected superusers (with visible Klout icons on your site), you can roll the Integrated Profile out to progressively larger groups and roles.

Alleviate any privacy concerns

Community managers should take the time to educate their members about to privacy, as it applies to Klout. Let members know that they can not only disconnect their profile at any time by visiting Klout.com, but can also control which networks are displayed (and can be clicked through to). Just point them to the klout.com Settings > Network page. 

Leveraging the LSI reports and profile (hover) cards

After it’s activated, the Integrated Profile feature starts dropping information into LSI. Community Managers should make it a habit to visit community user profiles and the LSI reports to better understand their superusers. As they begin to better understand their topical expertise and interests, community managers should start inviting these members to conversations on topics of interest, cc’ing them as a way of encouraging their feedback and insights. 

Klout Insights report in LSI (open beta)

LSI now includes a new Klout Insights report in the Members section. This report shows you the total number of your community members who have connected to their Klout account and provides key information about their topics of interest/expertise and their social networks.

Then, for your top 50 members (based on their Klout score), this report shows their:

• Klout Score: a number between 1-100 that represents the member’s online influence.
• Community Klout Score: a number between 1-100 that represents the member’s influence on your community site.
• Other Networks: Lists the other social networks that this member is connected to (for example, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+)
• Expertise: List of topics that the member has been identified as an expert. (Experts are typically the in top 1-3% of all people who have expressed interest in these topics.)
• Interests: List of topics that the member has chosen as topics of interest in their Klout profile.

Using this report, you can identify experts and influences on your community, who you might want to enlist to answer other people’s questions based on their expertise. You can also use this report to expand your outreach into other social networks where your community members participate to help you increase membership and activity on your community.

 

To view your Klout Insights report:

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligencein the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the MEMBERS
4. Click Klout Insights.

Float accepted solutions below the original post

Sometimes, threads can get quite long, and it’s not uncommon for posts marked as accepted solutions to get buried deep in a thread. When this happens, either you can see the question and know there’s an accepted solution, or you can navigate to find the accepted solution, but not have context to the original question. To solve both of these issues, we’ve added the ability to float accepted solutions toward the top of a thread.

When enabled, a thread that includes an accepted solution displays the accepted solution(s) just below the original post, so you don’t need to spend time searching for the answer. You can also opt to include the name of the person who marked the post as the accepted solution.

The accepted solution is still shown in context in the thread, too. (It’s not moved to the first page in the thread.) To make it easier to find the original post in the thread, floated solutions include a “View solution in original post” link so you can go directly to the post in the thread.

 

To use this feature, you must:

• Ugrade to Forums v3 from Studio and then enable this option from Community Admin.
• Use linear layout (as opposed to topic/threaded layout).
• Use the message-list component on the ForumTopicPage quilt.
  

To float accepted solutions to the top of threads:

1. Go to Studio > Features.
2. Set the Forums version setting to 3.
3. Click Save.
4. Go to Community Admin > Features > Accepted Solutions.
   
5. Check the Float Accepted Solutions on the top of threads.
6. To include the name of the user who accepted the solution next to the floated thread, check Display who marked Accepted Solution.
   Note: You can change how the author name appears by editing the associated text key in Studio.
7. Click Save.

Tip: We recommend first enabling this feature on your stage site before deploying to your production site to determined if there are any conflicts with your current UI. If so, you can make any required customizations, including your existing quilts.

                                

Additionally, you can now choose to display the topic subject at the top of each page in the thread:

 

To display the topic subject on all pages in a thread:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > SEO.
2. Select Display topic subject on all thread pages.
   
3. Click Save.

Now, when you read through posts in threads that span multiple pages, the subject of the thread is visible:

 

Updates to quilts to display floated accepted solutions

To display floated accepted solutions on your pages, we have made a few, simple additions to the XML in the affected quilts/layouts. If you have not customized these quilts/layouts, you don’t need to do anything in Studio to get this new functionality.

However, if you have made customizations, you’ll need to add this code to the appropriate pages via the XML tab in Studio.

Forum Message Layout

1. Go to Studio > Layout.
2. Open the Page Layouts menu and select Forum Message.
   
3. Click Switch to XML View.
4. Enter the highlighted code:
   
5. Click Save.

Forum Message Page

1. Go to Studio > Page.
2. Open the Community Page menu and select Forums > Forum Message.
3. Click Switch to XML View.
4. Enter the highlighted code:
   
5. Click Save.

Forum Topic Page

1. Go to Studio > Page.
2. Open the Community Page menu and select Forums > Forum Topic.
3. Click Switch to XML View.
4. Enter the highlighted code into the main content area:
   
5. Click Save.

Enable Doc Viewer from Admin

In the 15.6 release, we announced the availability of the new Document Viewer. The new Document Viewer supports inline viewing (via a lightbox experience) of these standard file types:

• Adobe PDFs
• Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel
• CSS, XML, and JS
• Text files

Clicking the document link in a post opens the document in a lightbox:

We have now opened the new Doc Viewer up for everyone, and you can enable it yourself.

To turn on the doc viewer:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > File Attachments.
2. Select the Preview attached documents in online viewer
3. Click Save.

Things to consider before enabling Document Viewer

This feature was built using Google's popular Angular JS framework. If you are also using the Angular JS framework on your community for custom development,  your Angular code could conflict with ours. Those of you who have done custom development in Angular probably already know who you are. If you are not sure whether Angular is in use on your community, consult your technical resource or contact Lithium. 

LSI reports for Ratings & Reviews (open beta)

If you have purchased and enabled the latest version of the Ratings and Reviews feature and are running release 15.7 or later, you can now get the associated Ratings $ Reviews reports in LSI.

Note: These reports are only available if you have purchased and enabled Ratings and Reviews, released in 14.9.

To view Ratings & Reviews metrics:

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the RATINGS AND REVIEWS tab.
   
   Tip: Hover over a specific area to see the numerical breakdown of the review ratings.
   
4. To view information on a specific product, click a product in the Top Products list:
   
   In this filtered view, you can see the number of reviews and average star rating by date for that product.
5. (Optional) You can click Add a Filter to create an advanced filter to show ratings and review data for one of more products, product categories, users, or device type.
   

Note: We recommend retaining the 5-star rating scale for your reviews. If you change the rating scale, LSI buckets your rating distributions to a 5-star scale. For example, if you change the rating scale to be 1-10, all of your 9 and 10 ratings will be grouped under the 5-star rating group in LSI.

Lithium-Klout SDK enhancements

In the 15.4 release, we announced the open beta release of the Lithium-Klout SDK, which was also featured at LiNC. We are excited to announce that we’ve added new functionality that you can take advantage of during the open beta period. You can now:

• Use the SDK with Windows 7+
• Download a Studio plugin to populate an SDK plugin
• Clear items from the Studio and SDK plugins from the command line
• Contribute endpoints, macros, controllers, layouts, and the page initialization script (common.init) to the SDK plugin via the command line.

The SDK enables developers to contribute customizations to the stage environment using their own tools and workflow. As an alternative to Studio, this tool provides a more efficient workflow and makes it easier for developers to collaborate with their team.

To participate in the open beta program, see @JeffY’s post on how to get started. To provide feedback and collaborate with other beta participants, check out the Current Betas board with messages labeled as “[SDK]” in the subject line.

Component caching

In the 15.6 release, Lithium introduced an open beta version of a new component cache to improve page load time.  This feature is now GA. You implement component-level caching by including the @liaMarkupCache directive within custom components. This cache, along with the application and user caches are all tools available for community performance tuning.

Note: The component cache is disabled by default. Contact Lithium Professional Services or Lithium Support to enable it for your community. The directive is used in components. It is not supported in endpoints.

Components that make multiple Community API REST calls to generate content can impact performance. The @liaMarkupCache directive caches a component's markup in memory after FreeMarker processing on the first page load where the component is rendered. With this caching directive, you pay the performance cost of making the REST calls once, and then receive the performance benefit of calling cached data for subsequent requests for the specified time-to-live (TTL) period.

Caching gives the biggest benefit on components that make the most API calls and/or process the most data. Caching might result in slightly stale data being shown for the TTL duration, so consider caching when this user experience is acceptable.

For more information about the component cache, see Component Caching with @liaMarkupCache.

Additional enhancements

General Subscription notification email template
We have made a minor change to the footer text in the General Subscription notification email template. The "how to manage your subscriptions" text now reads as: 

To control which emails we send you, manage your subscriptions and notifications here:
${notification.recipient.subscriptionsPageUrl}

instead of

To manage your subscriptions or to change your subscription options,
click this link: ${userSubscriptionsPageUrl}

 

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• Video Closed Captioning now supports foreign languages. The XML file you upload must still include valid UTF-8 characters.
• Previously, when you inserted a link to a YouTube video that didn’t include a description, you’d receive an error when trying to preview the post/video. This issue has been fixed.
• We have fixed the display issue with custom components that included “${env.context.message.uniqueId}” in the code. Previously, custom components would produce a FreeMarker error when you tried to preview a post. This error no longer happens.
• We have fixed the issue where using spellcheck v2 in Finnish was flagging correctly spelled words as being misspelled.
• We have fixed the issue where product mentions were not working with product names that included a hyphen (-) as one of its first three letters in the product title.
• API v2 now updates messages when they are featured/un-featured.
• We have fixed the display issue where child nodes were not displaying the node description, if the parent and child nodes used the same setting name and description.
• We have fixed the issue where the labels component was reading the labels that exist in replies of merged Ideas, but was only displaying labels for threads. Now, if a label is only used in the Idea that is now a comment, it is removed from the labels component and you are unable to filter by it. However, if the label is used in other ideas, the label still displays in component and you can filter by it.  The filter results do not include the idea that was merged and is now simply a comment.