Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (1 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 80,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® .   Our Unique Promotion   We used the transition to Lithium as an opportunity to relaunch, reenergize and redesign SAS Support Communities. We aimed to make it easier for members to: Find correct information faster with intuitive searches Connect with peers Share what they know with others   We wanted members to recognize the immediate benefits of the new site, including: A quality mobile experience A new system of ranks and badges that rewards community contributions Better SPAM filters, keeping the noise level down so they can enjoy the good content   Our  Promotional Strategies and Tactics    The community management team deployed an integrated communication plan geared toward new and potential community members, employees and social media influencers to generate awareness of the relaunch.   After finalizing a launch-specific tagline for SAS Support Communities, “Your forum, transformed,” we came up with a succinct, evergreen tagline that invites community action: “Ask. Find. Share.”   Then we identified key pieces of “getting started” information for members, and produced six community articles and videos covering the points:   Welcome to the SAS Support Communities 3 ways to show off your skills on the SAS Support Communities How to get fast, helpful answers Community etiquette: The do’s and don’ts of the SAS Support Communities How to add SAS syntax to your post 5 features of an awesome SAS Communities profile   We held a soft launch phase for “super” active employee and external community members to gather feedback and create a sense of ownership among this influential group from the outset.   Social proved to be a critical channel for all promotional efforts. Over several weeks, we promoted the following assets across SAS corporate, user-specific and personal channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, and external SAS-related communities:   How-to videos SAS Users blog post Six social tiles with quotes from community super users. Examples:     Multiple SAS-owned websites promoted the news including the SAS homepage, support site, and appropriate support pages like SAS Training and Books. Three SAS user e-newsletters promoted it as well.   The relaunch received third-party validation through earned media placements including a Huffington Post interview and Social Business Engine podcast episode.   We internally promoted the launch through a video, article on the SAS intranet, post on social media blog, email blast to marketing and sales teams, posts on internal communities and email notices to other communications groups.   Our Results   SAS Support Communities have enjoyed healthy membership and web traffic since their inception in 2006. The relaunch built on this momentum resulting in bumps to online visits, membership and engagement.   Analysis* of SAS Communities traffic, post launch: Comparing Oct 1, 2015-March 27, 2016 to same time last year (Oct 1, 2014-March 27, 2015) 19% increase in sessions (visits) (1.53M vs 1.28M) 25% increase in page views (3M vs 2.4M) Higher rate of return visitors (80% returning vs. new, instead of 74.5% returning vs. new) 31% increase in new registered members rate (14,510 vs 11,067)   *Sources: Google Analytics and Lithium bulk data/history   Traffic to specific promotional tactics contributed to the online traffic boost. Here are a few sample metrics:   Cumulative views on how-to pieces: Articles with embedded videos: 4,407 Stand-alone YouTube videos: 1,061   Breakdown:   Welcome to the SAS Support Communities: article: 1,399; video: 325 3 ways to show off your skills on the SAS Support Communities: article: 1,064; video: 265 How to get fast, helpful answers: article: 560; video: 123 Community etiquette: The do’s and don’ts of the SAS Support Communities: article: 738; video: 77 How to add SAS syntax to your post: article: 471; video: 200 5 features of an awesome SAS Communities profile: article: 175; video: 71     SAS-owned social channel engagement:   We sprinkled promotions from corporate and user-focused social channels for months following the community relaunch date of Sept. 8, 2015. From Sept. 8 through Dec. 31, 2015, here are a few promotion results.   137 posts 940 engagements (709 likes, 13 comments, 218 shares) 282,500 account followers   Sample comments:   1. A quoted active member retweeted and pointed to specific SAS product board:     2. Same member replied and cited tagline, Find. Ask. Share:     3. One update received a technical question from a SAS user:     4.  Supporting visuals: Please include any supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. Insert them into your text copy, so we’re clear on desired positioning of the graphics. We will accept videos for this entry. All videos must be submitted as publicly viewable links on YouTube or Vimeo.   Answer #2 includes links to external promotions, such as community articles with embedded videos. In addition, here are direct YouTube links to the videos:   SAS Support Communities: YouTube playlist of all introduction videos Welcome! Boost your rep! How to get answers… Community guidelines Create an awesome profile New for SAS programmers    

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   In February 2015, we launched http://community.smartbear.com on the Lithium engine. By that time, we had forums for different products. They had their own design, gamification features, etc. It was a big challenge for us to unite all forums on one Lithium engine – we didn’t want to reduce the features we had on our old forums. In addition to this, we wanted to add more modern features provided by Lithium.     One of the main requirements was related to the community design – we wanted to see a branded community. Our designers worked hard on every image we added to the Community pages. In addition to modern design, we wanted to have more than just forums in the Community. Now, the SmartBear Community includes forums, feature request areas, Community Matters Blog, SmartBear Developer Network, Customer Advisory Board, different user groups and much more.   Here is the Community home page:     We regularly analyze community metrics, and they prove the success of our new Community. We achieved the 500% growth of visits to our Community by the end of 2015! We expect to see this trend in 2016 as we put much effort into the SmartBear Community.   Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% #Solutions +240% #Kudos +280% Visits +500%

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   The SmartBear Community provides 24/7 assistance for all product users. In addition, the Customer Care Team helps our customers resolve technical issues during normal business hours. Decreasing the load on our Support Team was one of the important tasks for 2015.   People should go to the Community first In 2015, we were concentrating on increasing the number of questions asked in the Community. For this, we launched different community programs oriented towards increasing the community visibility and boosting the activity of current community members.   We allocated one community manager who worked with community members, launched different community programs oriented towards new and existing community members.   To decrease the number of support cases, we have implemented the pre-submission search on the Contact Support form. When a customer submits a case, we show community topics where a similar question has already been discussed. Answering one specific question in the Community often means answering the same question for dozens of people.   The results of this implementation were great – many people went to the Community instead of contacting the Support Team.   Involve different teams into discussions As a rule, different teams don’t have time to read all community questions. However, we had a community manager who could refer an interesting question to a certain developer, QA engineer, technical writer, etc. They would find an answer faster when given a specific question and not having to review all community questions. Involving employees in the community brings great quality to practically all community discussions.   In addition, community members see that they can talk to developers of the product they use. They like it and often return to them to ask other interesting questions or provide some valuable feedback.   Case Deflection Increase Working on all of our initiatives helped us increase the number of deflected support cases (cases that would normally go to the Support Team, but were resolved in the Community). Last year, we doubled those metrics – at the end of 2015, we had 12% of deflected cases in comparison with 6.8% of deflected cases at the beginning of the same year.    

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   Our Story We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.   What we did We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).   We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs: The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members; The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.   Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.   To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.   What issue were we trying to solve? One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.   Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.   Our results We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics: Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% %Topics replied < 24hrs +12% #Solutions +240%     Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.  

  Company: Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe / PlayStation Europe Entry submitted by: Javier Tenes (Community & Support Manager) Community: PlayStation Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe (SIEE) is the central support organization for over 100 countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Australasia, marketing the world’s most popular computer games platforms – PS one®, PlayStation®2, PlayStation®Portable (PSP), PlayStation®Vita, PlayStation®3 (PS3), PlayStation®4 (PS4) and the ever-growing online PlayStation®Network (PSN) platform. SIEE main challenge for nest years is to consolidate the world of virtual reality through PlayStation VR.   Our community goals   Our main goal is to create brand advocacy and loyalty through community by connecting like-minded people and immerse them in a unique world of gaming. We give users the sense of be part of the brand. We have proved with data that a well-engaged community member is synonym of a high spender player and therefore leveraging community to generate engagement is one of our main goals.   Our community active members appear always within the exclusive segment of very high spenders of our PlayStation Store and therefore increasing that group of active and well-engaged members is key for us to generate revenue through community.   In addition, our community is the creation engine of the most extensive database of solutions and recommendations for PlayStation. A community self-support scheme that boosts our CSAT score.   “The Gamer” is at the center of our brand strategy and therefore our six community pillars (discovering, connecting, cooperating, competing, sharing, and recognition) converge with our brand needs.   PlayStation is #4theplayers and therefore PlayStation is for the community of players.   Our unique community design   Our design is unique and can’t be compared to any other Lithium community or any other community in general.   Over the past years, several internals teams including community managers, designers, data analyst, developers and project managers, have worked side by side to change the “out of the box” face of Lithium’s community platform and create completely customized UI, which follows an irreverent and funny style that fits perfectly into the culture of our main audience: the gamer.     Because we are a community of gamers, gamification breathes at the core of our design concepts.     In addition, we have aligned our platform’s look and feel with rest of official PlayStation sites such as our main website PlayStation.com, in order to provide our users with a unified UX across all PlayStation online entities.     We have tried to move away from overpopulated pages with several widgets and CTAs and move into a more minimalist design that clearly defines the function of each page within the overall user journey across the platform.      SIEE / PlayStation is a big retailer company with several key products & services our community is interested in. Thousands of messages are posted each month about these products & services and therefore our designs always aimed to facilitate a dynamic navigation between different topics  within the community. Provide our users with at a glance view of our latest and most popular topics  is a must.   We have introduce an additional navigation bar which help users to navigate across their personal community areas (profile, notifications, Private messages and settings) with just 1 click.     Finally, as our community is divided between supports and not support areas, we have introduced clever design concepts to help us routing visitors to the right place of the community depending on their necessities. Those designs always maintain a gaming style to maintain the platform in harmony .     All these concepts are extrapolated to our new responsive designs:     How we executed our community design   Our design approach is one of the key elements for achieving our community goals focused on supporting our overall marketing strategy.   A Community Steering Committee, a group of people with different expertise such us community managers, data analysts, UX designers, developers…, manage the different phases of executions for those objectives.   A group of Community Managers and other Marketing peers work together to define the list of key community priorities for next year. These objectives need to be validated by Senior Management and once that happens, the Steering Committee start working on them.   As kick off point, our Analytics and Reporting team put together a list of reports and analysis suggesting different tactics to approach our objectives. The Community Steering Committee have then different brainstorming sessions supported with those analysis and suggestions, including users surveys results, which will finally crystalized in a well-defined community strategy.   Once the community strategy is established, the designing team lead conversations around what design changes are needed to support the strategy, and they put together different mock-ups to illustrate that. Those design concepts / mock ups are reviewed and signed off by the Community Steering Committee. A report focused on technical feasibility of the new designs is created by the Technical Development team as this stage too.   We always have assigned a Project Manager who creates the project’s specs and scope, and keeps stakeholders updated with the project status all the time. The Analytics and Reporting team suggest KPIs to measure the new designs’ success once they go live and which are included within the project’s specs. .                                                                                  The Project is signed off by The Community Steering Committee and ultimately by the Director of Consumer Experience in SIEE which gives the green light for the development works to start on Lithium Stage.   Once a design change(s) is/are implemented on Stage, they are fully tested in house as well as by a group of selected community members, before we push it live to our community.   After going live we measure on a monthly basis how the new designs help to achieve our objectives.   Our design excellence results   Number of pages views per visit after introduce new navigation design elements Visits to boards from homepage before and after the implementation of the popular topics module Visits to support boards form homepage after introducing our CHI progression after