Company: HP Entry submitted by: Tyna Chua (tyna_c) Social Media Manager Community: HP Support Forum (h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _______________________________________________   The award-winning HP Consumer Support Forums – the cornerstone of HP’s social support efforts – are a global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another to exchange insights, tips and answers to each other's questions.   Boasting traffic of two visits every second in 2012, the HP Consumer Support Forums have hit some remarkable milestones which demonstrate their reach, impact and growth:   With a notable 48% increase in Forum questions, the community handled this growth effectively, showing a 17% improvement in reply rate.  We are showing continued improvement in reply rates, with the last three months showing an increase of 27%. An impressive 80% increase in page views of Accepted Solutions. Accepted Solutions are viewed 1,500 times on average, enabling others to benefit from a solution provided by the community to the original post-er. (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011).   Drivers of Success   At the heart of HP’s Social Support Program are the following:   I.  Community Engagement HP’s social care community would not be as successful as it is today if it weren’t for our volunteer "HP Experts" – employees and customers who donate their time to the Forums to answer HP customer questions.These Experts are the life blood of HP’s Forums, and their active participation directly influences the vibrancy and vitality of the seven HP Forum communities.   So how do we energize and motivate our Experts to keep participating in our Forums?  We continue to develop our HP Expert Program, which includes:   Our annual Social Support Summit, bringing together hundreds of our top Forum contributors from around the world with one thing in common: a passion to help others through social tools.   In its second year, the Summit this March in Orlando, FL attracted 200 attendees speaking more than seven languages: English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.   Worldwide expert meet ups:  Meet-ups bring together global and regional HP employees and local volunteers for informal social gatherings to exchange ideas and solutions. Contests:  HP introduced a gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to threads on the least active Forum boards. Expert Days: 24-hour Expert "marathons” on specific topics designed to accelerate solutions to customer issues. Improving Expert efficiency with an Unanswered Questions Widget: A widget displaying unanswered Forum posts allows HP Experts fast and easy access to neglected posts, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers. Product Loan Program: Provides Experts the opportunity to have the most popular HP products in their homes so they can better help customers asking product-specific questions.  Product Briefing Series:  Provide training on new HP products and technologies, giving Experts up-to-date knowledge to help customers in the Forums.  We conducted seven Product Briefings in 2012, with more planned in 2013.  These initiatives helped contribute to the following results (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011):                                 II. Customer Experience Because the great majority of our Forum visitors are “observers,” we have placed due emphasis on improving the user interface by making it easier for visitors to ask a question or search the Forums.  In partnership with Lithium, we have launched several customer experience improvements that increase visibility to the “ask” feature and improve search results layout.   Preliminary data shows that the changes yield positive results, increasing Forum search by 66% globally (week after release average vs. week prior to release average).  In the pipeline are changes to simplify registration and encourage customer feedback.   III.  Monitoring and Harvesting We currently harvest our Forum conversations and provide frequent, regular feedback to the business units for product improvement or service/support quality. Funneling customer feedback from Forums to business units results in improvements such as creation of patches by our software development team or updates to content on our website.Additionally, every month, we provide the business units with a list of top viewed threads that have not been solved by the community so they can further investigate and provide guidance.   IV. Investments Our Forums are a key component of our overall support strategy, and this is evident in our investment priorities, including: improving our tools and making enhancements to the Forums experience recruiting top talent to add to our army of Experts and advocates investing in our volunteer base and dedicated agents that help assist our customers Social media as a channel for customer support continues to grow in importance to HP and its customers.  Our Forum activity remains far-reaching, providing support throughout several regions and languages.   Quick Timeline HP's Consumer Support Forums available since 2009 Quarterly Expert Days across seven languages commenced 2009 Expert meet ups commenced 2010 Inaugural Social Support Summit occurred March 2012 One billion Page Views milestone in November 2012        

Company: National Instruments Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight __________________________________________________   “Are two Knights in one day better than two days in one night?” <Hint, the answer is yes.>   When the NI Discussion Forum was launched in 2004, we could not have predicted how successful it would be in fostering passionate, proficient, and accomplished advocates for National Instruments. Our super users are not only incredibly engaged, but they also constantly push the envelope and drive innovation. They are an extension of the passionate company culture we have built and strive to maintain internally at NI.   Our community members chose the ranking Knight of NI based on a shared love for the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members who reach the 10,000-post milestone virtually receive the Knight of NI title and physically receive a shrubbery. This group has only seven members but is a respected and revered resource within our community. Collectively, the Knights have a vast wealth of knowledge. When we ask why they continue to engage in the NI Discussion Forums, we consistently receive the same response: They enjoy helping others, solving difficult problems, and sharing their knowledge to develop and empower future engineers. The Knights of NI participate because they truly recognize the value of our company, products, and industry.   We recently recognized two Knights of NI on consecutive days! Becoming a Knight does not happen every day; in fact, it does not even happen every year. However, in their race to Knighthood, these two loyal users have consistently been neck and neck for over eight years.               As a group, our Knights’ engagements make up 8 percent of our total community activity, and they receive more than 20 percent of the total kudos in the community. They frequently create quality content and have authored 12 percent of our total solutions. These numbers are extremely significant considering we have seven Knights in a community of over 200,000 users! The sheer volume of posts and solutions that the Knights provide significantly drive down support costs for our organization. We are thankful for their passion and strive to nurture their behavior through recognition, sneak previews before products releases, and direct channels to engage with NI engineers, just to name a few. The Knights lead by example and inspire fellow community members to engage to earn the greatest reward: knowledge.   There are many more examples and statistics we could mention to further sing the praises of this valued group, however one of the greatest outcomes of this recognition system is the bond our super users have built with one another. Their discussions are helpful, interesting, cutting edge, personal, and always entertaining. A great portion of the success of the NI Discussion Forums is absolutely due to these loyal SuperFans.    

Company: SuccessFactors Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Why should we win this award? “We want our customers to love work again!” To ensure that our customers have the best tools and resources to help them achieve success using our products, we launched the SuccessFactors Customer Community in April 2012. The primary goal of our community is to promote peer-to-peer engagement, but we also want people to use the platform for best practices knowledge, tips and tricks, discussion forums, blogs, new ideas, and much more.     The Challenge After launch we realized that our customers still had to access multiple systems during the day to get to our training and professional services resources. We needed to enable a single sign-on solution between our community and our SharePoint sites. We have a private community with a registration process so that only customers, partners, and employees are able to join. We have an active directory that authenticates users as they register. The two other critical resources we wanted customers to be able to access through the community were our SuccessFactors Training and SuccessFactors Professional Services. Both of these teams provide extensive knowledge and resources, but they do so on separate SharePoint sites.   The Solution Our exceptional technical implementation, which connects the Lithium community to the SharePoint sites with the click of the button, has resulted in a completely seamless community experience for our customers.  In order to achieve this technical implementation, we worked with Lithium partner Cloudsquads and a Cloudsquads partner SusQtech. This project enabled the single sign-on capabilities with a custom integration effort. The team first explored the solution, which started with the ADFS authentication issue. The technical teams then built an integration account, which provided credentials to access SharePoint. Then they developed a custom widget within Lithium that enabled easy access to the shared documents by using an iFrame housing the SharePoint sites, within which customers can download the documents. The custom-logic widget was placed on the community forums via the Lithium studio layout editor. The widget is modular and placed in the Lithium Studio Editor. A new page was created to host this service, the content is filtered by the SharePoint app, and Lithium passes whatever available fields that are specified by the integration protocol.     After clicking the button on the homepage with single sign on users are brought directly to the PS SharePoint site.     Training Page “Get Training” button     The Training SharePoint Page after you click on the “Get Training” button single sign on brings you to the Training SharePoint Page   The Outcome Customers are extremely satisfied with this seamless integrated solution. When customers and partners need information, documents, training, or other resources, the SuccessFactors Community is their one-stop shop! Once they are in the community, if they need to access the SuccessAcademy (training) or the Empower Methodology/Welcome Kits (Professional Services), they can easily access these SharePoint systems with a click of a button without logging in again. This is a huge win for us, and it creates an exceptional community experience for our customers.  

Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________     Best Superfan Story/Insight BSkyB 2013   In July 2012 we introduced our innovative Super User Program on the Sky Help Forum Community, recognising the super contributions from some of our forum members. Our Sky Help Community Super Users are individuals from within our Community who are the ultimate Sky boffins. Their technical prowess, detailed knowledge and broad range of expertise mean that they are the most valuable commodity in sourcing answers to our Customers questions. Whether they are technical aficionados looking to get the optimum performance of advanced applications or a technophile looking to simply decipher the jargon our Super Users can offer insight and support across our Customer base. All of our Super Users are independent of Sky and offer a true Customer insight in how to get the best from our products and services.   We wanted to implement a Super User program which truly recognised those active members within our Community who were advocates of sharing knowledge and best practice and wholeheartedly encompassed our methodology of peer to peer support and inclusion.   In being an advocate of our Customers and understanding their viewpoint our Super Users can offer a definitive insight into the sentiment of our audience and work with us to envisage a cohesive community built upon our core values. Our current base of 12 Super Users, have been recognised not only by Sky but by their peers as frequent, knowledgeable contributors with the Kudos and Accepted solutions to prove they are ‘worthy’ 🙂   To recognise the contribution of our band of expert Superfans we provide them with enhanced access to encapsulate them as part of the Sky team. “The Boardroom” our Private Community boiler room allows us to engage with our Super Users at a unique level understanding their views, ideas and feedback on new product trials, services and general discussions about almost everything. Not only that, but their contributions to our dedicated Knowledge Base and Monthly Blog articles truly gives a unique view of what it means to be a Super User and a true Sky Superfan.   One of our original community members on the Sky Help Forum was Annie+UK who registered on 27th October 2010 and has become a mainstay Sky boffin across our Help Forum offering insightful help and support to our Customers.     As a respected senior member within our community Annie+UK is our ultimate Superfan and was a first choice to join our Super User Program when launched.   However, it wasn’t always that way. During the early days, Annie+UK felt frustrations with regard to issues she was having related to her service provision and how this was handled from a customer support point of view, all of her frustrations were evident in her posts. A lot of this had to do with transparency, product development and honest communication. In case managing the issues experienced by Annie+UK we began to develop a foundation of open communication and feedback which offered us key insights into the sentiment of our wider community. Her insight was invaluable as a true testament of the value of our Customer’s knowledge and experience. Cultivating a strong relationship based on a mutual support and shared knowledge has integrated Annie+UK and our wider Super Users into the Sky team.   Being part of the Super User program and having the opportunity to build relationships with the Sky team allowed us to be more open and honest and along with having the opportunity to be involved in beta trials has helped change Annie+Uk’s opinion and rather than leaving the community she has become an advocate, this is evident in her having read 90%of all posts across our Community Forum and in supporting her peer customer group has responded to in excess of 2,750 Customer queries.                                             Her continued support of our Community members in sharing her knowledge and advice has assured her respected status as one of our key Super Users. She is not afraid to ask difficult questions and pose feedback directly to us based on Customer experiences which, assures that we can continually improve our service for our Customers. Her inspirational and engaging manner has assured she is an advocate of both our Customers and Sky which, has been key in the continued development of our Community and indeed our service provision.     In essence, Annie+UK has spent over 1 ½ years logged into the community, for a community that is less than 3 years old…making Annie+UK our ultimate Super Fan.      

Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________       Best Social Support Program BSkyB 2013   BskyB has become an integral part of our modern entertainment society with in excess of 10 million subscribers across the UK and Ireland.   As part of our core vision of “Believe in Better” we have implemented a multi-platform Customer interaction and engagement model to create a culture of entertaining, exciting and inspiring our Customers. As a pioneer of modern entertainment and Customer service we developed a fully integrated Social support Customer program encapsulating Sky Help Forums, Facebook and Twitter delivering service excellence whenever and wherever our Customers need us.   Our Vision   “To ensure our existing Community and Social Media channels are kept relevant, informative and engaging. To develop emergent channels to engage our current subscribers, enhance our brand/recognition with our Online Customer base.”   Our core goal in implementing a cohesive Customer Service structure is centered upon the integration of our Social Channels and Customer support services, whilst promoting a culture of peer to peer support and online self-help.   Empowering our Customers to utilise the wealth of self-service options online supports the fast paced lifestyles of our Customer base allowing them to access the information they need at the click of a button at a time that suits them. In increasing community traffic and engagement, we have identified a core improvement in Customer first time resolution, Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.   Our Strategy   Our core methodology within Sky is “Believe in Better” from investing in our Customers, our product and our people we have created a culture of continuous improvement and development. Our social support streams are unique in their integration as a cohesive Social Customer Support program combining an end to end Customer experience.   The Sky Help Forum launched in October 2010 since then our community has grown to nearly 250,000 registered users, which is 250% up on last year.   We have seen our engagement on the community increase in the last year and we now have 9,708 marked accepted solutions. Over the last six months our thread views have reached in excess of 1.5 million each week.   We have also introduced Ask a Question and a Knowledge Base to help support our Customers in getting an answer to their query or issue quickly.   Our Knowledge Base is proving a great success to both our Community and Sky as a whole. We currently have 65 articles within the Knowledge Base with in excess of 127,813 article views in one month alone (February – March 2013) Our Knowledge Base is fast becoming a “One Stop Shop” for troubleshooting guides, hints & tips and ‘How To’ guides for our Community members and visitors.   To enrich support for our Customers we have expanded our Communities & Social Media team at Sky to incorporate a Community & Engagement team and a Designated Case Handling team. In optimising our Customer Service strategy in terms of social support we have utilised both the traditional Customer insight frameworks based upon KPIs of Customer sentiment, traffic and SEO analysis but also we have implemented a core Customer insight strategy to ensure that we continue to improve the service we offer our audience.   Our Customer insight strategy includes the implementation of Customer direct feedback sessions based both in an online WebEx environment and Customer closeness events to understand the experiences of our Customers. This insight has proved invaluable in the continued improvement of Customer support with the future implementation of gamification and supportive resources. The insight provided in terms of the continued optimisation of our social platforms, use of KPI metrics in terms of sentiment, SEO analytics and Customer satisfaction also support continued improvement across our Contact Centre operations providing key insight into service provision, product insight and Customer engagement thus influencing improvement programs across the organisation.   As part of our Customer improvement initiatives we have launched the One Service Programme offering an individualised Customer support stream within our Contact Centres and our dedicated One Service online Community.   The core ethos of One Service is to provide our Customers with continued Service Excellence in their end to end Customer journey from joining Sky to help and support. The initial One Service programme has launched to a pilot group customer base of 400,000 Customers in a key geographical location.   The measures of success in terms of individualised support have been resoundingly successful in terms of core operational metrics of Customer First Time resolution, Customer satisfaction and NPS. We have introduced brand new online features exclusively for One Service Customers including “My Help Request” that allows our Customers to manage their account and get in touch with us should they have any questions or experience any issues.   The My Help Request Portal is a central hub to raise help requests and manage any existing enquiries related to Sky products and services. All My Help Requests are case managed by our team of specialist trained Sky staff who resolve queries and answer any questions within 24 hours providing updates via text alerts or email.   In offering our Customers multi-platform help it was key that our internal structure in terms of processes and insight was robust and inclusive in terms of shared knowledge and best practice. Developing a core network of Specialists across our varying products and services assures that our audience demographic receives simply great service regardless of their chosen channel. Historically, our internal operational structure and process was designed to support Customer interaction in a standardised contact centre format however, with the inception of help and support across social channels outlining Customer journeys based upon each individual social channel was imperative in offering tailored solutions based on the method of contact.   Our core Customer Response Management system is now reflective of each individual Customer’s journey across all products and contact channels. Individual case management of each Customer’s enquiries across both our Lithium Social Monitoring/Social interaction platform and our internal Customer Response Management system provides a holistic view of each Customer’s activity and interactions allowing our people to provide an individualised service in understanding our Customers.   “Just knowing this has been achieved with the customer only needing their use of their smartphone/tablet/laptop opens up a world of possibilities. No more waiting on hold, no more call flows or robotic responses, just 100% satisfaction! And the best part of it all? The system is still in its infancy and will get even better with future updates!” - Dave Charleston, Community Co-Ordinator   Outcome/Results   As a pioneer of multi-platform entertainment and Customer interaction we continue to develop new and innovative ways to engage and offer support to our Customers. From Social Media to Interactive help via their Remote Control we have assured that our Customers are at the heart of our business.   The introduction of social interaction across multiple platforms has shown not only seen an increase in interactivity– over 82,000 interactions per month - but an increase in Customer satisfaction to 87%. Similarly, NPS for both Twitter and Chat Services has also increased substantially to 61% and 64% respectively.   In addition to increased usage and satisfaction, BSkyB has seen significant savings through call deflection with circa 11% Customers saying their visit to the forum partially resolved their query; and a further 29% of customers surveyed within the forum stating their query had been fully resolved to their satisfaction negating the requirement to contact us via telephone.   “I think that our use of social media along with our own in-house help forum is second to none due to the interaction we are enabled to have with our customers. Actually dealing with their inquiries through this form of communication allows us to deal with a customer at a time which is convenient for them, but it also allows us to deal with a customer from their initial query all the way through to a resolution for the most part.” - Fraser Hughes, Community Co-Ordinator      

Company: CommSec Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (benshute) Social Media Manager Community: CommSec Community (commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Best New Community, Best Community Technical Implementation, Best Community Design ________________________________________________   The CommSec Community is a unique proposition within the Australian online broking space. CommSec, as Australia’s largest online broker, has created a place for customers to connect with each other and discuss the share market, trading strategies, charting and other aspects of online trading. Regardless of how long they have been trading, or what their trading style is, this is a place where all customers can feel comfortable and learn from each other.   We launched in early February with a migrated client base from our previous chat room functionality. Over the last 6 weeks, they have populated with content - insights into sectors and stocks, charts on the price of gold, silver, oil and currencies, and offered up many ideas for enhancements to make the community a better place for all.     From a design and technical perspective, we have a number of custom enhancements to the platform which we believe are firsts in their field: We have the latest market indices and traded stocks constantly updating within the Community.                                                                     2. We have integrated ASX stock codes within the posting functionality, which allows us to: Generate sector and company specific views of the community Pull in and display the latest price information as it relates to the particular stock Display any company announcements that are made Members can buy and sell stocks directly from within the Community, add a stock to their watch list, or get a more detailed quote 3.  We have also included a sentiment indicator as part of the post creation page, where members discussing a stock can tell us if they think it’s a buy, hold, sell, reduce or accumulate. This allows us to: Measure market, sector and stock sentiment Compare that sentiment to the most traded stock data from the ASX While we are in our infancy, we are looking at a number of future enhancements that will take the aggregated data we are capturing and use it to foster the vision of our customers learning from each other.

Company: LandlordStation Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   LandlordStation is a startup company founded in 2010 which provides web-based software apps to property managers and landlords throughout the US. Although our community (and company) are new and small, both are growing at rapid clips. More importantly, we understand and value the importance of communities and other social platforms and have made a concerted effort built them into the core of our business.   The LandlordStation Community was launched in January of 2013, as a way for our uniquely independent clientele to have a convenient and open way to communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, and generally connect to their peers in a very fragmented industry. Our goal with the community is to grow awareness of our brand in the wider property management industry and improve our traffic channels with new and unique content.     We have already begun to see a return on this investment as traffic from the community and searches for the community have grown rapidly over recent months and are already causing a noticeable difference in the cost of our traffic generation as we chip away at the percentage of our traffic that is generated by PPC and other advertising channels. We already have hundreds of excellent users (and a few budding Superusers) as well as posts that continue to receive hundreds of daily views by landlords from across the country. Our number of total post views is at 100,000 within 75 days of launch. As we continue to gain traction with both our community and company, we expect to continue to see rapid growth in our user-base with the goal of being the premier community for this industry.   Community Impact since launch: Conversion rate for purchases on our main site for traffic referred by the Community (and referrals from Community oriented social campaigns) is more than 2X the conversion rate from PPC traffic. Dramatic increase in organic Google searches for LandlordStation by name (or close variation) in Q1 2013 v. Q4 2012 suggesting a higher brand awareness driven in large part by the Community. Increase in traffic driven by real-time keywords. For example, we recently noted revenue generation from keywords based on a popular real estate news story that was referenced and linked in our Community. SEO for real-time or newsworthy keywords is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish and we are very pleased that we are seeing this in such a young community. As illustrated in the screenshot below, we received significant traffic during this period for the keyword "landlord whipped tenant" which was the subject of a news story referenced in the community.   As we continue to grow our company and our community, we feel strongly that social is core value, not an add-on strategy. We will shortly being moving all of our customer service forums and knowledge base inside the Community as well which will increase traffic and hopefully create an even more vibrant area for our clients and our contributors.

Company: SFR Entry submitted by: Sandie Hodiesne (SH) Social Media Manager Community: Le Forum SFR (forum.sfr.fr) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   SFR Forum, an online Adventure, a great Human Adventure!   SFR Forum exists since 2008. It’s a place where web advisors used to respond automatically to customer requests either in a public or private mode.   During spring 2012, we faced a big challenge: Moving from an online customer services model to a 100% peer-to-peer Support Community model. A new way of thinking and managing information - a complete break and a real step forward into the world of online peer-to-peer Communities.   We decided to give to our future community as much space and autonomy as we could provide them with. We decided to take drastic decision. We kept the name but started from a white sheet without capitalizing on the old threads and existing content which could remind us of our previous operating processes.   We identified about thirty Super-users on our various social media properties (“Atelier SFR”, old “SFR Forum”, “HUB”). With the active help of our community managers, we gathered contact details for all of the super-users. A first contact was made through email. Afterward we contacted them all by phone and explained them this huge new project. Out of the 30 contacts, 29 were very enthusiastic and immediately ready to engage in this Adventure. Sandie (SFR’s Social Media Manager) set up 2 video conference meetings to discuss with the super-users in order to decrease the growing fear regarding the new community, to answer to remarks such as “it was better before with the old forum”, and to create the first relationships between participants. Fabien and Manuella, two community managers from the beginning, were collaborating with Sandie during these meetings and suggested a Beta test phase of one month. We explained to our super-users what would be their role and why it would be beneficial for them to be part of the New Forum beta phase. During this month, they would be able contribute to the community editorial content, create their own content, find new ways to communicate with the community management team in a public mode and embrace a heads-on the philosophy of the new Forum.   The day before the D-Day, the enthusiasm and the engagement of our “Founders” was very big. Dartagnan, Michel2, DocMac, RafCorDel, Rebel, Kendokanne and all the others were very excited to be launched in the open and exposed to a new audience and a new community.   January 15 th at 5pm, great emotion and vibes: first discussions, first ranks reached, first Private Message conversations… The SFR peer-to-peer Community where users could share their customer experiences and help each other was born!   Our “Founders” were recognizable with their specific “Founders” badges created for them and quickly took care of the new users. The SFR community is their community and they are deciding everything about the choice of discussion to highlight, what to post on the blog or the Wikisphere … These super fans defend strongly this new philosophy. We could witness comments like « But where are the SFR advisors?” or “Here, there is only us, the community, satisfied customers happy to help and support others. If you need to access your confidential customer data, the community won’t be able to answer.” When the community is unable to answer you, we guide you to the right contact points after the diagnostic is made. In this community, we always try to find a solution!   Our super-users have a dedicated space, a “private room”, invisible from the other members. Through this private room, we inform them about cases that members face regularly and the answers we have and that they can be spread out across the community. They can also give us their feedback on what is working or not with the platform and further needed developments… It’s also in this private room that we discuss about our next video conference, meetings, special events such as call for topics for the blog.                                                                                                   To transmit these values across the community, members must have taken the ownership of this online space. For this magic to operate, the online community needs to resonate with the members. Each members needs to feel comfortable navigating this online community. The customer experience must be positive.   The video launch takes the advantage of this simplicity: the ability to create something great together.   The ranking starts in a reference universe known from all but gradually draws references from the gaming world, while relying on the values of the Forum:                 - The “Builders” who by their contributions and exchanges secure and solidify the base of collective knowledge:                 - The “Enchanters” are recognized both for the quality of information they provide and the benevolence that radiates around them:                 After only 1 month and a half, our community has now 40 super-users with a high level of posts - Vindedious (1600), Kendokanne (1700), Boriswap (1300), Dartagnan (1400)…  They are some of our heroes you can visit in the “Forum SFR” community.   Discussions between all the community members and the super-users give us the opportunity to detect very quickly any malfunction and to inform the community when a problem is solved. For example, Kendonkanne initiative helped to qualify a problem with sms billing, to solve it very quickly and to relay the information in a public mode. This enabled to reassure our customers that have send us a lot of sweet words.                             40 Super-users provide 50% of the Community content   In addition of this efficiency, pleasure of sharing and conviviality moved in : Almost 2,100 posts shared within our Community on the “Discussion du Comptoir” pages. In a month and half, discussions are as well about music and cinema as Art in general.   The strength brought by our Community Management team are: Sincerity and authenticity, the wish to humanize the online relationships, the genuine desire to develop and reward anonymous expert by making them shine under the limelight. We will meet for real and for the first time our super-users on March 22 nd . It’s our way to celebrate Spring!   Goal : The official launch of our super-users program and share its content – Virtual Workshop and meeting with SFR experts, SFR site visits, game to participate to events such as new mobile launch, celebration and more.   Their first mission, find a name to the program. And to close the day, a great surprise is waiting for them. One of the founders of the Manau Group will be there to explain the story of “La tribu de Dana”, a very well known song in the 90’s, before we capture a great picture of all our superusers with our Polaroid.   The relationship between and with our super-users is essential and strong. The idea for this year is to offer them a customized T-Shirt with their username, a way for us to build a story together… See you soon with more input about this great Adventure.   Sandie & the community management team : Cindy, Manuela, Fabien, Fanja & Emmanuelle   http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-est-la-Social-Media-Manager/ba-p/18598 http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-sont-vos-Community-Managers/ba-p/9936  

Company: Google Inc. Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (http://www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Google AdWords has been working closely with Lithium Engineering on seamless migration of our users from OpenId to OAuth2. We wanted to make sure that users who are coming to our Community are offered with a Single sign-on experience that they are used to when using other Google products.                                                       The OAuth2 implementation allows our users to use the same login and avatar for the Community as the one they are already using for other Google products and switch between various Google accounts. It also removed the need for Lithium to create, maintain and secure a login email and password store. All together it makes the sign-in process fast and secure for our users.

Company: Google Inc. Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (http://www.es.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   Our superfan story shows how like-minded and passionate Community members can take the lead and create high-quality, engaging content around their favorite product without any involvement of the Community Manager. All you need to do is to bring them together!                       After the Google AdWords Communities Summit (October 2013), when we brought all of our global Community superfans to California, our Spanish Top Contributors initiated a project aimed at creating AdWords performance user generated content. Project included:   1. YouTube channel with content around online advertising 22 videos, 2-9 min. each Channel location: http://www.youtube.com/user/proyectosem/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=da Fun fact: first videos were shot in Mountain View at the Google campus and in San Francisco straight after the Google AdWords Communities Summit.                                                         2. Integration with Community Top Contributors proactively promoting videos from the YouTube channel in the AdWords Community creating new performance content, engaging other users in discussions and providing advice on how to be successful with AdWords.                                                                                  

Company: Rogers Entry submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Manager, Social Media Support Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy category: Best Social Marketing Program ________________________________________________   Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert - connecting Rogers product teams with customers in an open conversation about their most challenging technology questions. Our new consumer website, Tech Essentials, was designed to provide Canadians with a deeper understanding of how today’s technology works.   To increase awareness for the site, corporate communications looked to the Rogers Community Forums for support. Over the last year the forums have become a platform for our product teams to engage directly with customers. In 2012, we covered mobile payment security and new product launches by hosting expert events.   Why use the Rogers Community Forums as a platform? We know that over 90% of registered users are Rogers customers based on SSO ID sign-in Events such as this give us a chance to present our point of view in an open and transparent way The event creates link love for programs like Tech Essentials and promotes SEO. The “Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert” forum series will run throughout 2013, providing our forum users with insider access to our product teams. Our first event covered roaming, a topic that can generate confusion and frustration for customers. We held an open Q&A over a two-hour period and generated a dozen questions and three Accepted Solutions. We received great feedback from customers as we clarified some misconceptions they had.   Marketing integration – the event was promoted through these owned channels: On our corporate blog Redboard On our online consumer magazine Connected Rogers Using direct channels, we invited 90,000 customers via email to the event Via Twitter - @RogersHelps, @RogersBuzz and using the #techessentials hashtag We also asked employees to invite family, friends and customers with an intranet story How does an event like this improve the customer experience? Product owners get to hear directly from customers. It generates immediate feedback that can be used to improve product offers.   How does an event like this drive revenue? The event was hosted just a few days before March Break, one of the most popular travel times for Canadians. By targeting customers we believe likely to roam, and providing instructions for roaming without worry, we expect more customers will purchase travel packs.   How does an event like this build advocacy? The Rogers Community Forums are peer-to-peer. By posting validated answers, we’re empowering members of the community to answer future questions. We’re looking forward to hosting future events, coordinating with the Tech Essentials Monthly Spotlight, some possible topics include data usage and how parents can keep their kids safe online.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.   Since launch in November 2011, our A1 Support Community grew significantly: our real substitution ranks around 25 percent (= percentage of users which perceive the A1 Support Community as primary service channel) and the crowd ratio is located around 80 percent. When looking at the charts, we managed to create a vitally and steady growing Community – but what are the qualitative actions we set to engage with our users and to motivate them to participate in the way they do?   On the one hand, it is all about motivation factors, gaming mechanics and gratification approaches: Transferring online into offline events: within 2012 we started the initiative “Community events”. We organized a guided tour at the A1 Technical Department. The Super Users were accompanied by A1 Device managers and the A1 Social Media management team for a meet & greets and to gain exclusive background-infos. “Community photo tour” – we exclusively invited users to a phototour to the Viennese zoo and equipped them with Hero-device smartphones to review the quality of the photo-cameras.   Hero of the month Award: Super Users – the most active users in our Community – are rewarded monthly for their outstanding contributions within the Community. Super Users as moderators: to show the most active Super Users our respect and trust, we gave them moderator roles within the Community. Now they are able to contribute even more to the content and quality of the A1 Support Community.                                               Exclusive boards, badges, ratings and rankings for Super Users are a matter of course as they were part of the concept when creating our new Community. On the other hand, we deeply link our A1 Social Media channels and provide target-group oriented content:   It all started by integrating the A1 Support Community in our Facebook fanpage. By doing so, we opened the Community to our established fan base on Facebook.   When comparing to our competitors in the Austrian telecommunications market , we keep a facebook fan-share of 59% and are therefore at the pole position with around 238,000 Facebook fans. On Facebook, three A1 Social Support agents provide fast and exclusive support. Additionally, we spread offers, lotteries and product information for our Facebook target group. Twitter is our channel for distributing company news as well as servicing support requests.   The A1 Blog provides product information, device and App reviews, etc. and is deeply linked with the A1 Support Community. The A1 Community actively creates content for our A1 Blog, eg. device reviews from users. The recruiting of our authors takes place via A1 Support Community and Facebook.   We take Customer experience one step further:   Initiatives like the Ideas concept take the customer experience to another level, where users can participate in the development and beta testing of products and solutions.   For that reason, we integrated our A1 Community in the development of the new “My A1” customer self-service area. Firstly, we asked them for ideas which functions they would like to see in the new Customer Self-Service area. After reviewing them, we gave them feedback concerning their ideas and invited them to join a workshop with the “My A1”-project managers. In one last step, the A1 Community had the chance to evaluate the scribbles made for “My A1” and give their feedback to be incorporated into the self-service area.                                         Not only the facts and figures proof that we are one the right path – in 2012, our A1 Support Community and Social Media commitment stood out at national and international Social Media and Community Awards.   In Hamburg, Germany, we were rewarded for the “Best Social Media Strategy” in the DACH region at the Social Media Economy Days 2012. At the Digital Communication Award 2012 the A1 Support Community was honored as the Best Online Community within the European online PR and communications branch as well as with the German Award for Online Communications 2012 in Berlin, Germany. In Austria, one of our integrated Social Media campaigns was rewarded with the Award for the Best Online- and Social Media communication granted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth.  

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ________________________________________________   In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.   We claim the top position in terms of technology, so our mission is also to advance service innovation.   More than one year after launching our community it’s time to take a look at the benefits we gained from it. We had an average extraordinary 270% growth rate on requests since the start.                                           To generate our Real Substitution value we integrated a randomized onsite survey on our website (www.a1.net). It pops up for community users after some time of activity. To get a valid outcome the number of cases is exceeding 300 every month and the respondent gets the survey only once every three months.   The Real Substitution rate shows how many of our users come to visit the community without contacting any other service channel we offer – in other words: how many users perceive the community as primary service channel. Additionally we measure if community visitors find a solution for their problem in the A1 Support Community.   For 2012 we reached an amazing Real Substitution value of 25%! That sums up to 168,000 Saved Interactions in one year whereupon only posts and search requests count as interactions in the A1 Support Community. A remarkable 26% of community users found their solution in the first minutes of their visit.                                           Especially in the field of crisis communication we were able to prevent a shitstorm by actively informing our customers about tariff changes and keeping the protest wave to a minimum. In four months we attained 60,000 contacts on the board that has been set up especially for this task.   Increasing Customer satisfaction and Growing Loyalty With our special customer loyalty program we offer low smartphone prices for our community users on a monthly basis. Our logged-in members are able to accept the offers directly in the relevant boards.     To increase customer satisfaction we already involve our Super Users in service and product development processes to guarantee the best outcome for us and our customers. This year we launched the new self service are on our website where we used this co-creation approach.   To generate leads we organize competitions that are cross and deep linked through all of our social media channels. An example is our Sony Xperia go outdoor smartphone test where our users got the chance to design the screenplay with us and win a device. The success of over 1 million views on YouTube proves us right!   To sum it up: Community activities push the Digital Service Shift 80% Crowd Ratio (Crowd Ratio = percentage of user-generated content) – thereof 20% is created by our most active users Reduction of development and beta testing expenses Lead generation due to our customer loyalty program Real Substitution value of 25%, call reduction – up to 16,000 reduced Support calls and emails per month  

Company: Sony Electronics Entry submitted by: Doug Heavener (heavenerp) Community Manager Community: Sony Support Community (community.sony.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   Why should our Sony Community win the “Best New Community” Lithy Award? Well here’s just a few of the incredible things we think stand out with our community.   We get personal: We welcome all community members by embedding a welcome video into our community from our Sony Experts. We want our community members to immediately be able to relate/bond with our community experts.     We listen to our community: We have also embedded a monthly live webcast. These webcasts showcase Sony products and our Sony product experts. Our webcasts are geared towards our customers based on the types of questions we are seeing within the community. Our members are able to ask questions in real time and have them addressed by our product experts during the live webcasts.     We have the support of our employees: We are taking an aggressive approach to assist our community member by having a large amount of Sony employees actively participating in the community as product experts. Our employees spend an average/minimum of 1 hour a day moderating and answering member posts. This allows us to proactively address customer’s issues in a timely manner. Whether it’s a technical post or a customer service issue, we can address the customers’ needs in real time. For example, if a post comes in addressing poor customer service, our product experts will immediately escalate those post to our community relations team to handle. This has proven to be an effective way to keep issues from blowing up within the community. …. This is our way of trying to stay ahead of our customers and actively.   We showcase our expertise: We are using Sony Heritage for our upcoming Sony expert bios. Our current product experts that we have participating in the community have an average of 15 years of service with Sony. The amount of knowledge our employees have is incredible. You can say we’ve grown up with Sony products, have seen the technology grow and the products evolve to what they are today. But we still remember the first Walkman, first CD player, seen the technology Are our Sony Heritage goes beyond us…… to our parents, our grandparents, those who owned the first Sony TV, the first Transistor Radio, the first Walkman, etc. Our Sony heritage is strong. We’ve witnessed leaps and bounds in the evolution of our products and technology and we are all ready to share the knowledge we possess with our customers.   We get results: Our Search Engine Optimization using Google has increased to an incredible 490K. Our metrics continue to grow and have moved steady upward showing positive results. Lithium is one of the best customer service tools. None of them can even compare to the potential that the Sony Community brings to our customer service world. I can truly say, I have never been so excited about a customer service tool as I am about the Sony Community. It is an amazing tool that will change the way we do customer service forever!

Company: LEGO Systems Inc. Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   Since its inception in 1932, the LEGO Group has come a long way - from a small carpenter’s workshop, to a leading global enterprise, always looking for ways to reinvent the brand experience to maintain its world class service. With the growth of social, it was a natural impetus to build a social online experience which encouraged users to interact, engage and share with each other in a safe and secure way, while maintaining the fun, learning and imaginative elements that were aligned to the brand values.   The business aim was to create an interactive social online experience (via an infused dot com presence) that was buzzing in engagement whilst maintaining its simplicity and ease of use, in a safe and secure environment that provided users with quicker “get to times”.  We have a high affinity with users in the 7-14 years age bracket, so online safety and security was paramount.  We were also migrating our users from our old forums to the Lithium platform, so our first step was to understand the issues our existing user community was facing and leverage their feedback to ensure our new launch met their needs.  The responses we received included:   Faster moderation Increased engagement with LEGO staff Better structure to the forums More guidance on rules Less “spam” We launched the new community on 9 November 2012 with great success – migrated 2.4 million users and 4+ million posts. There was 0% data and user loss and 1000 users joined the community within the first hour.       “Get to Times” had reduced by more than 7hrs from 8hrs in January 2012 to 56 mins when measured in December 2012. At the same time, user interaction went up by 62% when compared to interaction in the previous forums the year prior.   With a more interactive and structured community reflecting features available on other social platforms such as “Likes” introduced, and additional features such as a new ranking structure, user interviews, story and role play forums as well as online polling, paved the way to a significant increase in user activity.   New Polling & Ranking Features:   Some of the new ranks:   There was also a large reduction in spam based on changing the ranking structure from the old posting only system to a new more varied criteria including user defined opinion on quality and rating of content. The new ranks have instilled a culture of support and encouragement between the users and we now have a very healthy community feel.   We changed our moderation and engagement coverage set up to ensure 24/7 coverage, with 8 team members located in different time zones and geographical locations around the world. With the backing of help from vendor moderators, the core LEGO team now has more freedom to actively engage with users, spending hours engaging per week now in comparison to minutes previously.   We set up a comprehensive help/FAQ section where users can check out the rules, how to change signatures and generally tailor their own settings. For new users, after reading the FAQs, in every single forum we have “Welcome to newbie” or “Adopt a newbie” topics where new users can come in and introduce themselves and existing users will take them under their wings and help bring them into the community.   As an example of how engaged some of our kids are, in January 2013, the stats tell us that our 27 highest ranked users (all Forestmen, Ninjas, Aztec Warriors or Conquistadors) each spent 74 hours in the community per week! They’re very dedicated!   The new LEGO.com community embodies the LEGO brand values of fun, creativity, quality and originality. Visit community.lego.com to view for yourself.  

Company: LEGO Systems Inc. Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   Girl members of the LEGO.com community had been a rare breed. On our old message board platform, we had around a 5% female portion of active users. Since we upgraded the platform, we’ve been enabled to improve our ranking structure and better reward both active and creative participation. Girls have become very active in our story-writing forums, as an example; reading, writing and providing encouragement to others. Since the changes, we’ve seen an increase in activity from girls and they currently make up around 15% of the active community user base.   We have stories about passionate role players who know the finest details of the Lord of the Rings movies and help to keep the forum role plays “canon”/on story. We also have brother and sister pairings who have grown up building LEGO together and write stories, role play and submit creations both separately and together. Possibly one of our best user stories centers on a user who couldn’t be considered anything less than “super”! The user in question is JayZX535.   JayZX535 had been a non-active browser/reader on the old forums, having registered in July of 2012, and was 13 years old at the time. When we migrated our community from our old forums to the new Lithium platform, we were able to create a new ranking structure. We set up participatory ranks whose levels were based on LEGO through the ages, so that you begin at Caveman, move to Pharaoh and upwards and onwards through Gladiator, Samurai Warrior, Ninja and many more.     In addition, we were able to create reader ranks that were based on more passive participation such as reading posts and liking content. The first rank of which is “Apprentice Reader” and the second of which is “Master Reader”.   In December 2012, a month after launching the new forums, we could see we had a solitary Master Reader on the forums and both users and staff began speculating about it. The users asking what criteria were necessary for reaching the rank and the community team wondering why a user might be so highly passively participatory but have never posted a single comment (at the time, JayZX535 spent 4340 minutes online, with 546 likes/kudos given and had read 16551 posts). We were all intrigued.   Shortly after, we had begun a user interview initiative where we would identify positive and pro-active community members and ask them questions to publish their answers in full view of the rest of the community. This provided the users selected with some community celebrity status and also acted well for us to be holding such positive members up as role models.   We decided that we couldn’t resist inviting this intriguing “lurker” to participate in an upcoming interview and so we sent an email to the registered address with the interview questions. We immediately received an automated security response that said:   “To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.   If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.   Click the link below to fill out the request:”   With some slight trepidation, we continued to fill in the form and sent in the request, only to receive an error message. We thought that would be the end of our opportunity to have an interview with the enigmatic JayZX535.   The next day, we checked the mail folder for the other interview requests we had sent and found the following interview responses from JayZX535:       It seems we had lifted the lid on months of pent up desire to be heard and to participate and it was only parental approval that was previously holding the user back. Once the parents had received this request from us and could see we were a safe, creative and friendly community, they had given the green light not just for the interview but for ongoing active participation in the forums. The next revelation was that JayZX535 turned out to be a girl when everyone had assumed she was a boy! She began posting at an exponential rate and, with a lot of the active rank groundwork covered as a Master Reader, began shooting up the ranks faster than any other user we’d seen. Posting stories, roleplaying and generally making friends with all of the users who had wished her well via the interview, JayZX535 is now at Rank 8, a Samurai Warrior, and has submitted 1244 posts! Since the launch of the new platform in November of 2012, JayZX535 has now spent 40,059 minutes online and received 2290 likes/kudos! She has read 68,180 posts and given out 1663 likes/kudos, herself.                           She received an overwhelmingly positive reception from the other active users:     You can read some of JayZX535’s Ninja stories here: https://community.lego.com/t5/NINJAGO-Stories/The-Stroke-of-Midnight/m-p/4604354#M65411 https://community.lego.com/t5/NINJAGO-Stories/On-Borrowed-Time/m-p/4932432#M70559 https://community.lego.com/t5/LEGO-SUPERHEROES-Stories/Watch-for-Me-by-Moonlight-A-story-by-JayZX535/m-p/4871196#M3196  

Company: Canon Entry submitted by: Patricia DiPasquale (pmdCanon) Sr. Manager, Internet Marketing Community: Canon Forum (forums.usa.canon.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   The Canon Forum has been a long time in the making. Not being permitted to respond on other forums, we wanted one of our own, although the risk factor was high since it would be living on a Canon property. Our risk mitigation plans had to be spot-on and accepted by executive management, as well by the Canon Call Center since they would ultimately be responsible for moderation. After great success with our Facebook launch, we knew the community would appreciate a forum hosted by Canon, and we were proven right.     Going with best practices, our Web Intelligence team scoured the web for active, positive, passionate Canon advocates to participate in the beta release. All who were invited were excited to be a part of the launch, with one gentleman making his way out from the wilderness to find a signal in order to respond.     We gained a great deal of valuable insight from these Pioneers—as we have tagged them—from functional issues to suggestions as well as asking what was to be expected from a Canon Forum… both how Canon would participate and what the members would be able to discuss. The Canon Community is vocal and passionate, leaving us to walk a fine line between providing information when possible and remaining quiet when it would otherwise spiral out of control.   The Forum was implemented to provide both a place for these passionate Canon fans to congregate with like-minded people as well as allowing Canon to hear the voice of the customer, meaning, hearing firsthand what people were saying. We want to know the good, the bad and the ugly so that we can learn from it.   Our initial marketing plan included a post to Facebook, a press release and an email to our over 2MM person email list.   However, the spike in registrations we saw after the Facebook post (1) and Press Release (2) went viral (over 1,000 registrations in a single day!), caused us to postpone our email plans. Our Call Center was just beginning to get acclimated to this new platform, and feared that the email might be too successful and overextend their resources.                                                                 The Canon Forum was launched publicly on November 5, 2012 and since then we have accumulated over 5,100 registered users and have over 2.8MM page views. Of those registered users, almost half are Contributors, with less than 1% of the Contributors (17 members) providing 27% of the content. The Community Health Index (CHI) score is a respectable 525.     *Top 17 are comprised of Frequent, Super and Valued Contributors   As of March 10, 2013, the stats are as follows:                                 Just recently, two of our members became Super Contributors and another became a Valued Contributor, rank levels 9 & 10, respectively. They have 778 posts, 17,068 page views, 224 kudos received, and 22 accepted solutions between them. And this was in a just under four months time.   We went from 5 boards to 16 boards in a matter of weeks. As expected, the Camera board grew the quickest, first splitting into three boards and soon thereafter splitting into the seven separate boards that it is now.                                 Our moderation rules are such that Canon will not respond for at least 48 hours, unless it is something that cannot be answered by the community, such as a warranty question. But when it’s a question of quality, it is the Canon way to be quiet until a full review has been completed by the parent company (Canon Inc.), which is something we know isn’t acceptable in the social arena. It didn’t take long before an issue bubbled up from other forums and an investigation began in earnest.   First we responded by saying only that we got the message, but once the issue was determined, details of the cause were revealed and that a firmware update would be released as soon as it was ready. The community was ecstatic—even though the solution wasn’t ready to go—and the thanks came pouring in no sooner we announced that a fix was in the works… 25 minutes to be exact!     This occurrence has made it crystal clear to executive management that the Community is beneficial, even when the news isn’t good. We are working out faster response times that will benefit both Canon and our end user.   And now that we have gained the trust of our most ardent fans, we will continue to listen and respond in a timely manner, without shying away from hot issues. The next steps for enhancing the Forum will be to have a bi-monthly “Chat with an Expert” events. The Forum has provided the opportunity to interact directly with our customers, and from there, almost anything is possible!

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design ________________________________________________   We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.       But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.     While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as: Customized categories and sub category pages User options (turn on/off elements on homepage) Custom banners area Activity feeds Feature videos   These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.     We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.    

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   With a constant demand from customers to interact with Telstra, CrowdSupport was developed to be an online social hub for customers to quickly help each other, help themselves. We wanted to be able to provide our community with the best possible answers from within Telstra as well as leveraging external content to provide rich and relevant support.     To bring this vision to life we knew we had to develop CrowdSupport as a platform that was not only visually appealing but allowed content to flow fluidly between sources and the community in a responsive method to maximise the benefit to our community. To do this we began with a World First! By integrating the Microsoft community support knowledge base into the Lithium platform we are able to pull content from the Microsoft community and display into CrowdSupport, providing richer results to our community when they are searching for answers.     In addition, by using the Lithium REST API we have integrated CrowdSupport content into other assets including the Telstra website (Telstra.com) & our Telstra 24x7 mobile and tablet apps. We’ve also developed our Live Services Portal using the Google search appliance integration to aggregate and surface community content into search results on Telstra.com. These types of integrations mean our customers can access the CrowdSupport community from a range of platforms and devices so that customers can use the community in any way that they desire.       To ensure that our customers could make the best use of these new features, we’ve increased the options available to our customers to engage through introducing a range of new enhancements to the presentation layer. We’ve enhanced the layout and design of our knowledge base so that accepted knowledgebase threads now present the most relevant information first so that our customers get the right answer fast. We’ve also integrated with the REST API to create a custom homepage that surfaces trending community interaction and statistics .         Use of Lithium Rest API to customize pages high traffic pages and optimize the user experience In terms of content upload, we’re enabling Ooyala video functionality to allow all Telstra customers to submit video content without requiring a You Tube account & we’ve integrated the Lithium contest component to better engage with our customers and encourage contribution which has proven to be a real success.                                             Later this year we will also be introducing Single Sign on for all Telstra customers which will significantly alleviate registration headaches for customers using CrowdSupport. Customer rating and reviews that will allow our customers to provide direct feedback about our products and services Use the Lithium REST API to develop the “Ask a mate Widget” which will allow customers to access relevant CrowdSupport content and ask question on product and service pages on telstra.com