Company: Best Buy  Entry submitted by: Gina Debogovich (Gina) Senior Manager Community: Best Buy Unboxed (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Best Buy is the world’s largest multi-channel consumer electronics retailer with stores in the United States, Canada, China, and Mexico. BestBuy.com is among the top ten retail websites in the United States and we have the number one customer loyalty program of its kind. There are more than 1 billion visitors to our website and 600 million visits to our U.S. stores each year. Our Blue Shirts sales associates and Geek Squad Agents are committed to delivering on our Customer Promise:   1. The latest devices and services — all in one place 2. Knowledgeable, impartial advice 3. Competitive prices 4. The ability to shop when and where you want 5. To support you for the life of your products   Our online community brings our customer promises to life.  It is an online destination that connects our customers, Community Super Users, Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents together.  The Community provides impartial and knowledgeable advice that is crowdsourced through these peer-to-peer interactions.     In 2013, we re-designed our Best Buy U.S. online community (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) making searching for content even easier. We recognized that it was cumbersome for customers to locate helpful information embedded within earlier threads and that topics would sometimes repeat because the content was not easy to locate. Visitors are now served a large "ask a question" box which searches published content and peer-to-peer support.   The re-design resulted in a 500 percent increase in searches since November 2013. As a result, customers found the information they were looking for and we saw a twelve percent decrease in the number of posts. Through identifying hot topics and trends, we publish knowledge articles for customers to understand policies, procedures, buying guides and troubleshooting.      

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: 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: Nextbit Contact: Kay Linayao (Program Manager, Community and Social Media)    Community: The Nextbit Community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Nextbit has created the only cloud-first, design-forward smartphone for anyone who wants to be freed from the limits of today’s mobile technology.   Nextbit was founded in 2013 by early Android veterans Tom Moss and Mike Chan, and is based in San Francisco. In order to produce a high-end, groundbreaking phone that would surmount common smartphone shortcomings, Moss and Chan brought on former HTC design lead Scott Croyle, best known for designing the iconic HTC One M7 and M8. Croyle was hired in 2014 and serves as Chief Design and Product Officer. The team has developed an elegant, cloud-first Android smartphone that will extend the storage capabilities of the phone beyond what the specifications currently allow, designed from start to finish in San Francisco.   Nexbit investors include Google Ventures and Accel Partners.   How community meets our customer care goals   We have a strong top contributor program and our goal is to leverage community to scale support by reducing call volume and get feedback back to Product/Engineering to improve product and address bugs/issues.   Reducing support costs   We’re leveraging more of the community as well as the call center to reduce costs. For example, we’ve badged support agents from our call center as “Product Experts” in the forum to scale support.       Our results   We measure our customer care results from the following: # of JIRA tickets filed to Prod/Eng from community escalation, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, and support agent utilization.   While we don’t have the above metrics to share yet at this early stage post-launch, we’re pleased to see these exciting results in the first two months of launching our community, indicating that our community is vibrant and headed for success: 21,144 Unique Visitors 79,714 Visits 12,867 Posts 531,186 Page Views 7,328 Kudos given  

Company: Dixon Schwabl (representing Frontier Communications) Entry submitted by: Jessica DiLuglio    (Social Media Account Executive ) Social channel: https://www.facebook.com/FrontierCorp/ Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Frontier Communications is an S&P 500 company and is included in the Fortune 1000 list of America’s largest corporations. Frontier serves predominantly a mix of urban, suburban, and rural areas across the U.S. The company offers a variety of services to customers over its fiber-optic and copper networks, including video, high-speed internet, advanced voice and Frontier Secure digital protection solutions. Frontier Business Edge offers communications solutions to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.   A focus on customer support   The company’s social media networks are primarily used for customer engagement, support and retention.   On April 1, 2016, Frontier acquired over three million customers from the states of California, Texas and Florida. To manage the anticipated volume of conversation, Frontier needed a tool that could coordinate community engagement between its 100+ customer service representatives, determine strategic workflow of responses and help the company easily serve its new customers.   With Lithium, Frontier was able to help listen to the conversation, identify pain points that customers were having and respond to the customers in a timely manner. Due to the efficiency of Lithium Social Web (LSW), social media became a key source of information for Frontier’s senior leadership. What are the main concerns of the customer? Where is the largest amount of volume occurring? How can we help the customer?   Thanks to LSW, Frontier was able to answer all of those questions and more in a timely and efficient manner. Plus, Lithium has made it easier for Frontier to prepare for business as usual conversations that occur on the page – and will help them transition forward with helping their customers at an optimal level.   LSW helps with customer retention   Frontier’s social media platform is a vibrant collection of customers and prospects that use the social channels to ask questions, seek customer support and learn new information. Since every interaction with the customer matters for Frontier, this online network is vitally important to the success of the company and its digital goals.   For these reasons, Frontier views their social media, and digital strategy, as a customer retention platform. If the customer remains happy they will continue to purchase the services that Frontier offers.   Lithium’s presence for Frontier allows its customer service team to be more efficient and knowledgeable with customers while keeping them happy throughout the communication process. In particular, the workflow operations enabled by LSW allow the Frontier team to work together while helping each customer, ensuring that customers are not seeing duplicate messages or requests.   Plus, Lithium’s data allows Frontier to stay ahead of the game when it comes to customer pain points and trending topics that the company needs to be aware of.   Frontier’s customer satisfaction results   Before the acquisition began, Frontier set a goal of an 85% SLA under 1 hour. During the first few days, Frontier looked at the data and realized that SLA was not reaching the target goal. Knowing what they were tracking at, Frontier was able to readjust and after April 5, the target SLA of 85% under one hour was met each time – it did not get back under 86%.   Other helpful metrics that Frontier was able to track were total inbound posts, volume of Facebook, Twitter and Spanish comments, response time, and top topics of what customers were talking about on social media. By being able to track volume of posts, to topics and its average response time, Frontier was able to find out how quickly customer questions were answered and compare concerns expressed by customers on social media to concerns expressed by customers calling into contact centers. This helped the company as a whole quickly identify service issues before they became widespread.   The Frontier digital management team has continually exceeded its SLA under one hour goals since April 1, and they have been able to do this despite the volume of the social media conversation increasing by 10x since March.  

Company: SS&C Advent Entry submitted by: Ellen Pun (Community Manager) Community: Advent Community Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year   SS&C Technologies, Inc. provides mission-critical software and software-enabled services for the global financial services industry. SS&C has more than 7,500 employees worldwide, located in the Windsor, Connecticut headquarters, and offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Australia. SS&C provides the global financial services industry with a broad range of highly specialized software, software enabled-services and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for operational excellence. We deliver mission-critical processing for information management, analysis, trading, accounting, reporting and compliance.   Our community goals   Advent Community is intended to help our clients solve their problems through a variety of different channels. The community acts as a hub for content, connecting people, and a platform for interaction. It is a place for two way flow of communication between Advent and the ecosystem we interact with. We want to be able to connect our users with personalized and relevant content and capture feedback to help improve our software, services, and our community experience. It is our intention to make information and answers easy to access, with support, particularly phone support, being the last resort. We want our users to be able to share their thoughts with their peers and with Advent and know that they will be heard.   The design elements that make our community stand out   We designed community to be able to provide an easy way to access the information users are looking for while providing transparency into the future of our products.   We publish our product roadmaps on Community. Each product roadmap item is linked back to the product’s idea exchange, directly to the idea. We’re able to highlight which roadmap items originate from community members and we make it easy for others to comment and vote as well. By publishing Advent-originated items, we invite comments and questions from users about why features are important. Users are not only able to see the direct impact that they have on our product but we believe that knowing specifically where the product is going can help make the decision to upgrade an easier one.   We also publish our products’ known issues (called Fixes & Requests, or F&R) in an effort to be transparent and to help divert support requests. While the UI of these pages runs on Kendo UI, the backend of the page is a hidden Lithium discussion board. Each F&R item is posted as a topic to the board associated with the product. By leveraging the subscription capability of Lithium Discussions, users are updated when the product team makes an update rather than needing to start a support case.   We’ve made improvements to our site header and menu. We added “quick action” buttons to the header to start a new discussion post, create a new idea, or start a new support case. We highlighted these frequently used actions in order to help lower the barrier to engage. We’ve also added the ability to set and indicate your product version in the menu. By knowing what matters to the user, we’re able to deliver the most relevant content in search results.   How we executed our community design   We are always actively collecting feedback from clients both in person and online. Our CSM team incorporates a section on Community during their client quarterly business reviews. We speak with clients about Community during our annual client conference. During our session, we showed previews of upcoming ideas for improvements and often modify these ideas based on the conversations we have about them. We were able to survey s on different areas of the site to learn which areas of the site needed the most improvement. Most importantly, we collect information from the Feedback board on Community.   The Community team aggregated the feedback and brought it to our internal UI/UX team to ensure that we were not only creating a better site experience but one that was consistent with the look and feel of the Advent brand. The common color palate and use of shared technology platforms provide s with a consistent and seamless transition when moving between our software and Community.   Kendo UI’s intuitive design of the filters, groupings, and the clean aesthetic make the grids a great way for us to organize and sort through the large amounts of data that live within Fixes & Requests and our Product Roadmaps. We first applied the Kendo UI to our support case portal. After it was clear that it was intuitive to use, we then rolled it out to Fixes & Requests and the Product Roadmaps. Now that other internal teams have seen the benefits it has been integrated into future designs for other parts of our Community to be integrated later this year.   Our metrics   A large part of our site design is focused on the ability to surface relevant content as you browse different parts of the site. We also want to make your frequent actions easy to access.   We allow users to mark their favorite products with a star in the products menu. Starring the product not only makes the product easier to access within the menu, but it subscribes you to that product’s discussion board. Upon logging in, the primary part of the home page is focused on the user’s subscriptions. Updates to discussions about the products you use are front and center on the page.   To take that a step further, users have the option to set the product version they use. We store that information and use that to better surface relevant content within search results. By default, we’ll list information about the newest product version first but we don’t want users to have to sift through multiple results if they’re not using the latest version. Currently, 25% of our active user base has set product preferences. We redesigned and released our new-user experience last month which prompts and encourages users to set these preferences. We hope to see this number increase with time.   Our Fixes & Requests boards allow users to subscribe to over 23,000 product updates. While these settings and subscriptions (and discussion and idea subscriptions) allow us to better deliver information to users, we may have made things too easy to come. We’ve found that while many have subscriptions set up to their advantage, they are consuming the information via email rather than logging in. We actively post webinar recordings and other items that users can only access upon logging in but continue to work on campaigns to drive visitation and log in.   Home page with Subscriptions and Quick action buttons       Fixes & Requests and Subscription Ability     Product Roadmap with Client and Advent Ideas     Product Menu with Product and Version settings        

Company: Webroot  Entry submitted by: Nicholas Tolstoshev (tolstoshev) Community Manager  Community: Webroot Community (https://community.webroot.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   Webroot is the market leader in cloud-based, real-time internet threat detection for consumers, businesses and enterprises. We have revolutionized internet security to protect all the ways you connect online. Webroot delivers real-time advanced internet threat protection to customers through its BrightCloud® security intelligence platform, and its SecureAnywhere™ suite of security products for endpoints, mobile devices and corporate networks.   Webroot Brings the Online VIP Experience Offline!   This year, we’re proud to submit a Lithy nomination for “Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch” category based on an event we held for one of our super users. Here’s the story.   When the Webroot community was first started back in 2012, we set up a program to reward our power users and called it the Webroot VIP Program.  The community team built the program to recognize and reward the most active, influential members via a ranking system based on a combination of posts, kudos, accepted solutions, and other factors. The rewards were a mix of moderator abilities and gifts, and were based on members’ feedback so we were sure that they were the most valuable rewards we could offer.   One of the top rewards (at the Silver VIP level) was an all-expenses-paid trip to the nearest Webroot office, and in 2014 the first community member reached that level.  Known on the community as TripleHelix, Daniel Godin had been an active member of the community from the beginning.  He is a veteran of online communities and participates not only the Webroot community, but several other well-known communities.  His participation in various Microsoft communities earned him the coveted Microsoft MVP title several years running.   The Plan   When we initially determined the awards of each rank in the VIP program, we were unsure what the Silver VIP “visit the to the headquarters” would entail.  As Daniel approached this rank,  Anna Kim, Sr. Advocate Programs Manager, and I started to plan out what the visit would look like.  First we selected the date and length of the visit.  Daniel would fly in from Toronto and stay with us for two days.  Anna came up with an agenda of meetings with key teams that Daniel was excited to meet, and organized a welcome party for the first day.  I, as the person who interacted with Daniel the most, would pick him up from the airport and escort him around the office and go with him to meetings.  We set up meetings with folks form all different departments, from developers, to support, to marketing and the executive staff – even the CEO. We wanted to make sure his visit truly made him feel like a VIP.     The Visit – Day 1   When the day came, I drove to the airport to meet Daniel.  Things kicked off with him meeting the entire social media and community team, then jumped right into meetings with all the different Webroot staff.  He met with the senior product developers, a group meeting with the support, QA and threat research teams, and then followed up with a meeting with one of the top product managers.    Mid-day, we gathered the entire Colorado office together for a “VIP meet and greet” with a cake reception. Webroot employees were able to thank him in person and Daniel could take photos with them.     At the end of the first day we took Daniel into Boulder for dinner and some sightseeing.  After a bit of walking around, he was quite ready to call it an evening.  Between jetlag, travel, and a very full day, we’d worn him out, but he was very happy and excited.   The Visit – Day 2   The next morning Daniel had a breakfast meeting with our Executive VP of Products &  Strategy, Mike Malloy, after which Mike took him to a meeting of all of the executive staff and the CEO.  The CEO took him to the front of the room and introduced him and thanked him for all the help he had provided to Webroot through his participation in the community.  Then there was an opportunity for the executives to ask him questions about what he through of the product and any ideas for improvements he wanted to share. Daniel said that is really meant the world to him to be treated as he was by our executive staff – something that not many other companies would do.   He then hopped onto a Google hangout that Nic regularly leads for our VIPs. He mentioned that he had a surprise guest joining him and it was a fun delight for the rest of the VIPs to see Daniel standing with Nic (and a great way to encourage others to reach the Silver VIP level!)   His visit wrapped up with Daniel shadowing members of our community team and the best part – hitting the button to push our most recent product release live!   Positives outcomes from the visit Daniel’s first experience with Webroot was with a company called Prevx, that Webroot acquired and rebuilt their technology around.  The heart of Prevx was a whiz kid from the UK named Joe, who invented the new cloud-based technology.  Not only was he a programming whiz, but he also was a fan of online communities.  He participated in the Wilders Security Forum, which was a platform-agnostic place for security professionals and enthusiasts to discuss security and anti-virus.  Joe and Daniel connected there and became fast friends.  Joe instinctively grasped the importance of customer feedback through directly talking to customers, rather than getting that feedback through layers of employees.  He would give Daniel beta builds to test and ask him for his opinions on new features and design decisions.  Joe ended up leaving Webroot shortly before Daniel came to visit, to go work on another venture.  Daniel’s visit was well timed in that he got to make new connections with developers, product managers, and other folks here at Webroot, to replace the relationship he had with Joe.  As an outcome of this, we revamped our beta program and recruited more community members to work directly with PMs, devs, and QA in the private beta forum.  What started as an informal relationship grew to a formal beta program, thanks in part to Daniel’s visit.  We now have a Beta group with almost 200 members and thousands of posts discussing testing new features.  We got developers, QA folks and product managers posting in there and talking directly to customers, just the way Joe and Daniel used to. When Daniel visited Webroot, I had been with the company for less than a year.  I was still relatively new, and didn’t yet know as many people throughout the company as I needed to as a community manager.  Anna Kim is a 15 year veteran of Webroot, and the sister of the founder of the company.  She was able to use her knowledge and connections to select the right people to talk with.  Getting to escort Daniel to those meetings and helping facilitate them helped build connections for me as well as for him.  I got to know people at Webroot that I hadn’t met yet, and that helped propel the community to be more useful to employees at Webroot. We took many pictures from the visit and posted on the community to share Daniel’s visit with everyone, as you can see here: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Introduce-yourself-to-the/TripleHelix-visits-Webroot-HQ/m-p/126332 This allowed the rest of the community power users to share in the experience, and also be motivated towards the day when they would reach the VIP level and get their turn to visit.  That thread got over 1,000 pageviews, both for community members, users of the Webroot products, and Webroot employees. Meeting Daniel in person and getting to spend so much time with him cemented the relationship that we’d begun online.  That helped tide us over the ups and downs of any relationship (such as the time when I accidentally forgot to invite him to the new private Beta group and made him feel slighted).   Negative feedback from the visit: The one negative feedback that we heard from some Webroot employees was whether this visit was a suitable use of company resources.  Was it worth it to fly Daniel here, put him up in a hotel, and spend dozens of employee hours towards this project?  This showed us that the importance of customer feedback wasn’t completely well understood by everyone here at Webroot.  It made us realize that we still had work to do to evangelize the importance of community to the company at large.  That led us to kick off a project in 2015 to improve employee engagement in the community (which will hopefully be a story for a future Lithy award submission).   We asked Daniel to let us know what the experience was from his perspective, to make sure that the trip was valuable from his perspective.  And also to see if there was any feedback for improvements for next time.  Here’s what he had to say:   My visit to Webroot HQ was an awesome and once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will remember for the rest of my life. The first day Nic the Community Manager picked me up from the Denver airport and we drove up north to Broomfield where the Webroot Head Office is and we chatted all the way. Once we got there the Community & Social team had lunch ready for us and they all made me feel at home and very welcomed. Anna had an agenda made up for me for the afternoon and the next day, which allowed me to meet many groups of staff such as the Threat Research/Support teams and the Director of Threat Research let me push the button to release the latest Beta to Beta testers which was easy and fun. In the early afternoon they had a “Welcome to Webroot” cake and social hour with all the staff so I got to meet many people which I now call friends (and the Cake didn’t last too long!). Then I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Community & Social Teams to see what they do from their point of view and on the other side of the screen it’s a small world!   For the evening the Community & Social team took me out for dinner at a very nice place in Boulder, Colorado where Webroot had its beginning in 1997. Then we walked around Boulder for a couple of hours - what a nice city and the view of the mountains was so beautiful. The next morning I had breakfast with Mike Malloy, Executive VP of Products & Strategy and we had a very nice chat. Then he came and got me and had me come into an Executive Staff meeting and introduced me as an Ambassador of Webroot. Some of the senior staff had questions for me so I gave them my answers & advice, and in the end they all stood up and clapped to thank me and in turn I thanked them. As Mike was walking me out, the CEO Dick Williams shook my hand and said “thank you, and thank you for being an Ambassador of Webroot” - that really touched my heart, as they all were so nice. The rest of the day I spent my time with the Community/Social Groups and got to meet quite a few more Webroot staff such as the Development Group, and the Technical Product Manager. We had a nice chat and it was nice to meet them in person. The time went so fast, and then it was time for Nic to take me back to the airport to fly home. I really enjoyed myself with all the nice people I got to meet at Webroot HQ and I would like to thank all of them for making it a fantastic journey. Like I said, I will never forget it. Here are some very nice moments of my visit: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Introduce-yourself-to-the/TripleHelix-visits-Webroot-HQ/td-p/126332n   Thanks, Daniel A Godin     Goal of this promotion: Build a loyalty program to reward members of our community   Why it was unique: We invited one of our VIP members to come visit our office in an all-expenses paid visit.   Results of the promotion: Lots of good connections with our top VIP within the company as well as the opportunity to showcase the rewards that our VIPs receive for being advocates and participating in the community.   Our video:       

Company: Vodafone New Zealand Ltd  Entry submitted by: Mike Hales (VF_MikeHales) Digital Content Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.co.nz) Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   Vodafone NZ has been New Zealand’s leading total telecommunications provider for nearly 20 years. It is a provider of mobile, fixed line telecommunication and television services over 4G, Fibre, cable and copper. It’s a key player in the wider New Zealand community through its Vodafone Foundation activities as well as sponsoring key music and sporting teams and events.   Our 2014 objectives   Growth to 20,000 members and to deflect more than 170,000 calls by resolving customer queries online. Both were exceeded with 21,000 members and 174,000 calls being deflected.   Our results   By working with Vodafone Group and Lithium, we implemented a formula to give us a proven dollar value to the Community activities. Using that formula, we can now show that the Community is worth more than NZ $3million to the business and that every member acquired is worth +NZ $2.50. It also helped to show that we exceeded our 2-year plan by more than $200k.   Additional business achievements   Additionally, we have been able to demonstrate additional business value through SEO – acquiring more organic visits to the Community as well as into the website; engagement – through measuring positive interactions, we’re able to show that customers interact more than seven more than previously – posts, kudos, tagging etc; brand value – by creating original content, we have increased our transparency to our customers by giving them direct access to product owners as well as external partners; and lastly by making Community the ‘gateway’ into self-help content and services we’re making it easier for customers to help themselves (and each other).

Company: Sony Europe   Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) Head of Communities, Europe Community: Sony Europe Community (www.sony.co.uk/community) and European locale alternatives Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Sony Corporation is a leading manufacturer of audio, video, game, communications, key device and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. With its music, pictures, computer entertainment and online businesses, Sony is uniquely positioned to be the leading electronics and entertainment company in the world.  Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $75 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014.   The Sony Europe Community has been setup to achieve and facilitate 3 pillars: Conversation – create a platform that enables end users to have conversation with other end-users so they can share experiences, issues, behaviors, etc with each other. This to be done through any media mean: forum, photo, competition etc… Self-service and Learning – Forums and How tos to enable customers to get the maximum out of their products and learn them how to become professionals using them (mainly photography and videography) Advocacy – Editorial blog strategy to support our social channels. Mainly create engaging content with high Like-ability and share-ability This year we have been strongly focusing on developing the 3 rd pillar. We have optimized our blog area and put it in the centre of our social strategy. 2-3 blogs per week are being posted in 5 different categories (Arts, design, Entertainment, Product & events, Education) and all of these are being used in FB, TW and G+ to drive traffic to the blog area. The ultimate goal being high engagement (putting the correct person in front of the blog) and then have them share the article back out in the social landscape.   UX flow is Post on social media linking to Blog   We also introduced a new Blog homepage: Our results   1) Blog traffic Traffic went up 3x versus previous year. We are now undergoing a new re-design exercise to further optimise the blog area and make it even better from a mobile friendly and responsiveness angle.  Making assets used in blogs easier to share   More focus on content Legend: in pink the sharing functions, in Blue the next content suggestion. Otherwise on the page no distractions from the content. now no assets are directly shareable but only full blogs are Vs future where each asset (video, picture etc…) will be shareable directly out to the social landscape. 2) Blog advocacy   Results after introducing the sharing buttons actively to the blog area: The additional reach produced by the social sharing buttons usage now exceeds the overall ORGANIC reach Sony has on FB, TW and G+. This allows us to compensate better when FB throttles further the posts displayed on end-users’ walls.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG  Entry submitted by: Esther Groth (esther27) Market Development and Digital Business Community: A1 Support Community (www.a1community.net)  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   A1 Telekom Austria AG is Austria’s leading communications provider, encompassing more than 5.4 million mobile communications customers and almost 2.3 million fixed access lines. The offers by A1 include voice telephony, internet access, digital cable division, data and IT solutions, value added services, wholesale services and mobile business and payment solutions. With four strong and established brands (A1, bob, Red Bull Mobile and yesss!) A1 successfully targets various different markets, ranging from premium quality to low budget.   A1 is part of the Telekom Austria Group which holds eight international operations in eight CEE countries. Headquartered in Vienna, A1 employs approximately 8,600 employees.   In 2014, A1 started its largest infrastructure investment with the fiber optic broadband roll-out in cooperation with the Austrian government and the national broadband plan.   Placing the customer at the heart of A1’s business has been key for the company’s ambitions to continue leading the Austrian telecommunications industry. This has been emphasized in the core values “Close to the customers”, “Simple” and “Trendsetting”. Hence, the A1 support community aims to provide the best service for our customers, to efficiently distribute the A1 brand and to use the potential of our crowd to develop new products, services and authentic user-generated content.   Through the Lithium community platform and LSW we could successfully tackle our main challenge to understand our social customers in more depth (360° social customer profiles). By modeling the social history of all interactions in LSW and using the behavioral tools of the Lithium community we can generate quantifiable ROI in terms of increased sales and reduced service costs.   We could also improve the following points of our social customer care processes:   Technical feasibility – Adequate infrastructure for growing visitor flows looking for digital service   Workforce optimization. – Considerable volumes of community requests can be efficiently managed by social media agents via efficient routing and prioritizing measures   Linkage between public network and owned social properties via Facbook tab application –Facebook users can be directed to our own knowledge site and get a deeper level of engagement and experience among an articulated and curated crowd   Peer-to-peer engagement – In the A1 Support Community users help users and with LSW social media agents can effectively assess and steer the need of providing additional answers to the user-generated content   Trend intelligence – By engaging community members in idea exchange boards and through intelligent tagging we can identify trending topics and connect them with observations from our other social media channels   Premature crisis management – LSW enables qualitative sentiment analysis of community content and helps to raise awareness for customer dissatisfaction with our service   Benefits of having a Lithium Community and LSW for our digital strategy   With our Lithium-powered Community and LSW we are able to exercise full control over the digital service topics incurring within the service tools of the A1.net online portal or on the other A1 social media channels. A specific process has been established for fast improvement measures where service issues were reported by community users. This process entails the identification of service issues, e.g. with the disrupted transmission of A1 TV on customers’ TV screens, by the A1 social media team. With LSW the social media team was able to assign new tags to this kind of issue and to observe the sentiments resulting from this topic. The service disruption as well as the magnitude of concerned customers was reported to the A1 customer and field service to prepare and sensitize all customer touch points. In a second step the A1 TV product management was informed and presented with the LSW analysis. Consequently, reasons for the service disruptions were analyzed and the product management could take up the depth of the issue by receiving daily updates from the community. The A1 TV product management team was also able to actively listen to the community discussions of the TV issues and the proposed solutions by members. As the share of negative sentiments towards A1 TV began to rise the corporate communications department was integrated in order to create unified statements regarding criticism in other media. Subsequently, a broader project team responsible for fast corrections of the detected issues with A1 TV was built. By involving the A1 social media team into the project, informal feedback and solutions posted by the community crowd were taken into account and directly integrated into the product improvements. Within 12 days A1 managed to provide A1 TV customers with a new interface, improved connectivity and a reduction in switching time.   The A1 Support Community currently counts 25,000 logins per month and has acquired 175,000 registered members so far. With an average real service substitution rate of 25%, A1 was able to save about 50.000 service interaction in January 2015 (calls and e-mails per month) and could therefore strongly increase its agent efficiency gains. What is more, although the amount of total community visits dropped in summer 2014 because community posts were then also integrated into the A1.net portal search the traffic began to soar up again in the following months. In addition, the weighted average for the real service substitution rate also increased and refers to an even more purposeful visitor stream.     With 80% of user-generated content A1 is also able to draw detailed insights from the community posts and create more innovative and competitive services for its subscribers.  

Company: EE  Entry submitted by: Ben Kay (BenKay) Head of Digital Strategy & Social Community: EE Community (Community.ee.co.uk)  Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     As part of a company-wide program to become #1 for Service within our sector, we have taken the opportunity to focus the EE Community and deliver clear (and ambitious) benefits to the organization. While our community is 18 months old, it is only within the last 6 months that we have made some real, demonstrable progress and are delivering operational savings back to EE.     Our strategy for developing the community is based on the Lithium benefits methodology of call deflection. At the start of 2014, we set out a clear ambition (dubbed our 2-3-4 strategy): 2 x Volume of topics created 3 x The volume of traffic Y-o-Y 1 in 4 topics resulting in an approved solution     Through this clear articulation of the targets, we have built a robust business case that has been shared throughout the organization and is tracked week on week. We are completely transparent with our performance and the benefits we are delivering. This simplicity and transparency has engaged parts of the business previously unaware (and skeptical) of the community and has garnered a large amount of support for our cause.   This support has opened doors to a new level of transparency between our brand and our customers. This transparency is demonstrated by our being open and honest with our community members when there are system/network issues, or when we recently changed terms and conditions and also when we announced a price rise. The benefits have been both intangible and tangible. Intangible: Real-time feedback from community on hot topics Platform for transparency when we are experiencing system issues Tangible Traffic is up 50% in 4months - Peaking at 300% uplift in traffic at certain points Best ever performing thread - 100k views in 24hour period Continuing on this trajectory we will see exceed traffic target by 30% in 2014 Topics started exceeding target by approx 30% Approved Solution Rate exceeding target week on week by up to 40% Number of customers no longer needing to call us  - Currently at 130% of YTD Target Without Lithium we would not have been able to act (and react) in real-time. The flexibility of the platforms allows us to publish content, manage interactions and provide real-time insight back to the business in order to inform better business decision making.   Our 2-3-4 strategy has provided a clear platform both internally and when working with Lithium. In our recent QBR, it allowed me to work with our Exec Sponsor to ensure that all parties are 100% on the priorities, opportunities and plans. This alignment aids collaboration and ultimately project delivery and business realization.   Through a simple, clear and consistent strategy we have seen: Dramatic reduction in the time to respond to customer interactions – Time to respond has dropped by 95% Average Agent Handle Time for Social Interaction down by 8% Reduction in inbound customer service support calls     

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products. Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.   Vodafone Spain Heroes promotes both users as a support channel and new useful content creation. Those interactions and new content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. Furthermore, this Programme enables users to feel they are in a comfortable community where they may ask their questions and uncertainties, because many of the questions are either addressed or fully resolved by users on an equal level.     Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain. In addition, over 25 contestants actively help out other users.  A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. As a result of the Vodafone Heroes Programme, we managed to deflect call volume by over 1.6m total calls. In addition, we enhanced our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by an average of 5 NPS points YoY and unassisted resolution rate increased by 10.2%.   More about Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/user participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolute answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice, Vodafone Hero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.     Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of Power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate in the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community, resulting in support savings through call deflection.   

Company: HP Categories: Best Community Business Integration  Entered by: Margaret Nugent (manugent) Community Name: Enterprise Business Community | HP Online Forum  URL: h30499.www3.hp.com/   HP Enterprise Business group consolidated 11 existing communities from HP.com legacy and external proprietary platforms to bring them together on one platform.   By consolidating our discussion forums to a single unified platform, we will be able to bring our community members new features and capabilities beyond what our legacy forums could provide. This also included combining our English and local language communities to the single instance.  

Company: National Instruments Categories: Best Community Business Integration Entered by: Laura Feeney (Laura) Community Name: NI Discussion Forums URL: forums.ni.com     National Instruments (NI) transforms the way engineers and scientists around the world design and deploy systems. Often deemed the "Home Depot for Engineers," NI offers a wide variety of hardware and software products to empower technology leaders working on applications ranging from LEGO MINDSTORMS® NXT® software to hardware for the CERN supercollider. At National Instruments, we understand the importance of embracing our lead users and other customers when developing new product features for our flagship software platform, NI LabVIEW. While social innovation has been a hot topic among technology companies recently, we truly embrace this notion of co-innovation and have built user feedback into the development process. The LabVIEW Idea Exchange on our website (powered by Lithium) has been instrumental in our success. Customer Loyalty Survey Data As we began to think about building co-innovation into our LabVIEW development process, we knew we needed to gather more information about our community, because we intended for community members to be part of the process. We began by evaluating our community. We specifically wanted to embrace the audience of innovators and evangelists in our community, and to find these innovators and evangelists we used customer loyalty survey information.   The survey showed that 41 percent of NI customers are “active” NI community users. Additionally, the more active the customer is with the NI community, the more loyalty they are meaning they are:     likely to recommend to a colleague, repeat purchase the same product or or purchase new products.     This data, shown in the following graphs, emphasized the need for NI to embrace these customers for software development.     Objective One of our key social business objectives is to embrace our customers when developing new versions of LabVIEW. Using cutting-edge social technologies, we want to not only listen to their feedback but also incorporate it into our products. Because no industry represents more than 15 percent of our revenue, it is imperative that we gather feedback from various areas to prioritize new features and connect with lead users as we enter emerging markets or new vertical industries.   Strategies and Technologies After evaluating our audience and objectives, we came up with the following strategies: • Make it easy for NI customers to share, discuss and vote on new software features • Obtain feedback from lead users as we enter new markets  • Encourage customers to share their feedback in the community-driven software development areas • Launch customer-driven software developments at NIWeek 2010  • Integrate these ideas with traditional marketing  The LabVIEW Idea Exchange was born out of the need to implement the above strategies. Going beyond the typical beta program, it is one area of our website where the online community can interact directly with NI R&D and provide candid feedback about our products. We then work to incorporate their feedback into our products as much as possible, which results in increased customer satisfaction because they see that we pay close attention to their needs and suggestions.       We promoted the Idea Exchange on the NI home page.In the LabVIEW Idea Exchange , LabVIEW users can submit and vote on features covering topics such as user interface enhancements, performance improvements, computation capabilities, and hardware integration. Since August 2009, more than 2000 ideas have been submitted for consideration in future versions of LabVIEW. In August 2010, the newest version of LabVIEW launched with 14 new ideas incorporated into the product. This video shows some of the users whose ideas were incorporated.        The LabVIEW Idea Exchange includes ideas straight from customers interested in helping NI develop the next version of LabVIEW.   In today’s social environment many companies are interested in what their customers are saying, but do not know how to best gather this information. The most innovative characteristic of our activities is that we not only used social technology to listen to our customers, but we also incorporated their feedback directly into our products and gave them immediate access to our R&D team. Many companies are afraid of what their customers might say about their products, but by making co-innovation an important step in the product development cycle, we have been able to work with our customers to create better and more technical products.   Results Overall, the LabVIEW Idea Exchange has been a great success. One important measure is that it has decreased the number of customer complaints. Before the Idea Exchange existed, customers requested new features for the product by emailing a private database maintained by R&D, and if users had a complaint they often posted it to their own blogs. By launching an open, public idea board for users to share their feedback, we gave our customers a voice that they did not have before in the development of our software.   We have also seen an increase in our own productivity because we no longer have to guess on the priority of new software features. Now our community does the initial prioritization of these new features followed by our R&D team.   Some specific metrics follow: • 2,400 Ideas submitted across several software product lines (initial goal first year goal was 500) • More than 47,800 votes on product ideas • 9,470 customer comments on ideas • More than 45,400 unique visitors to the Idea Exchange, for a total of 99,100 visits  • LabVIEW 2010 included 14 new features from the Idea Exchange  • The LabVIEW 2011 beta (the new version will release in August) includes 13 new features from the Idea Exchange

Company: HSN  Entry submitted by: Matt See (MattHSN) Director, Social & Games Community: HSN Community (http://community.hsn.com, http://blogs.hsn.com) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   HSN is all about making shopping FUN! Great products and unique experiences that you can’t find anywhere else, plus exclusive access to celebrities and sweepstakes. The HSN Community makes that possible by connecting them with all their favorite HSN Hosts and Partners and introducing them to fellow shoppers just like themselves who share their passion for great deals & shopping!   Lithium Community & LSW provides a platform that empowers HSN to efficiently moderate, market, measure and scale conversation across owned and earned platforms including Facebook, Twitter and the HSN Community. It gives our customers a seamless experience across all devices to engage with HSN wherever they are and provides real business value back by driving quality conversation around HSN product, which in turn increases conversion through people looking for similar topics across natural search.   Benefits of a Total Community   Moderation work flows have become much easier to manage across multiple people on a team working 22-hours a day across multiple channels. Assigning moderation tasks and reviewing the analytics that LSW generates has provided more insight into the volume and sentiment of conversation happening, which has allowed us to be smarter as an organization and as a team when identifying new community guidelines, reacting to crises, and day-to-day community management. Lithium Community has allowed us to also remove redundant engagement platforms so that conversations are now ONLY happening on one platform, but integrated and optimized for all screens.   Our Total Community Results   +2,502.4% in Membership Y/Y +241.8% in Unique Visitors Y/Y +109.4% in Posts Y/Y +105.7% in Sessions Y/Y Stats are still growing this year. We’re seeing +40% in Sales Y/Y in Q1 this year.  

Company: Warner Bros  Entry submitted by: David Turner (david-turner) Digital Manager Community: WB Play Community  (Community.wbgames.com ) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Our community is the dedicated forum for WB Games titles. Starting with Batman Arkham Origins, it has expanded to Mortal Kombat and mobile games.  We now have 6 games on the community, with 230,000+ members with much more to come.   Our Lithium community is the very core of our conversion funnel. In the video game industry, hardcore fans- those who live, breath, and sleep the titles-- represent the figurative end of the consumer journey. People could pick up a game and enjoy it over a weekend, but there are those who play a game 10X over, sometimes in excess of 200 hours, ultimately wind up forming an identity around the game and the brand, and that's why our community exists, to connect them. Our fans write help guides, they speculate about the lore, and they find stuff so detalied (and often inconsequential) that it delights the creators of the game. Our goal is to let our most devoted of the fans create content, and we do everything we can do encourage them to do so. Success for us is a growth in our devotees; we want them to come to our community, stay, find friends online, and ultimately invite more friends into the world of the game. Our community is at the core of this strategy.   All of this leads to the next, larger plan, when it comes to fan migration. Rather than trying to market to the same fans every new title, using the community, we are able to keep them engaged and centralized, so when we annouce our next games, we know exactly where some of our best fans are and how we can share our new games with them.       Our marketing campaign   Last fall, we ran a community based "Cosplay Week" which was a celebration of some of the best user created Costumes based off the Batman Arkham games. We were in a particuarly content poor part of the year and our devoted fans were looking for anything about the game that made them reengage with the brand. I collected 5 top tier cosplayers from across the globe and did daily posts, each day with a new cosplayer or cosplay team. The results were enormous, garnering a reach of near 10 million. We took some of the most hardcore of our fans and turned them into content generators. The fans loved it and it was able to greatly increase traffic to the forum and across all of our social channels.         Campaign results   Because Lithium is able to incorporate WBPlay as it's SSO, we have been able to show a great cross promotion between in game and forum identity. Not only are we able to view the user journey from player to forum member, we are able to quantify results of playtime, forum activity, and ultimately, user value. While I cannot speak to our numbers externally, we have found that players of our games who are active in the forums are active players, on average, 10 to 20 times longer than those players who are not logged in. We are approaching a quarter of a million members in the WB Community, and show no slow in growth.