Company: Vodafone UK  Entry submitted by: James Butler (Butlerj7) Digital Product Manager Community: Vodafone UK eForum Community (http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/) Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   Vodafone is one of the world's leading mobile communications providers, operating in more than 30 countries and in partnership with networks in over 40 more. Across the world, we have almost 360 million customers and around 19 million in the UK.   Primary Objectives for 2014 Improve deflection from assisted service channels [Calls, LiveChat] Improve commercial leads Increase community engagement   Improve deflection from assisted service channels [Calls, LiveChat] Community deflection from assisted channels increased in FY 14/15 by 2.4% YoY to 22.8%. Deflecting 2.2 million customers from assisted service channels.   How we achieved this: Increase visibility of solved topics: In the three months after optimisation the total number of solutions had increased by 18% and total solution visits had increased by 16%.   Increased traffic to self-serve content: Traffic from Contact Us page to Community increased by 41% YoY as more customers select it as channel of choice. Since launching new custom component functionality in Sep 2014, 21,000 visitors have navigated directly to self-serve tools.   Improve commercial leads In FY 14/15, on average, 800 orders a month visit the Community on their way to checkout.   How we achieved this: Promotion of new devices and services: Custom component banners are seen by 130,000 visitors a week, generating high CTR and awareness. Blog content integrated: Rich content added into blog templates on the Community driving further awareness and encouraging discussions.    Increase community engagement In Aug 2014 we launched the Premium Gameification module, with 26 badges and a review of our on-boarding experience. Since launched, 205,529 badges have been awarded, with 10 new members identified and added to our nurturing programme to develop Super Users.   Here is an overview of their activity since registering [Aug 14 – Mar 15]: Number of Posts 354 Total Posts Read 14050 Gross Thanks Given 127 Gross Thanks Received 496 Total Minutes Online 6778 Accepted Solutions 11 Total Sign ins 439   How we achieved this: Use bespoke functionality to identify potential Super Users: New members must achieve the first 5 ‘core functionality’ badges before unlocking further badges [Post, Reply, Give Kudos, Receive Kudos, and Update Profile]. This means that highly engaged users are identified early. Additional business results   After launching Premium Gameification, we observed an increase in engagement across all of the core activities we targeted, with a 20% increase in kudos and a 7% increase in solutions.   3 months before 3 months after Topics 4,466 5,590 Replies 28,777 [6.4 Replies per Topic] 35,319 [6.3 Replies per Topic] Kudos 16,540 [3.7 Kudos per Topic] 19,845 [3.6 Kudos per Topic] Solutions 588 [0.1 Solutions per Topic] 634 [0.1 Solutions per Topic] Total Tagged Messages 928 978                         In order to earn the Welcome to the Community badge, awarded for completing the first 5 ‘core functionality’ badges, members would need to fill out a profile bio.   Of the new members who we identified as potential new super users, the vast majority of them personalised their avatar, give a detailed biography and completed all other relevant fields [what device do you have, are you PAYG or PAYM customer]. Here are some great examples:    

Company: Advent Software  Entry submitted by: Al Castillo (Al) Solutions Manager, Advent Direct Community Community: Advent Direct® Community (https://community.advent.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     Advent Software has a 30 year history of technology leadership in the investment management industry. Our client base spans over 4,400 firms, from established global institutions to small start-up practices, in nearly 60 countries. We view our clients as collaborators, and are constantly seeking to improve our solutions to break down boundaries between systems, people, and information.   Technology as an industry, whether consumer-facing or in the enterprise, is becoming increasingly personalized for the individual user, and as a technology company, Advent strives to be at the forefront of that trend. In November 2013, Advent Software unveiled Advent Direct® Community, a new, interactive way for Advent clients and partners – from disparate parts of the investment management industry – to connect, share information, and learn best practices. In what is so frequently an adversarial and information-hoarding environment, Advent Direct Community provides a unique opportunity for financial industry practitioners and firms to engage with each other and with Advent in an open, personalized, collaborative, and transparent forum.   With Advent Direct Community, we set out to design a website that mirrored our goals of building a personal, transparent community while also providing a simple and familiar experience that would be true to the overall Advent brand. The community design thus is consistent with the look and feel of other Advent properties – simple but bold, sophisticated colors and graphics that reflect our business and client base. From the beginning, we included members of our Marketing and Product teams to ensure that everything from menu navigation and other user interactions to font and color was on par with the high standard we set for other Advent applications.   From the very first click on the landing page, the user experience is all about personalization and ease of use. Instead of sifting through cluttered information that may or may not be relevant, new users answer a few brief questions at the onset and are then presented with customized content personal to their particular interests, minimizing the number of clicks to get to that relevant, recent content.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY PERSONAL LANDING PAGE     For example, when a user decides to “follow” a product on Advent Direct Community, they are auto-subscribed to the Lithium discussion board for that product, their menu is customized to include a direct link to the discussion board, and a product tile is added to their home page. The tile uses a “counter” approach to highlight contributions from the last seven days on the Lithium platform – Discussions, Answers, and Ideas – and it also provides a count for new and recently updated knowledge base articles. With a single click on any product tile line item, the user can see a list of the three most recent items and by clicking an item link they can view the conversation.  Alternatively, they can start a new discussion or view all discussions. Three distinct actions, one click. ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD     The Lithium platform has proven immensely valuable in serving as a conduit between Advent and our clients. Through the discussion area and “Idea Exchange” areas of the site, it has enabled us to deliver on our promise of transparent communication and acting on client feedback. We are particularly excited about the “Idea Exchange”, a relatively new feature of Advent Direct Community, where users can suggest, share, and vote on new ideas for Advent products. This has generated a number of constructive ideas that we are incorporating into new releases for our products. The Idea Exchange is, in effect, co-creation between Advent and our clients in action.  In addition, the Lithium platform enables users to give peers a visual “kudos” for post contributions, something which users have particularly glommed onto and helps build a network between Advent product users. Posts that are the most active or receive the most kudos are the most prominently displayed.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY IDEA EXCHANGE       “I love how Advent has gamified Advent Direct Community. I really thrive off getting kudos from other users and rising to the top of the leadership board. I’ve also enjoyed the clean design, which allows me to navigate the site very easily. There aren’t a lot of things that distract me from finding what I need.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   “The design isn’t simple, but it makes things simple. I can see all the information I want to see right when I login and decide if I want to go further or go back to it later. It’s far from basic, but the design of the site makes it easy and basic for me to easily navigate to all the information that’s relevant to me with a scroll of the mouse.” – Tom Harmke, Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Reaves Asset Management   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY BOARD ANNOUNCEMENTS     We attribute the professional, vibrant, and friendly design of the site to the remarkable success Advent Direct Community has seen almost immediately after launching. Within just three months Advent Direct Community surpassed Advent’s previous client portal in registration numbers, with 8,500 registered users. Ninety percent of registered users visit monthly and about 1/3 visit on a weekly basis. The number of unique visitors to our core products boards is consistently strong and growing – double-digit growth for our Axys, APX and Moxy products.  And users aren’t just visiting more often; they’re starting more conversations, getting more replies, and the number of answers being generated by the community is increasing.   “The enhancements to Advent Direct Community make me feel like Advent is interested in my success and my development personally because they are creating ways and avenues for me to quickly become a subject expert in my field. I didn’t really have a great connection with other Advent product users before and now I am easily able to find users who are in the same position as I am. I can reach out to these users and get the information that I need while at the same time create a strong network of professionals that allows me to excel at my job.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD      

Company: HP Categories: Best Community ROI Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani) Community Name: HP Support Community URL: hp.com/supportforum Highlights:   Exponential growth in page views across 7 language Forums Averaging more that 65% year over year growth in forum visits  Global visits are approaching 20% of HP Customer Care Web Site  More than 20 million customers found solutions from 600,000+ posts Steady increases in problem resolution and call deflection rates   English launched Nov. 2008                               www.hp.com/supportforum m.hp.com/supportforum   Spanish launched March 2009 www.hp.com/foro     Simplified Chinese launched April 2009 www.hp.com.cn/get-answers     French launched June 2009 www.hp.com/assistance     Portuguese (Brazil) Sept 2009 www.hp.com.br/forum Portuguese (Portugal) www.hp.pt/forum     Korean Launched Nov 2009 www.hp.co.kr/hpcommunity     German Launched Feb 2010 www.hp.com/kundenforum  

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Google recognizes the opportunity to help SMBs improve their businesses through adding features which improve their advertising campaigns. AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. Advertisers can use the wide range of features available in AdWords to create campaigns to accomplish their business goals while staying within their budgets, helping to improve their return on investment and acquire additional customers.   Providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   According to Nielsen (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/which-forms-of-advertising-do-consumers-trust-and-act-on-the-most-36767/attachment/nielsen-trust-in-advertising-sept2013/), 68% of customers are more likely to adopt a product or feature if it is endorsed by other users. In 2013, the AdWords Community team explored the link between active usage of communities and impact on the depth of product adoption. The key goal for the team was to shorten the gap between “Learn” and “Try it out”.   Adwords Community homepage   The first step for the Google team working on this project was to connect the activity on the community to activity in an advertiser’s AdWords account. This was achieved by improving the integration between Lithium platform and the Google infrastructure. Second, the AdWords Community team took a list of key product features they felt would be most helpful for their customers’ AdWords success and mapped discussions, threads and articles to this list via custom tags. Additionally, AdWords community managers created and curated content on the most important product features. On the backend, the team connected the customized tags with the AdWords accounts, and noted activity in the accounts after views of the tagged content.   When a thread has a solution, a Community Manager or one of the Top Contributors can select from a list of custom tags to trigger the reporting.   The custom tags allow to attribute the content piece to a specific product feature.   Measuring ROI of support forums is a step-level change. Google is a numbers-driven company, and it was important for us to unlock a way to measure impact of the content from support forums on the bottom line.    In around 1 out of 4 cases the users would take action in their advertising account within 48 hours of viewing content that had a specific recommendation for a feature. This result is 50% higher than in other online help resources with non-user created content. Additionally, with the community’s lower cost and scalability a single recommendation can contribute to hundreds or thousands times more feature uptakes that in the case of a single 1:1 support interaction.

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Agata Krzysztofik (Agata) Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   AdWords is one of Google’s main products, used by millions of businesses worldwide, from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses.   With such a vast group of users, we wanted to create an online space where we could address any product related questions and provide strategic guidance to users in a scalable way.   We launched our AdWords Community on Lithium (in 6 languages) in 2011. The initial design was pretty “simple” reflecting the UI of broadly-known Google products such as Gmail.     Towards the end of 2012 we decide to redesign our Communities (in 8 languages at the time).     Our vision for the new design was “to provide members with a beautiful, engaging and wow! experience, and to make information easy to find”, while focusing on the following business goals:   Users are able to resolve their issues faster Users are more engaged with the Community Our Top Contributors are more satisfied with the Community Users have an improved perception of experts presence on the Community Users have increased satisfaction with ease of navigation The redesign wasn’t purely limited to a refreshed look, but also incorporated a launch of several brand new Community features that we defined and implemented together with Lithium developers.    The new Community features launched as part of the redesign spanned across 3 main themes:   1) Cleaner interface and easier, more intuitive navigation for user to get engaged   Custom Promo Carousel (With a banner builder incorporated into the admin)     More visibility into accepted solutions Stream of the most recent discussions and articles Recommended reading Quick access to follow discussions Ability to reply within thread At a glance view of discussions by categories Quick view of discussion stats   2) Better integration with social   Users able to add social networks to profile Easier social sharing of content across platforms   3) More recognition for engagement   Achievement badges Progress bar of your membership level Articles’ author box with integrated Google authorship tag The redesign has resulted in a 23% increase in the average daily accepted solutions, +28% in daily average kudos clicks and 19% increase in the overall satisfaction with the website (English Community results). The survey conducted among our Top Contributors also indicated overall positive feedback about the new UI combined with the newly added features. The main satisfaction driver among our top-engaged members were the achievement badges (86%).    

Company: Research in Motion Categories: Best Community Story or Anecdote Entered by: Kerri Birtch (kerrib), Social Support Planning Team Community Name: Blackberry Support Community Forums  URL: supportforums.blackberry.com What is a Super User? On the BlackBerry Support Community Forums they’re more than just active community members: They are truly the super glue that holds our community together.   Many of our Super Users spend more than 20 hours a week participating on our Forums and their individual post counts range from 1,000 to more than 30,000 posts! They’re always glad to answer questions, investigate issues and occasionally discuss the best way to prepare a cheeseburger. When asked why they keep coming back to the BSCF, the most common response is: “Because I love to help people and I love my BlackBerry”.   We recently celebrated our 3rd Birthday and to show our love for the community, we launched a rockin’ new redesign as well as a brand new Spanish instance.   In honour of our Birthday, Super User 'Bifocals' offered these kind words which we feel demonstrate the bond of all our Super Users:   “Through this forum I have met people from every spot on the globe. They have given me the priceless opportunity to learn about customs and cultures I could never have otherwise experienced. I am honored to have formed close friendships and share personal experiences with people I have would have never have had the pleasure of meeting outside of this forum. I joined this forum to learn about my Blackberry Curve. In retrospect of all I have gained here the technical knowledge I was looking for is actually a bonus. Happy Birthday BSCF!”   We can’t imagine what our Forums would be like without the glue that holds us together. So, to encourage these great community contributions, we as Administrators of the BSCF make every effort to maintain a great relationship with our Super Users.   Whether it’s our weekly Happy Friday posts, our quarterly Conference Calls or a chance to meet in person with our special invitation to attend BlackBerry World 2011 (formerly Wireless Enterprise Symposium), we make sure that we’re truly connecting with them on every level. They have our email, our phone number and our BBM PIN’s – and can get access to us just about any time of day.   This relationship allows us the chance to get feedback directly from the heart of the community, and to be honest, we also have a lot of fun along the way! By allowing them direct access and encouraging a feeling of camaraderie, there is a great feeling of mutual respect and understanding.   Without the super glue that is our Super Users, we would not be the vibrant support community we are today.

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Comcast, a fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service though all channels-traditional and atypical.  In recent years Comcast spent considerable energy and resources developing its digital strategy.  Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and enhancing product knowledge.  While social care is still new to most organizations, including Comcast, we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program.  This includes ramping up a strong operational and technological infrastructure capable of integrating social into our broad operations model.  This allows social to feed into all organizations providing for both rapid customer engagement and collaboration and message synchronization across all channels.   Comcast’s Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team has set and continues to drive an ambitious social media agenda encompassing technology, operations, broad functional alignment and support from all levels of the organization. Comcast has deployed Lithium products to help meet our goals to make significant improvements in our customers experience using social media. Through the use of these tools we have been able to create broad partnerships across the organization. This includes our communications and PR teams, marketing, operations and quality teams. DMO information is being used to augment business processes ranging from customer satisfaction to retention and sales to outage detection and prevention. The winter Olympics provided an opportunity for Comcast to showcase the social media platform in preventing incidents, resolving customer issues quickly and directly, and engage customers in entirely new and innovative ways.   Lithium’s products and services have supplied Comcast with the ability to track measure and engage with our customers in real-time on preferred customer platforms. This includes:   LSW: In order for Comcast to provide superior social media customer service while maintaining a single message, it was necessary for the company to develop a singular, seamless workflow.  The LSW product has been integrated at the corporate and divisional levels for care, marketing, communications and sales to allow customers to have a top-quality in-channel experience.  LSW has also helped us understand inbound volumes as we work to develop a true operational social care model which includes forecasting, service level management and staffing requirements.  Within five months of launching LSW, we were able to justify a 30% increase in staffing through the use of clear and concise operational reporting.  In a most recent case study, Comcast brought on 10 additional agents to support customers during the winter Olympics as social volume was expected to increase as much as 40% in a short three week period.  Comcast has a complex organizational structure with Care resources deployed geographically by division. Each division assigned several resources to assist the corporate Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team by handling geographically specific questions and concerns.  LSW allowed DMO to seamlessly re-queue work to our additional support teams. As a result we eliminated thousands of out-of-channel escalations by enabling the front line employee’s best equipped to handle these contacts to do so immediately.  Our marketing team also used the publisher feature to provide great Olympic content through the duration of the event. Community: Comcast has built a 2 million monthly peer-to-peer participation community, using Lithium’s platform.  Our community is different from third party social networking sites in that we are finding more brand advocates and loyalty within the community.  Comcast utilizes this audience to provide customers the opportunity to become beta testers with certain product releases.  This is also the only channel that has over 100 internal employees from throughout the company participating from a product, care, marketing, communications, engineers and user experience standpoint.  Through Lithium we control the content and knowledge base within the community’s approved solutions. Community posts and engagement can also be fully integrated into LSW, allowing us to engage with customers on multiple social platforms simultaneously while inviting third party platform customers into the community through sharing of publically available and approved solutions within our help and support site and communities. This helps the agents to both engage properly with the customers and provide an efficient way to enable future self-service. Social Operations Center: Comcast and Lithium teamed up to create a monitor wall or better known within Comcast as the Social Operations Center (SOC) to provide real-time volume, operations and social feeds. The SOC was designed specifically to act as an early warning mechanism for Comcast’s National Customer Operations team as we headed into the winter Olympics.  The Olympics is a significant event for Comcast and we needed to deploy a sophisticated way to monitor all social volume for any possible network feed issues and proactively alert the right internal fix group.  The SOC’s launch demonstrates our continued efforts to push the limits on what social media is capable of providing to the operational infrastructure of a complex organization such as Comcast.  The social operations center was active within the Olympic war room and is still currently active in our national workforce management center.  The SOC allows us to find groups of customers in real time who are reporting service concerns and the opportunity to escalate to the appropriate fix groups more rapidly than possible via traditional care channels.  Through this system proactive customer messaging become possible - potentially preventing significant call, chat and social media volume while providing a better overall customer experience with consistent messaging created and make available in all channels.  Lithium social Web was launched as a cross functional solution for organizations to engage properly with customers.  Currently we have four organizations using LSW for proper customer engagement and seamless customer interaction.         The Comcast Community forum gives our internal experts (from all over the company) an opportunity to engage with customers who may have concerns with a specific product.  The community allows customers to speak with the appropriate internal expert for proper assistance.  The community also allows our internal experts to help many with one response.  Superusers also play a large part in the community life cycle, assisting with peer-to-peer engagement.    The Social Operations Center delivers social real-time brand content company wide.  As mentioned above this is used for multiple purposes to analyze data, catch real time trends about the brand and show team productivity.  LSW: The DMO team is challenged to provide at least a 25% in-channel resolution rate and no greater then a 10% ticket escalation.     Community: The increase of community page views and participation is a key driver of our community growth.      SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.      

Company: Consorsbank  Entry submitted by: Clemens Eckstein (CCornerstone) Senior Expert e-Business Community: Die Wissenscommunity von Cortal Consors (https://wissen.cortalconsors.de) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Consorsbank by BNP Paribas is a leading direct bank in Europe that prides itself on “liberating clients from the restrictions of classic banks.” The digitalization has changed our daily lives – and that’s what we have translated to banking. Our broad product offerings, useful tools and the platform for customer ideas allows us to create the banking of tomorrow together with our customers.   The bank’s brand is built on the concept that financial investors hold the power to make the best decisions for their investments, and its goal is to provide product offerings that help achieve this objective.   Consorsbank is an online bank with no branches, therefore there are limited number of opportunities for the bank to connect with its customers in traditional ways. The bank wanted to create a social environment where they could better understand the needs of their customers, help them solve problems and build trusted relationships. Market factors also dictated the need for Consorsbank to differentiate itself from the increasingly competitive landscape and deliver on customers’ extreme expectations.   The bank was inspired by its challenges to move beyond the outdated “knowledge base” on its website and create a Total Community experience for private investors. The company envisioned a social community for the full gamut of investors, beginners to those with decades of experience. Consorsbank planned for a community where private investors could feel comfortable sharing knowledge, offering peer-to-peer support, and providing investment advice. Always on the forefront of innovation, Consorsbank also wanted to allow their customers greater influence and involvement in the company’s offerings by giving them the ability to rate the bank’s products and services.   Benefits of having a Lithium Total Community   In order to create a customer community that would meet these diverse needs, Consorsbank turned to Lithium to provide the Total Community software platform. Now Consorsbank’s Lithium-powered community boasts more than 14,000 community members with more than 8,500 posts. It gives customers a voice and builds trust between the bank and investors.   The main feature of the community is Consorsbank Websection Knowledge base, monitored by the bank’s community manager. It gives customers a voice and builds and gathers trusted user-generated content. The platform offers real and up-to-date help for customers, and provides a place for them to discuss financial markets and have their questions answered. Many long-term customers have significant knowledge and experience in a wide array of banking topics, and the community allows other members to tap into their insight. Additionally, a blog written by the bank’s subject matter experts allows Consorsbank to provide professional education to their community members.   Ideas Consorsbank Community Ideas is an aspect of the community that asks members to help create “ the bank of the future” - it’s a place for investors to share their wishes and proposals for the bank of tomorrow. The bank provides the community with bi-weekly themes to help drive the conversation. In addition, members evaluate products, compare prices and services, and suggest features to help make banking products transparent. This activation has produced 150 innovation ideas within 2 months.   Ratings and Reviews What really sets Consorsbank apart from other financial institutions is its Ratings & Reviews. Customers can rate and review the bank’s products and services and give feedback. Consorsbank is one of the first banks in Europe to drive this level of feedback and transparency with its customers.   “This is a bold move for us since it puts great power in the hands of our customers,” says Clemens Eckstein, Social Solutions Architect and Project Head at Consorsbank. “By allowing this open and public feedback from existing customers on our own platform, we provide absolute transparency into our strengths and weaknesses.”   The program has validated the importance of transparency and increased the bank’s conversion rate by 30% which was an increase of 1,500 customers per week.   Customer Voice 2.0   Consorsbank set the bar high with its Customer Voice 2.0 roadmap. Their goal was to transform themselves into a customer-centric company. By using Lithium’s Community Platform, they were able to leverage the ideas, knowledge and feedback from all of their customers. In doing so, Consorsbank is allowing customers to be active participants in developing an even more effective foundation for their money decisions, while also further enhancing the bank's connections with its customers. The trusted relationships they are building with their customers encourage open dialogue, brand advocacy, and loyalty. Customer Voice 2.0 is also extremely valuable to internal stakeholders by giving them valuable and immediate feedback regarding their products and services. Thus, it helps them to define a roadmap together with their customers.   Our Total Community results   In the first year the Consorsbank Community saw outstanding business results:   The average rating for current account holders is 4.3 out of 5 stars Increase of conversion rate by 30% netted 1,500 new customers each week 260 Ratings & Reviews by customers with more than 80 Comments 40% increase in click-through rate on banners showing Ratings & Reviews Unique Visitors increased by over 300% 17,000 community members 150 Community Innovation Ideas within two months Because of the success of the social platform, the marketing campaign introducing the new “Consorsbank” brand featured community as one of the main selling points. The campaign also included a commercial.    

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: Lenovo Categories: Best Community Story or Anecdote Entered by: Mark Hopkins (Mark_Hopkins) Community Name: Lenovo Community  URL: forums.lenovo.com If the Lenovo Community has a secret formula, it's the collaboration with our superusers established long before we launched.  When we decided to launch our own community, we asked ourselves what would happen if we invited our customers to help us build, run, and develop the community instead of just presenting it to the world and hoping it would work. In other words, what if we threw our customers the keys?   That’s exactly what we did. The community runs with a moderation team composed entirely of customer volunteers from all over the world—US, Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Pakistan, and Turkey.  Initially, the collaboration focused on the operation of the community - the policies, the rules, and the content. We tapped the experience of this group - many who are also admins and moderators in other technology communities to develop community rules and practices, and to encourage the team to identify and recruit rising talent from within the ranks as the community grew.   Over the last three years of operation, a group of approximately 30 members contributed 44% of the solutions in the community, and in less than one year helped us grow the community knowledge base to over 1200 articles.  We've shared our problem solving objectives and found mutual purpose in helping customers through the community and the group has responded, doubling our effective montly accepted solution rate. While I expected that we would have a shared purpose with our super users in helping facilitate discussion about our products, I have been surprised by how the relationship has grown with several of our volunteer moderators taking it to the next level and getting involved in helping develop the community working in Lithium Studio, our staging site, and also participating directly here in the Lithosphere.  They're reading about community best practices, successfully submitting ideas for features they value in other communities like the quick reply feature, sharing their community experience with others, have been recognized for their Lithosphere contributions through Kudos and even a spot on the VIP Council.   After reading Michael Wu's blog post series on rank progression, JaneL, one of our volunteer moderators noted that our original rank structure was holding us back.     Jane developed and implemented a new structure that allowed user advancement along multiple paths depending upon user participation style, all while adding a bit of fun and mystery with computer themed rank names ranging from "Punch Cards", to “What’s DOS”, and the ever-elusive "TrackPoint Cap". Jane, known on the Lithosphere as jloyless has contributed a number of ideas which have been implemented.   Erik, another volunteer moderator and frequent Lithosphere participant, contributes his time and talent as a graphic designer and has been responsible for most of the header and announcement images found throughout our community since inception, including our current TKB hero image above.   When our community added two new languages last year, Erik learned to use Lithium Studio and, along with Cleo—one of our community admins, developed the new skin and tabbed navigation style that we thought worked so well on the Lithosphere.  As we launched our German community, andyP and several other English/German volunteer moderators jumped into our staging site to help us tweak the localization terms and served as goodwill ambassadors, introducing us to an existing German forum and the rest of the German social ecosphere.   This year our superusers are helping Lenovo develop a community advocate program to recognize and enable even more helpfulness in others. Community practitioners frequently gravitate to stats when describing what makes superusers super—the thousands of hours spent helping others, dozens of ideas, hundreds of solutions, and thousands of posts contributed.     Our community has all that, but perhaps when it comes to the diverse talents of your super contributors the better question is not "How super are you?" but rather "How are you super?"

Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Courtney Pannell (cocopannell) EN Community & Social Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop in Austin asking an AdWords question via Twitter or you’re a global corporation in Dublin landing on an AdWords Community thread via a Google search, we want to be involved in that moment of connection. The AdWords team aims to form connections with our advertisers, advocates, and influencers, to improve both product functionality and brand perception.   To forge those connections, our digital strategy has been to create a social ecosystem for AdWords, one of Google’s main products. Our social channels — Community, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook — are not silos; we think about how each can drive traffic to all our social properties, assist in content creation, and amplify our brand message.   DRIVING TRAFFIC   Over the past year, traffic to our Community grew by nearly 3x, our Twitter follower count increased by 350% to 175K, our Google+ subscribers surpassed 1.1M, our Facebook fans grew to 75K, and our YouTube viewership grew by 80%. Put simply, we’ve used this social ecosystem to bolster traffic to all our channels and grow our brand’s reach.   Specifically looking at the Community, our growth strategy has focused on increasing traffic via organic search and social referrals. Our organic search traffic now constitutes nearly 60% of our overall traffic globally, as we’ve worked to refine our content to more closely align with what users search for help with.   Not only has our social promotion helped to increase direct awareness of our content, it may also have increased the visibility of community content in search results. We also see that visitors from social channels have nearly twice as high a pages/visit count as a regular user, so we have a great opportunity to interact with an engaged audience.   CREATING CONTENT   In the past year, AdWords underwent a significant launch called Enhanced Campaigns. Our Top Contributors were prebriefed on the update and helped us create nearly 100 unique content pieces to support the launch. In promoting this content, we utilized our multi-channel approach and saw a boost on all our properties.     As you can see above, we put a premium on rich media content, and we identify potential topics for videos and Hangouts on Air from our social media and Community interactions. An example of this strategy in action is our weekly #askadwords video series. For each episode, we solicit user questions on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ using the hashtag #askadwords. After uploading the video to YouTube, we promote it in the Community and on social channels to encourage engagement. The video series just passed its 20th week running and now regularly has 1K viewers per week.   BUILDING AN ARMY OF ADVOCATES   Instead of being a megaphone in our social ecosystem, we really want to empower influencers to share our content and amplify our message. Obviously, our Top Contributors have been a huge part of this for many years, but in the past year, we’ve also tried to identify social influencers that extend beyond the Community.   In identifying these social influencers, we do outreach to try to get them involved in the Community in a meaningful way. We are hosting several global influencer events this year to assist with this, and below is an example of a Community highlight we did with David Szetela, arguably one of the most influential people in the PPC space. He’s now writing articles for us in the Community.     Obviously, the fact that we use Lithium for our Community platform and LSW for our social responding/publishing makes it quite easy for us to grow and maintain this multi-channel social ecosystem. We’re able to see how beneficial our social traffic is to our Community growth, we’re able to identify budding influencers in the Community, and we’re able to easily promote all our content seamlessly to social channels via LSW.   This multi-channel social ecosystem has also made us re-evaluate the appropriate channel to communicate product and support launches for the first time. Although our product blog is typically the venue for such announcements, we’ve seen great success first posting updates to Google+ or the Community. Below is an example of a launch that we promoted solely on the Community at first, where it garnered the attention of online industry publications.             In addition to pure reach, we’re also interested in engagement: pages/visit on the Community, RTs/clickthroughs on Twitter, +1s/clickthroughs on Google+, Likes/clickthroughs on Facebook, and watch time on YouTube. Visitors to the Community from social referrals are twice as engaged as regular visitors, and in many markets, Community content shared on social networks is the content with highest levels of engagement. Our creation of this social ecosystem enabled us to build brand loyalty as well as educate and support our advertisers in new and creative ways.  

Company: Research in Motio n Categories: Most Innovative Social Customer Program Entered by: Kerri Birtch (kerrib), Social Support Planning Team Community Name: Blackberry Support Community Forums  URL: supportforums.blackberry.com   In the three years since the launch of the BlackBerry Support Community Forums, our overall support community has grown exponentially, particularly in past year as our organization has rolled out even more avenues to assist with social support.    Our approach to social support has a focus on empowering our customers and offering the tools they need to find a solution to their query.   This is done in a variety of ways including:   Maintaining strong ties with our Super User members on the Forums; integrating our Developer Support Forums and Resource Centre into the platform; interacting via Twitter to provide links to Knowledge Base articles or YouTube videos, and continually providing connections to the BlackBerry Help blog and the BlackBerry Developer blog.   By ensuring that all resources are easily accessible to users and directing them to the correct resources, we are able to cultivate a support community that is not limited to just the Forums, but one that is based on strong, networked ties, allowing our customers to get social support from the channel they are most comfort with.       Our newly launched site redesign will assist in enhancing this network as we have created more prominent connections to all of our social support channels. New features of the redesign include a more clear break down of support categories to allow users to easily navigate to their area of interest, a real time blog and Twitter feed which is customized to that specific support area, (Developers Support Forums feed has the Developer Blog, Business Support has the @BlackBerry4Biz Twitter account etc.), as well as a dedicated section where users can find links to all of our other BlackBerry communities.      With our commitment to empowering users and creating social support channels to assist them, we are able to provide our customers with timely responses, reliable support information and some friendly interactions along the way. 

Company: Webroot Contact: Nic Tolstoshev (Community Manager) Community: Webroot Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   Webroot delivers next-generation endpoint security and threat intelligence services to protect businesses and individuals around the globe. Our smarter approach harnesses the power of cloud-based collective threat intelligence derived from millions of real-world devices to stop threats in real time and help secure the connected world. Trusted and integrated by market-leading companies, including Cisco, F5 Networks, Aruba, Palo Alto Networks, A10 Networks, and more, Webroot protects tens of millions of devices across businesses, home users, and the Internet of Things. Discover Smarter Cybersecurity™ solutions at www.webroot.com   Webroot Business Dispatch Since December 2012, we’ve been sending out a monthly newsletter featuring the best community content determined by community metrics and an editorial team.      Every month we see a big spike in visits to the community.     We wanted to match the success of the Community Dispatch on the business section of the community.   Our strategy and tactics   We added a business oriented Community Dispatch sent only to SMB customers, starting in June 2015.  Our goal was to grow the business community as it wasn’t as active as the consumer side of the community.       Our results   We matched the 30% open rate of the consumer newsletter.     We’re seeing more questions and more answers coming from power users on the business and channel partner sections of the community:     More than doubled the business post views.     We started the business dispatch at the end of June 2015 and have doubled the business post views since that month.    

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, we really wanted a strong customer experience.  And given our many types of customers, customization was definitely necessary.  We customized the community in three unique ways:   1) Our Contact Us form.  We have multiple ways the customer can contact us (email, live chat, call, search knowledge base, open discussion thread).  This is all based on permissions (free, paid, enterprise).  It was important to serve up the right options based on the type of customer asking for support.  We needed to make the page smart to manage these permissions - which required customization.                              Customized contact us forms based on customer type   2)  Integrated search and chat integration.  We believe we’ve provided a revolutionary and elegant support contact form.  When a user clicks contact support they are presented with a page tailored for them depending upon what kind of customer they are (consumer, enterprise, other), and as they type into the subject line we instantly serve up answers based on articles in our knowledgebase and community.   We recently switched to Zendesk as our ticketing system and rolled out chat-based support. As part of the rollout - we incorporated chat features directly into the contact form.  The integration built by cloudsquads seamlessly transfers the user name and email Id along with the post content and creates a chat session.  From the customers’ perspective, once they’ve completed the form, they can opt to email or live chat without reentering information.  From our agents’ perspective, they’re able to get the customer information along with the context of the issue right from the Lithium form, and directly into our backend chat tool.                                           3) Site Status Page. Our customers rely on us to share large amounts of information quickly, securely, and reliably, thus service availability is critical to their business.  We tied our service availability status indicator to the community experience - thus enabling real-time status push to our millions of subscribers.    Our Site Status Page is housed on Lithium as a custom blog.  There are several key features that CloudSquads customized to make this very unique.  The main page shows the most current “blog entry” which is our latest status, and a user can look at the history of blog posts to see our site status history.  Additionally, we’ve provided a subscription widget so that users can subscribe and be notified whenever new site information is posted.  Finally, we then have multiple other locations in our community, such as the “quick help” section on the main support page, that check the most current blog post and dynamically display the appropriate site status depending on a tag.  These features allow us to very quickly update multiple locations on our site during maintenance or an event, and simultaneously notify our customers which helps us proactively avoid deluge of support queries.                                    

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, we’re very focused on finding the best and most cost effective way to manage all of our customers through social.  We have over 40 million customers, many of whom are free users, so we’re unable to provide the same services for them as we do our paid customers. Our support program uses social media to stay connected, but not incur high support costs.  We worked with Lithium partner, Cloudsquads to have a more integrated unified approach to engaging with customers.  Below are two examples of that integrated approach.    With our Lithium community we were able to put our blog and forum in one place.  Because of this, we get more visitors/readers to the blog. We leverage our knowledge base more and directly link the support questions coming through our community to the right answers and information.                                               Also, we offer multiple ways in which our customers can contact us (email, live chat, call, search knowledge base, open discussion thread).  This is all based on permissions (free, paid, enterprise).  It was important to serve up the right options based on the type of customer asking for support, so we needed to make the form smart - which required customization.  We now take the subject line as the user types up their support request and instantly serve up the right answers based on articles in our knowledgebase.                                     Customized contact us forms based on customer type                                             Dynamic search

Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ___________________________________________________________________   Barclaycard Ring MasterCard © is a very simple credit card product with a low interest rate, simple terms and no annual or balance transfer fees. But what sets Barclaycard Ring apart is its use of online communities in an innovative way to talk with card members about the product and how it should evolve. The Barclaycard Ring team also developed the industry’s first profit sharing program with card members, called Giveback™. This aligns the interests of both bank and card member like never before and opens the door for both to advance the cause of charities. And to help crystalize the trust, the team posts the financial statistics for the program on the website and discuss the results each month.                                                           While less than 10 months old, Barclaycard Ring’s innovative credit card community is already showing signs of revolutionary success:   Gross Income has increased for Barclaycard by > $500K since the launch of the program.   The business ROI of Barclaycard Ring has benefited others as well. The Ronald McDonald House received $10,000 donated by the community through our Giveback program.                                     The future for profitability looks even brighter as community engagement level is driving significantly different card behaviors.  Superusers and engaged community members give Barclaycard more of their business, are less likely to close their account and are significantly more likely to pay their bill on time.  The results are staggering:                                                                                                               There is no better evidence perhaps than continued investment in branded community – based on the success of Barclaycard Ring, Barclaycard is launching a new travel community focused on servicing the specific needs of its traveling customer base.  

Company: giffgaff Contact: Gregg Baker (Head of Community) Community: giffgaff community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   giffgaff, the UK based mobile network run by its members, has now been going strong for over 6 years. It was founded on the principal of having a community at the heart of everything. Be that Idea generation, business decisions and even our support.   We are an online only company, which means no retail stores and no pesky call centres to have to suffer when you need a helping hand. We found a better way, the right way, to do mobile with the support of our members.   Our customer care model   At giffgaff our peer to peer support model is not simply a way of saving money, or reducing cases, etc. It’s an approach we believe is the right way of doing things. Because of that, is is integral to how we function and operate as a business.    From day one, we wanted to give our members the best tools and platforms and sit back and let them decide how they should be used, what the purpose of them should be. Lithium was our platform of choice and our Community pushes it to it’s limits – more than we ever could.   The giffgaff approach   Our approach was born out of a desire to disrupt an industry, challenge ways of thinking and be a cause members would be driven to back. We stand proud of the difference our members made, taking it from a brave new idea to an industry expectation.   6 years of doing something different, 6 years of trusting our members, 6 years of having members come together and deliver a better way. This is the giffgaff way of doing things, putting metrics behind something which we just believe in is a HUGE challenge. So, this is our best metric, 6 years going on 7.    

Company: Barclaycard US Contact: Kati Driscoll (Community Manager) Community: Barclaycard Travel Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments supports our credit card products and creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and engagement.   Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind the Barclaycard Travel Community. BarclaycardTravel.com is a unique travel community experience where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel stories, look to other members for travel inspiration, and earn miles, which can be redeemed for rewards, for engaging in community activities.   Our unique promotion and objective   On July 2, 2015, changes to the Rewards Program Rules for the Barclaycard Arrival™ and Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ MasterCard® were announced. Community was part of a cross functional team initially formed to support customer care and manage complaint volumes, which were estimated to be higher than average, during the transition.   Rather than focusing on the minimal product changes being made, Social Media and Community teams suggested a different approach. Why not highlight the qualities of our award-winning travel card which remained unchanged?   We started with the question, "What is it about the experience of travel that drives our cardmembers' passion?" We discussed the emotions that travel evokes, especially the feeling when one arrives somewhere new. From there, we explored what it means to "arrive" as a symbol of status, connecting the existing social sentiment (#IHAVEARRIVED) to the way the Arrival card and its features enable and empower our cardmembers to have these same moments.   Our primary objective of the campaign was to promote and encourage positive product sentiment through proactive messaging of core featured benefits. This would be measured by a reduction in complaint volumes and an increase in positive social sentiment surrounding the brand.   Our secondary objective was to build loyalty and advocacy through an engagement campaign with our cardmembers and community members. This would be measured by content consumption & engagement on social media and within the community, content amplification, and cardmember behavior analysis.   Our strategy and tactics for our community   CONTENT STRATEGY Strategy for #IHaveArrived content focused on two types of content: #IHAVEARRIVED "moments" and Arrival product benefits     MOMENTS: Using Facebook audience insights based on our Arrival cardmember and community population, we created content which reflected lifestyle buckets Established Elite – represents America’s elite couples and singles. With no school-age children at home and the second highest income in the country, these households have enormous disposable incomes and pursue correlating luxuries and activities Summit Estates – families are enjoying the good life – luxury travel, entertainment and consumption of every kind are within easy reach Skyboxes and Suburbans – the best educated of all the clusters. These families shop at upscale stores, spend time feathering their nests and adhere to regular fitness programs. Corporate Clout – well educated and well compensated singles and couples in their 40s and 50s. These corporate executives and professionals are serious travelers, whether for work or pleasure and intelligent investors.     BENEFITS: We used community search and traffic trends, we developed content which helped users to better understand some of the most popular Arrival benefits while highlighting more obscure card features No foreign transaction fees No miles expiration Chip card technology Travel protections Rewards Access to Travel Community Access to Rewards Fan Zone Access to RewardsBoost MasterCard World Elite benefits Automatic World Elite status World Elite Concierge World Elite Luxury Travel benefits MasterCard Travel Services   DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY Content was posted across the following channels: Social Media Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Community Home page 5 separate user experiences PR Email Community Newsletter Arrival cardmember email Website Web tile Featured campaign content on the servicing site Integration with Arrival rewards – users could earn additional miles for registering for the community, sharing stories or using the #IHAVEARRIVED tag   PR 119M Media Impressions 225 outlets   SOCIAL 2M Social Media Impressions 961K Social Reach 125K Engagements 103K Video Views 91% decline in negative sentiment regarding the changes, our primary objective!   COMMUNITY 91K Page Views during Sweepstakes #IHAVEARRIVED generated 11% of 2015 community registrations 735 Travel Stories submitted   EMAIL 316K unique opens 20K unique CTR   CARDMEMBER 12% increase of arrival cardmembers registering in community Drove 5% increase of Arrival cardmembers linking accounts in the community   Key Learnings   SOCIAL Most engaged & cost effective age group for the contest: 18-34 (+20%) Most engaged & cost-effective age group for the benefits messaging was 25 – 34 (35%) Instagram ads proved to be cost effective but lacked the reach related to our Cardmember/Community audiences and fans Cardmembers who were Community Members, but were not linked were more inclined to enter the promotion via social Mobile is everything - 70% of the campaign reach was on a mobile device   COMMUNITY Best performing content spoke to our audience about benefits which provide a service for free or increase miles earns as opposed to benefits which save them money or offer convenience “If content is king, distribution is queen” - multichannel distribution is essential for content engagement success Content from promotion