Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Mozy by EMC Entry submitted by: Zach Moffett (zachm) Community Manager Community: Mozy Support Community (community.mozy.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ____________________________________________... See more...
Company: Mozy by EMC Entry submitted by: Zach Moffett (zachm) Community Manager Community: Mozy Support Community (community.mozy.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation _________________________________________________   Three years ago we created the Mozy community to add a level of support for our customers.  The community has helped decrease the number of support cases that have been created by customers while keeping a high level of customer satisfaction.  We rely on our super users to help answer questions for their peers but we find ourselves asking support agents to answer questions in the community.  We know there will always be a need for Mozy support agents to work with customers but would like the community involvement to answer a majority of the questions.   Since we launched our community we have been cultivating users to participate more frequently and with a higher level of knowledge.  We provide knowledgebase articles, tutorials, and technical blogs for them to pull their information from.  This process has helped us further reduce support costs while keeping customer satisfaction over what we agreed to be an acceptable level.  Gamification has been a huge influence on the processes we have implemented to drive this participation.   As processes of gamification grow, so does the need to have a leveling system in place. To complement the Lithium rank structure we have implemented a leveling scale that shows the progress to the next rank.  As community members participate and work towards the next level in the community, they can see their progress and have an idea of what it will take to get to the next level. We built a custom slider bar that shows how close the customer is to the next rank.  Once the customer ranks up the slider bar refreshes to show what it takes to get to the next rank.   We have also implemented a rank system so community members can start off as a villager and work their way up to cook, ninjas, and eventually the overlord through participation.  We used the default Lithium measurements for the rank system but changed the names and provided corresponding avatars.  For example, when the user reaches the rank of Sensei the new avatar becomes available.  We modified our notifications to not only alert customers that their rank has increased but that they can change their avatar as well.   To augment the new features we wanted to provide our community members with more context for the gamification concept. We wrote a story that goes through our protagonist’s life story and how he started off as a lowly villager and through much learning, dedication and will, worked his way up to be the Overlord and eventually the Emperor.  The story can be found at http://community.mozy.com/t5/community-story/ct-p/communitystory . The story changes dynamically as the community member’s rank increases.  If you were to visit this page while not logged in you would not see any information.  If you create an account then you will see the first part of the story.  Once you level up then more of the story will become available.    A member of our staff created all of the avatars along with full size images.  We went through multiple versions of the story but eventually agreed on the story that is now available.  We have had great feedback from our customers and staff members on this process.  
Company: LEGO Systems Inc. Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _________________________________... See more...
Company: LEGO Systems Inc. Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   Since its inception in 1932, the LEGO Group has come a long way - from a small carpenter’s workshop, to a leading global enterprise, always looking for ways to reinvent the brand experience to maintain its world class service. With the growth of social, it was a natural impetus to build a social online experience which encouraged users to interact, engage and share with each other in a safe and secure way, while maintaining the fun, learning and imaginative elements that were aligned to the brand values.   The business aim was to create an interactive social online experience (via an infused dot com presence) that was buzzing in engagement whilst maintaining its simplicity and ease of use, in a safe and secure environment that provided users with quicker “get to times”.  We have a high affinity with users in the 7-14 years age bracket, so online safety and security was paramount.  We were also migrating our users from our old forums to the Lithium platform, so our first step was to understand the issues our existing user community was facing and leverage their feedback to ensure our new launch met their needs.  The responses we received included:   Faster moderation Increased engagement with LEGO staff Better structure to the forums More guidance on rules Less “spam” We launched the new community on 9 November 2012 with great success – migrated 2.4 million users and 4+ million posts. There was 0% data and user loss and 1000 users joined the community within the first hour.       “Get to Times” had reduced by more than 7hrs from 8hrs in January 2012 to 56 mins when measured in December 2012. At the same time, user interaction went up by 62% when compared to interaction in the previous forums the year prior.   With a more interactive and structured community reflecting features available on other social platforms such as “Likes” introduced, and additional features such as a new ranking structure, user interviews, story and role play forums as well as online polling, paved the way to a significant increase in user activity.   New Polling & Ranking Features:   Some of the new ranks:   There was also a large reduction in spam based on changing the ranking structure from the old posting only system to a new more varied criteria including user defined opinion on quality and rating of content. The new ranks have instilled a culture of support and encouragement between the users and we now have a very healthy community feel.   We changed our moderation and engagement coverage set up to ensure 24/7 coverage, with 8 team members located in different time zones and geographical locations around the world. With the backing of help from vendor moderators, the core LEGO team now has more freedom to actively engage with users, spending hours engaging per week now in comparison to minutes previously.   We set up a comprehensive help/FAQ section where users can check out the rules, how to change signatures and generally tailor their own settings. For new users, after reading the FAQs, in every single forum we have “Welcome to newbie” or “Adopt a newbie” topics where new users can come in and introduce themselves and existing users will take them under their wings and help bring them into the community.   As an example of how engaged some of our kids are, in January 2013, the stats tell us that our 27 highest ranked users (all Forestmen, Ninjas, Aztec Warriors or Conquistadors) each spent 74 hours in the community per week! They’re very dedicated!   The new LEGO.com community embodies the LEGO brand values of fun, creativity, quality and originality. Visit community.lego.com to view for yourself.  
Company: Google Inc. Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (http://www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation _____________________... See more...
Company: Google Inc. Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (http://www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Google AdWords has been working closely with Lithium Engineering on seamless migration of our users from OpenId to OAuth2. We wanted to make sure that users who are coming to our Community are offered with a Single sign-on experience that they are used to when using other Google products.                                                       The OAuth2 implementation allows our users to use the same login and avatar for the Community as the one they are already using for other Google products and switch between various Google accounts. It also removed the need for Lithium to create, maintain and secure a login email and password store. All together it makes the sign-in process fast and secure for our users.
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ______________________________________________________________... See more...
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   How long does it take to build a new community?   Some weeks at least, a few months probably. Joe's community was born in a day. We remember it very clearly - it was last Oct 23 at 1PM.   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan.   We launched that day of October after a month-long teaser period consisting of a single video on our website with very few information inside. At 10pm, we broadcasted a live Google Hangout from our offices that was watched live by 12,000 people and opened the service early in the afternoon.     It took only minutes for the first curious person to register for an account and order a SIM. The first questions started to pour into the forum and while the team took on the role to try and answer them we soon found this effort was futile. Indeed, in less than one hour, a few good men had already visited every corner of our website, read every information that they could land their hands on and started posting and answering questions way faster than we were able to.   By 4 PM we just sat there and read, amazed by what was happening.   Three months later the community is going strong. With 50,000 posts over 3,900 topics it is very active. Each new subject gets 14 answers on average but what we pride ourselves with is that 49% of questions are tagged as Solved. This helps a lot the new users to quickly find the answer to their questions.   There is still a lot of work to do for the community to keep growing. We need to build engagement and give everyone a good reason to come back every day.    Joe is a pure community-based model. Each and every Joe customer is a community member thanks to a one-step subscription process that allows us to have a single ID for both the community and our self-care.   We also provide an invitation system inspired by Dropbox where a member can invite his friends and relatives to join the community and earn a few euros for each new member that actually activate a SIM.   This allows for funny initiatives such as the member map : a google mashup where members can pin their location on the map and insert their invitation link.                                              
Company: Elisa Entry submitted by: Noora Halme (Noora) Community Manager Community: Elisa Palsta (palsta.elisa.fi) Community: Saunalahti Palsta (palsta.saunalahti.fi) Lithy category: Best Community Design ______________________________... See more...
Company: Elisa Entry submitted by: Noora Halme (Noora) Community Manager Community: Elisa Palsta (palsta.elisa.fi) Community: Saunalahti Palsta (palsta.saunalahti.fi) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Saunalahti and Elisa had separate discussion/help forums for several years, original launches dating back to 2005 and 2009. That makes a total of ten years of conversations and community bonding! When we decided to bring our community to the next level and moved the old forums over to the Lithium platform, we had few things to consider design-wise:   We wanted to keep our community clear and simple, easy to navigate, visually new but similar to what our users were used to. With a decade of history with little or none design changes, we couldn’t risk losing our members due to a radical change from classic and simple design to something very cutting edge. Our current Scandinavian design reflects the minimal taste of our Finnish users. The whole web presence of Elisa and Saunalahti is being renewed during 2013, and we wanted to be the first ones to take the changes into account. Elisa is a pioneer of support communities among Finnish telecom companies, and as a community, we wanted to be pioneers also internally. We were excited about the great new features that could guide our users to the most relevant and helpful content. We wanted to present kudos, solutions, subscriptions and bookmarks on our forum pages in a way that would make it possible for all of our users to find relevant content easily. Our goal is to be easy to approach and intuitive. Two brands, one community. We have one community, but two separate brands. Elisa provides IPTV-services, e-books and home security systems and Saunalahti focuses on mobile and broadband services and our customers are interested in different things depending on their products and services. We want to be there to help and to listen on both brands, forum pages have to be similar, but still provide relevant content for all types of customers. This was no easy task, but we managed to do it!   Our main focus is to provide a safe and friendly environment to our customers to ask questions about our products and services - we're essentially a support forum, a challenger to traditional customer support via telephone and e-mail. The community is a natural part of our customer care for us and - more importantly - to our customers.   We have had loads of good feedback from our clear colors, simple navigation, simplicity and the visual similarity of our two forums that form one community. The usability of our forums has been much praised: even though the radical decrease of different boards, from 30 to 11 on Saunalahti and 23 to nine on Elisa, was frowned upon at first, our members soon begun to appreciate the simplicity. Bringing the kudoed posts and solutions to the forum pages has also been a much-appreciated feature. We have had an amazing growth on our community members, and what is most important, the amount of visits and the average time spent online!   Our much praised avatar collection is one of my favorite parts as well. We use clear coloring to separate our staff and even super users from other community members, we see this as an important factor that helps our new users to find the most trustworthy content. After all we have a whopping community of 50 000 members! Our basic set of avatars consists of 20 characters including these ladies and gentlemen:                           We added a bunch of new at the end of 2012, including few moustached-up versions for movember (they were a hit!):                           And don't tell anyone, but we still have few more in store:   Maybe we'll add few special ones for nose day and pink ribbon?   We have a long lasting tradition of choosing a member of the year, they are rewarded with a crowned version of the avatars and our superusers have their own avatar collection with a small starred banner:                           Finally, here are our staff members. Orange is for admin (that would be me), green for moderators and blue for other staff. Our moderators also requested a special avatar for movember and we have a grey one for the moderators, who have already moved on:               Now that the first year of the new community has passed, we want to keep on rolling! Some of our users are very active on other communities around the web and they're constantly driving us towards better usability. Our plans for 2013 include, but are surely not limited to: Ideas exchange! We’re implementing Ideas in few weeks. Our users have been wishing for “Ideas-smithy” (that would be Ideapaja in Finnish) for a long time and now we’re ready for it! The design will be even more simple than the one on our forum pages’ and we’re ready to listen the voice of our users on what they want to see and how they want to use the “smithy”.                                                 Banner rotation! New banner pictures for spring, 1st of may, autumn and perhaps also gay pride? User designed banners? Sky's the limit! Speech bubble -logo and branding aren't going anywhere, but now that we have a good grounding, we can let loose a bit. Product-specific designs, new backgrounds for new product launches. Even better visual integration to product pages of Elisa and Saunalahti. We'll be incorporating a new navigation bar (currently marked with a grey bar on top of the community pages) that will allow our customers to easily navigate between our product pages, help pages, forums and self services.
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ______________________________________________________________... See more...
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan.   Joe is also community-based. It means that the community is at the heart of its business model and allows for very lean operation when it comes to customer support.   Obviously it is easier to achieve this result when it's in your DNA right from the start rather than switching from a regular business model to a cooperative one.   That being said, it might have failed and we could have been flooded with support requests from angry users dying to find an answer to their legitimate questions. Fortunately this has not happened, in fact it's quite the opposite since with a satisfaction rate of 92% and an NPS score of 44 just two months after the start of our operations, our customers seems to be quite happy with their customer experience.   Let's dive into some numbers. There are 3 ways to find an answer with Joe :   1) Search the community. Chances are your question has already been asked, but also already answered. With 80K searches since the community started, this seems to be the preferred and most effective way to find your answer.   2) Open a topic : 3K new topics have been opened in the Help sections of the community (I voluntarily left out the "Café" section dedicated to off- topic discussions).   3) Fill out a support form : 2.5K have been opened so far. These are treated by our support agents via a dedicated channel and depending on the difficulty, are escalated to Level 3 support.                                           So how much have we saved ?   Again this is hard to tell since we have no prior comparison point. What we can say however is this :   We have to first make an assumption on the efficiency of the search tool. Let's say, that only 10% of searches guides the customer to the answer he is looking for (we think it is a conservative number when we look at the search terms that are most used). If we assume this hypothesis to be true, that's 8K support "cases" (10% of 80,000 searches) that would get solved without any further interaction with either the community or our support staff.                                                     All in all, this would mean that, out of the 13.5K support cases that you get if you add up 10% of the search to new topics and support forms, only 18.5% of those cases incur a direct cost for Joe (the support staff). That would be quite a compelling result in our opinion and truth is that we have not been forced to hire more support agents so those figure seems to be spot on.      Of course you should take into considerations all the efforts and staff needed to make sure that the community is indeed active and effective but in the long run, it will be more effective to have a few community managers rather than line up support agents that solve cases one by one.   One last takeaway. The community can handle the first level of support effectively because our system is simple and transparent. We don't have the burden of legacy IT or aging tariff plans. That allows the community, in most cases, to know the answers. We have worked a lot to have a simple process and make most information available directly to the customer via self-service. The best way to cut costs on support costs is to take away the root cause of calls.  
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________... See more...
Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan thanks to a web app called the cockpit that is accessible on any smartphone.   The community is at the heart of Joe Mobile's website because it is very much the key to its success and its low-cost business model.   It was clear from the beginning that Joe's community should take center stage in our otherwise very lean website. Hence on Joe's homepage the community link sits in the header's navigation bar, a search field module appears in the middle just above the latest conversations module, and the blog finally rests on the lower right side, just above the fold.   The customer is welcomed via its pseudo and a ticker that notifies him of any unread messages.   You just can't miss that Joe is serious about being a community-based service. But that's not enough. Joe's business model lies on the fact that the community should be in charge of the first-level consumer support. We don't have any call centers, just a limited number of agents that use a form-based tool to deal with the most complicated requests.   For this to work, you need to organize the community space so that the customer, who often comes here for the first time, knows instantly what he is supposed to do to find the answer he is looking for. We have worked hard on the design to ensure that a newbie would find his way. This is how it's done :   First, a mega huge search bar People are very used to searching the google way, it's just the same with Joe. Chances are your question has already been asked…and answered already so Search should be your first stop.   A  horizontal community nav bar This design moves away from the commonly accepted best practices for new communities. However, knowing that it could be risky, we decided to go along with this horizontal design that clearly separate the section for prospective customers, who mostly have questions about our services and how to join, from the section for current customers who need help when activating their number or a more technical issue related to phone or the network.   A cozy place to chat Joe's community is about support, about people helping each other out. But rather than using the Q&A style module that could have been well suited for this purpose, we went along with a regular board design. This choice allows for longer discussions between members sometimes long after the correct answer has been given and validated since we never close subjects. We also dedicated a space, the Café Joe, for pure off-topic discussions and where new users can introduce themselves to the community.   This design is a success! With 30,000 searches per month and 17,000 posts for 1400 new topics, the community is thriving.   All section are very well balanced and we mad sure that "approved solutions" would be very visible both in the live search bar and the posts to be as precise as possible for anyone having a question about Joe.                           We just added The Facebook integration for the community again using the Facebook studio tools provided by lithium. This allows to open the community to a broader audience whilst retaining the same design principles that have worked for us so far.   Good design is key to a successful website. It is even more important when you service depends on the efficiency of the community. Forums can be messy and overloaded, a well-thought design is critical to give customers both a feeling of liveliness that brings a more emotional touch to your operation but also a efficient tool to very rapidly answer any question.                                                            
Company: Webroot Entry submitted by: Jim Murray (jmurray) Community Specialist Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight _____________________________________________   Trip... See more...
Company: Webroot Entry submitted by: Jim Murray (jmurray) Community Specialist Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight _____________________________________________   TripleHelix (Daniel) is Webroot's biggest fan. He came to Webroot via one of our acquisitions, Prevx, back in 2011. On the old Prevx forum, over the course of about nine years, TripleHelix accumulated over 9,000 posts. When Webroot acquired Prevx, we embraced their core technology and made it our own. Accordingly, TripleHelix embraced us in a big Canadian bear-hug and never let go.   In only the single year the Webroot Community has been around, he’s already got 1,300 posts – putting him at over 10,000 posts just on our official forums. And not only is he the most active member of our forums - he actively travels the internet seeking out other security-related forums at which to talk about Webroot. Wilders, NeoWin, DSLReports - you name it - TripleHelix probably has an account there.   TripleHelix doesn't miss a single day on the forum. Each and every day, like clockwork, he signs in and stays on the forum almost the entire day. When someone replies on his threads, he almost immediately chimes in with a response. He contributes more forum content than anyone else, particularly to our Security News section.      TripleHelix is like a Security News machine who constantly churns out security-related news stories at a pace of a couple of valuable stories per day. He also keeps us up to speed on anything that is coming down the pike from Microsoft, Adobe, Java or any other companies that routinely participate in Patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is TripleHelix Tuesday at Webroot.   He isn't just a news-specific contributor though. One of the best things about Daniel is that he will help other users solves their problems. With 93 accepted solutions under his belt (3.5x more than the next closest member), he rivals even our official technical support helpers on the forum in his skill, ability, willingness, and availability to solve problems. It's no wonder he is sometimes mistaken for official Webroot tech support. Other forum members love him too, which is shown by his collection of 700+ kudos.     The real icing on the cake with TripleHelix is that he isn't just a Webroot superfan. He's also a Microsoft superfan. What a great combination! One day, Daniel even volunteered to take a bunch of free Webroot trials and branded pens to the next Microsoft convention he attended. We never would have even thought of asking him to do that on our own, but he thought of it himself and will be doing it in April. Daniel is like a magical, traveling Webroot billboard that offers free tech support with a little bit of Santa Claus thrown in for good measure.   Speaking of Santa Claus, one of my favorite TripleHelix stories involves our company Christmas party. On the day we had the party, the entire social media department was going to be off to enjoy some free dinner and beverages. As a rule, we advise it's probably not a good idea to come back to work right after the party. In advance of the party, which was held during otherwise staffed hours, I happened to notice that TripleHelix was online, as usual. I let him know the party was about to start and that the Community would be unstaffed for a couple of hours. He volunteered to hold down the fort while we were off enjoying some holiday cheer. True to his word, during that time, he made a series of useful posts. When I returned after the party was over to check in and make sure there weren't any fires to put out, I saw the posts, and TripleHelix saw that I was online. He sent me the following message:      Flash-forward about a week, TripleHelix was posting on Christmas Day helping users who received the gift of Webroot for Christmas and had immediately installed it. There has never been a more hardcore superfan on the internet than TripleHelix, which is why he deserves this award!  
Company: Ooyala Entry submitted by: Thomas Kearsley (tkearsley) Community Manager Community: Ooyala Community (community.ooyala.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________ ... See more...
Company: Ooyala Entry submitted by: Thomas Kearsley (tkearsley) Community Manager Community: Ooyala Community (community.ooyala.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Ooyala offers leading cross-device video analytics and monetization solutions, streaming over 1 billion videos to nearly 200 million unique viewers per month. The Ooyala Community was officially launched on 10/8/12. Since the launch we have seen 4,108 unique visitors with 20K+ page views. Our community is not open to anyone, only customers who have an account (Backlot) can comment. This limits the community to a low number of participants, but the community will grow as the company scales up.                                             My goal is to make the community a portal to everything Ooyala. A place to find solutions to technical issues, stay up on the latest trends ,and be informed of everything happening at the company. Since my start at Ooyala, I have implemented Google analytics into the site, giving us real-time information on who is visiting, OS, location etc.   I have integrated a Twitter feed for keeping up with the latest Ooyala mentions in social, and embedded Ooyala TV (video) on our home page where users can watch helpful videos. We are using the latest Lithium search (2.0) while building out our TKB with new content every day. I am excited to see our community grow in the months and years to come.  
Company: LandlordStation Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   Land... See more...
Company: LandlordStation Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   LandlordStation is a startup company founded in 2010 which provides web-based software apps to property managers and landlords throughout the US. Although our community (and company) are new and small, both are growing at rapid clips. More importantly, we understand and value the importance of communities and other social platforms and have made a concerted effort built them into the core of our business.   The LandlordStation Community was launched in January of 2013, as a way for our uniquely independent clientele to have a convenient and open way to communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, and generally connect to their peers in a very fragmented industry. Our goal with the community is to grow awareness of our brand in the wider property management industry and improve our traffic channels with new and unique content.     We have already begun to see a return on this investment as traffic from the community and searches for the community have grown rapidly over recent months and are already causing a noticeable difference in the cost of our traffic generation as we chip away at the percentage of our traffic that is generated by PPC and other advertising channels. We already have hundreds of excellent users (and a few budding Superusers) as well as posts that continue to receive hundreds of daily views by landlords from across the country. Our number of total post views is at 100,000 within 75 days of launch. As we continue to gain traction with both our community and company, we expect to continue to see rapid growth in our user-base with the goal of being the premier community for this industry.   Community Impact since launch: Conversion rate for purchases on our main site for traffic referred by the Community (and referrals from Community oriented social campaigns) is more than 2X the conversion rate from PPC traffic. Dramatic increase in organic Google searches for LandlordStation by name (or close variation) in Q1 2013 v. Q4 2012 suggesting a higher brand awareness driven in large part by the Community. Increase in traffic driven by real-time keywords. For example, we recently noted revenue generation from keywords based on a popular real estate news story that was referenced and linked in our Community. SEO for real-time or newsworthy keywords is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish and we are very pleased that we are seeing this in such a young community. As illustrated in the screenshot below, we received significant traffic during this period for the keyword "landlord whipped tenant" which was the subject of a news story referenced in the community.   As we continue to grow our company and our community, we feel strongly that social is core value, not an add-on strategy. We will shortly being moving all of our customer service forums and knowledge base inside the Community as well which will increase traffic and hopefully create an even more vibrant area for our clients and our contributors.
Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design ________________________________________________   ... See more...
Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design ________________________________________________   We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.       But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.     While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as: Customized categories and sub category pages User options (turn on/off elements on homepage) Custom banners area Activity feeds Feature videos   These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.     We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.    
Company: National Instruments Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight __________________________... See more...
Company: National Instruments Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight __________________________________________________   “Are two Knights in one day better than two days in one night?” <Hint, the answer is yes.>   When the NI Discussion Forum was launched in 2004, we could not have predicted how successful it would be in fostering passionate, proficient, and accomplished advocates for National Instruments. Our super users are not only incredibly engaged, but they also constantly push the envelope and drive innovation. They are an extension of the passionate company culture we have built and strive to maintain internally at NI.   Our community members chose the ranking Knight of NI based on a shared love for the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members who reach the 10,000-post milestone virtually receive the Knight of NI title and physically receive a shrubbery. This group has only seven members but is a respected and revered resource within our community. Collectively, the Knights have a vast wealth of knowledge. When we ask why they continue to engage in the NI Discussion Forums, we consistently receive the same response: They enjoy helping others, solving difficult problems, and sharing their knowledge to develop and empower future engineers. The Knights of NI participate because they truly recognize the value of our company, products, and industry.   We recently recognized two Knights of NI on consecutive days! Becoming a Knight does not happen every day; in fact, it does not even happen every year. However, in their race to Knighthood, these two loyal users have consistently been neck and neck for over eight years.               As a group, our Knights’ engagements make up 8 percent of our total community activity, and they receive more than 20 percent of the total kudos in the community. They frequently create quality content and have authored 12 percent of our total solutions. These numbers are extremely significant considering we have seven Knights in a community of over 200,000 users! The sheer volume of posts and solutions that the Knights provide significantly drive down support costs for our organization. We are thankful for their passion and strive to nurture their behavior through recognition, sneak previews before products releases, and direct channels to engage with NI engineers, just to name a few. The Knights lead by example and inspire fellow community members to engage to earn the greatest reward: knowledge.   There are many more examples and statistics we could mention to further sing the praises of this valued group, however one of the greatest outcomes of this recognition system is the bond our super users have built with one another. Their discussions are helpful, interesting, cutting edge, personal, and always entertaining. A great portion of the success of the NI Discussion Forums is absolutely due to these loyal SuperFans.    
Company: SuccessFactors Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation _____... See more...
Company: SuccessFactors Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Why should we win this award? “We want our customers to love work again!” To ensure that our customers have the best tools and resources to help them achieve success using our products, we launched the SuccessFactors Customer Community in April 2012. The primary goal of our community is to promote peer-to-peer engagement, but we also want people to use the platform for best practices knowledge, tips and tricks, discussion forums, blogs, new ideas, and much more.     The Challenge After launch we realized that our customers still had to access multiple systems during the day to get to our training and professional services resources. We needed to enable a single sign-on solution between our community and our SharePoint sites. We have a private community with a registration process so that only customers, partners, and employees are able to join. We have an active directory that authenticates users as they register. The two other critical resources we wanted customers to be able to access through the community were our SuccessFactors Training and SuccessFactors Professional Services. Both of these teams provide extensive knowledge and resources, but they do so on separate SharePoint sites.   The Solution Our exceptional technical implementation, which connects the Lithium community to the SharePoint sites with the click of the button, has resulted in a completely seamless community experience for our customers.  In order to achieve this technical implementation, we worked with Lithium partner Cloudsquads and a Cloudsquads partner SusQtech. This project enabled the single sign-on capabilities with a custom integration effort. The team first explored the solution, which started with the ADFS authentication issue. The technical teams then built an integration account, which provided credentials to access SharePoint. Then they developed a custom widget within Lithium that enabled easy access to the shared documents by using an iFrame housing the SharePoint sites, within which customers can download the documents. The custom-logic widget was placed on the community forums via the Lithium studio layout editor. The widget is modular and placed in the Lithium Studio Editor. A new page was created to host this service, the content is filtered by the SharePoint app, and Lithium passes whatever available fields that are specified by the integration protocol.     After clicking the button on the homepage with single sign on users are brought directly to the PS SharePoint site.     Training Page “Get Training” button     The Training SharePoint Page after you click on the “Get Training” button single sign on brings you to the Training SharePoint Page   The Outcome Customers are extremely satisfied with this seamless integrated solution. When customers and partners need information, documents, training, or other resources, the SuccessFactors Community is their one-stop shop! Once they are in the community, if they need to access the SuccessAcademy (training) or the Empower Methodology/Welcome Kits (Professional Services), they can easily access these SharePoint systems with a click of a button without logging in again. This is a huge win for us, and it creates an exceptional community experience for our customers.  
Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ____________________________________... See more...
Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   With a constant demand from customers to interact with Telstra, CrowdSupport was developed to be an online social hub for customers to quickly help each other, help themselves. We wanted to be able to provide our community with the best possible answers from within Telstra as well as leveraging external content to provide rich and relevant support.     To bring this vision to life we knew we had to develop CrowdSupport as a platform that was not only visually appealing but allowed content to flow fluidly between sources and the community in a responsive method to maximise the benefit to our community. To do this we began with a World First! By integrating the Microsoft community support knowledge base into the Lithium platform we are able to pull content from the Microsoft community and display into CrowdSupport, providing richer results to our community when they are searching for answers.     In addition, by using the Lithium REST API we have integrated CrowdSupport content into other assets including the Telstra website (Telstra.com) & our Telstra 24x7 mobile and tablet apps. We’ve also developed our Live Services Portal using the Google search appliance integration to aggregate and surface community content into search results on Telstra.com. These types of integrations mean our customers can access the CrowdSupport community from a range of platforms and devices so that customers can use the community in any way that they desire.       To ensure that our customers could make the best use of these new features, we’ve increased the options available to our customers to engage through introducing a range of new enhancements to the presentation layer. We’ve enhanced the layout and design of our knowledge base so that accepted knowledgebase threads now present the most relevant information first so that our customers get the right answer fast. We’ve also integrated with the REST API to create a custom homepage that surfaces trending community interaction and statistics .         Use of Lithium Rest API to customize pages high traffic pages and optimize the user experience In terms of content upload, we’re enabling Ooyala video functionality to allow all Telstra customers to submit video content without requiring a You Tube account & we’ve integrated the Lithium contest component to better engage with our customers and encourage contribution which has proven to be a real success.                                             Later this year we will also be introducing Single Sign on for all Telstra customers which will significantly alleviate registration headaches for customers using CrowdSupport. Customer rating and reviews that will allow our customers to provide direct feedback about our products and services Use the Lithium REST API to develop the “Ask a mate Widget” which will allow customers to access relevant CrowdSupport content and ask question on product and service pages on telstra.com