Company: GoPro Entry submitted by: Jeff Terrell (Director, Support Community) Community: GoPro Support Hub Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   GoPro, Inc. is transforming the way people visually capture and share their lives. What began as an idea to help athletes self-document themselves engaged in their sport, GoPro has become a standard for how people capture themselves engaged in their interests, whatever they may be. From extreme to mainstream, professional to consumer, GoPro enables the world to capture and share its passion in the form of immersive and engaging content.   Our community goals   GoPro’s mission is built on the idea that when you create the tools to help people capture and share their lives, something magical happens. Their shared content inspires others to get out there and do the same. We call this “The GoPro Movement” and it’s a testament to our inspired customer community and the world’s interest in participating. As stewards of this movement, it’s our job to make it easy for the world to join in.   When we launched the GoPro Support Hub, our goals were tied directly to this mission. Specifically, we wanted to build a platform that did three things:   Places GoPro enthusiasts at the center of a support community designed to inspire them and invite increased engagement. Engages audiences and enlist superusers to contribute value to the community by answering member questions and developing an emotional bond with our members at scale. Assures that our platform, trusted content, and incentives provide the unified foundation for this program that embodies the values of our trusted brand.   Ultimately, our goals for the GoPro Support Hub are tied to acquiring and engaging customers to experience our brand, giving those customers dynamic support and learning opportunities from both GoPro experts and experts within our customer base so everyone can get the most out of our products and services, and celebrating our members and sharing the content and knowledge they’ve developed.   Within GoPro, we often use the word “stoked” to express when we’re excited about something. The GoPro Support Hub is our way to help spread the stoke.   The design elements that make our community unique and stand out from the rest   Featured Search Bar Nearly all platforms have a search function, but for the GoPro Support Hub, we decided to bring that front and center and invite the user to “Find a solution. Share a solution, Ask a question. Stay stoked.”     Navigation Grid In addition to a traditional navigation tree, we built a more visual six-panel interface that encourages users to dive into our five key product categories, or into our in-house produced video tutorials. Each panel responds interactively to the user with engaging lifestyle images as the user mouses over, creating a dynamic experience that demonstrates the types of shots the user can capture with the products in that category.     Product Carousel Within each section, users find an image carousel of all of the products available in that category. Posts are automatically tied to a specific product based on labels the poster selects, giving other users the option to read and reply to posts on a category level, or to apply a visual filter so they only see posts related to the specific product they are interested in.     Profile Hovercard Designed to help members recognize and connect with each other, the profile hovercard feature is a pop up that appears whenever a user mouses over another user’s name. The card presents the other member’s username, avatar, rank and badges, core user stats, and the option to send the user a private message.     Badges Our badge system is customized in a very GoPro way. With names like Conversation Starter (new threads), Nailed It (solutions), Hi-5 (kudos), You’re It! (tags), Dishin’ Out 5s (kudos given), and Wingman (replies), and descriptions written to reflect our unique brand, we want to motivate users to keep earning badges so they can find out what the next one will say.     How we executed our community design   The GoPro Support Hub was designed in partnership with our Customer Support, Creative, Software & Services, and IT teams. The design is based on our company’s design perspective that great design doesn’t need to draw attention to itself. Our goal is to keep the aesthetic clean, simple, elegant, and understated.   Core to these goals, and in support of our mission to make it easy for people to capture and share engaging content, we deliberately decided to feature images of and by our customers wherever we can. In fact, GoPro products rarely appear in the lifestyle images found on the GoPro Support Hub. Our focus is on what people can do with GoPro products, not on directly marketing the products themselves.       With the foundational elements decided, we focused on integrating the GoPro Support Hub experience into the main GoPro.com site. We’ve done this in a number of ways:   1. Integrating the user’s already-established GoPro profile from the main site into the Support Hub via an SSO pull. This allows the user to have a seamless experience across both platforms.     2. Featuring the Support Hub on the GoPro.com Support page, which is accessible from the main header navigation on every GoPro.com page.     3. Integrating Support Hub content into our on-platform knowledge base so users with questions can find both GoPro-created articles as well as posts by our expert users.     The final step of our design process was to assure that we are embedding the GoPro Support Hub with a personality that matches the GoPro personality by assuring that our moderation team engages with our customers in a consistent and on-brand manner. Through trainings and regular team meetings, we are working to leave our users with the feeling that the GoPro Support Hub experience is authentic, friendly, inspiring, and even innovative.   Our metrics   In the first six months since the launch of the Support Hub, we have seen the following growth in our Traffic and Engagement stats [please note that these numbers are expressed as a compound monthly growth rate over the period]:   Unique Visitors – Grew 37.5% each month Total Visits – Grew 36.9% each month Total Posts – Grew 7.3% each month Views of Accepted Solutions – Grew 72.7% each month   Other engagement measures are also showing strong growth. These results are for the first quarter of 2016 vs. the prior quarter:   70.3% increase in the number of users starting a topic 75.8% increase in the number of users having a post they’ve written marked as an Accepted Solution 77.6% increase in the number of users who have given another user a Hi-5 (kudo) 56.4% increase in the number of users who have received a Hi-5 (kudo)

Company: The Home Depot Categories:  - Most Innovative Social Customer Program   - Best New Community     Entered by: Tia Robinson (tdrtia) Community Name: The Home Depot How-To Community URL: community.homedepot.com Launched: October 11, 2010   We should win either the - Most Innovative Social Customer Program and/or Best New Community award because: We launched the premier destination for DIY and home improvement discussions on the internet.   No matter how big or small - people can come to our Community to ask questions, share their expertise and to learn something new.   Members of the Home Depot How-To Community earn rank and status among their peers by participating in the site on a regular basis and offering their expertise to other users. Visitors to community.homedepot.com will find discussions organized in categories including Paint, Tools and Hardware, Garden and Yard and Do-it-Yourself and Repair. Visitors will also find some different types of members in our Community: Store Associates   We’ve trained a team of store associates who spend a dedicated amount of time each week helping customers in this community. These “designated associates” help answer product and project questions and share their knowledge and experience with the entire community. These associates might not always be the first ones to answer, for two important reasons.   First, we want to give other members of the community the chance to show their stuff. We know there are a lot of really experienced DIYers out there, and we want to hear great ideas and tips from them as well. Also, our designated associates will often take some time to research the most thorough answer possible so members can get all the info they need to get their projects done right. Regardless, members can generally expect our designated associates to chime in when appropriate within a 24-hour period of an initial post, if not sooner. Vendors & Partners Many of the companies who make the products are represented on our Community. You'll also find our many partners and other members of our Home Depot family here, ready to discuss all things DIY.   Members of the How-To Community can also: • Meet other DIY enthusiasts • Ask questions • Share tips • Post comments • Take polls • Share and browse pictures • Watch and share videos • Provide feedback to other users   The How-To Community also features a Meet Our Experts section that spotlights the community’s store associates and What’s New in Our Aisles section highlights new product innovations from The Home Depot.  

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: 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.              

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

Company: 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: 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  

Company: HSN  Entry submitted by: Matt See (MattHSN) Director, Social & Games Community: HSN Community (http://community.hsn.com,http://blogs.hsn.com) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   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’s Community serves a vital role for HSN as the single owned destination for customers to post and engage with partners, brands and each other. It’s a tool for our customers to get a second opinion about a product and is a key aspect to driving boundaryless retail for HSN across all screens.   How we activated our influencers   1) We re-launched the Community with a new design and a new way to connect with HSN personalities called Q&A’s. 2) Lithium allowed us to engage our audience, which in turn is allowing us to organically reach others. HSN is a differentiated way to shop because, unlike brick and mortar, you’re shopping from the personality behind the brand, and with Community shopping on TV has never been more personal. The Lithium platform has allowed HSN to take that one step further by creating omni-channel Q&A’s that give customers the ability to have their own conversations with the brand. Instead of just shopping for jeans, HSN gives customers unprecedented access to stylists, fashion icons, and other experts to help offer a more personal and valued shopping destination; and the customer is front and center in the experience with the power of Lithium’s Community.   Our results Hosted 71 Q&A’s between August – December in 2014, creating a whole new way for customers to connect and drive meaningful, relevant conversation on HSN. +2,502.4% in Community 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.   Q&A Banner Example       Before / After Lithium Launch   Before: After:   Community Q&A Example    

Company: Claro   Entry submitted by:  Iasmine Pereira (Iasmine) and Luciano Piva (Lpivap)   Community:  Comunidade Claro hdtv (http://comunidadeclarohdtv.claro.com.br/) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Claro TV is a Brazilian satellite pay-TV operator, controlled by Mexican company America Movil, one of the largest groups of mobile telephony in the world that, from 2006, began to adopt Claro brand in 16 countries of America. With over 3 million subscribers, Claro TV is now the fourth largest pay-TV operator in Brazil.      We decided to implement the Community and LSW because we wanted a new user experience for our brand which would bring with it key business and marketing opportunities such as: Call deflection; Reduced customer attrition; ROI optimization; Become an innovative player in the Brazilian Market; Create a CRM channel with our members and customers; Reduced Support costs.     Benefits of a Total Community   Both LSW and Community have been decisive in helping us be more effective on social channels and establishing a closer brand relationship with our customers.   The Community is a source of valuable content both for customers looking for solutions to problems and to Claro TV fans searching for the latest Claro news. To help direct our customers to the community from our main domain and ensure they can quickly find the information they need, the Claro TV website was redeveloped to include several various touch points to the community and federated search, leading to a 45% increase in Community page views.   In addition to our own promotion efforts, the community has benefited from seeing its content shared on the social web by some of our fans, expanding the community’s reach and driving engagement.   The Community also increased registrations for Minha Claro, an exclusive online account management tool for Claro customers. This increase is very important because not only is Minha Claro useful for future CRM purposes, the tool offers a number of support features that generate further call deflection from Customer Support.   With LSW we are able to unify support across social channels, and the agents are able to answer more questions in less time.  This productivity increase meant we were able to reduce the team while maintaining our SLA’s and volume of response.  The integration of Community and LSW means that we are able to link to community topics in our social responses, potentially reducing agents’ time to response while providing an additional means of promoting the community.   Our results   In the first 8 months of the ClaroTV Community and Social support through LSW we have seen impressive results:   40% month on month growth of unique visitors 23% month on month growth of registrations 18% month on month growth of new topics 86% customer satisfaction score for social support through LSW 50% increase in agent responses per day compared to our previous tool   On top of that, solution views continue to grow 100% month on month, increasing the reach of peer-to-peer solved topics and potentially contributing to support deflection.      

Company: Ooredoo Qatar  Entry submitted by: Muna Barakat (monabarakat) Community Manager Community: Ooredoo Community (http://community.ooredoo.qa/)  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    Ooredoo Qatar is a telecomm company based in Qatar. It is the first telecom company in the country. Ooredoo is a provider of mobile services, wireless and wire-line services, entertainment services, and content services, with varying market share in the domestic and international telecom markets and in the business (corporations and individuals) and residential markets.   Ooredoo went international few years back to include eight other telecom companies in countries such as, Kuwait, Oman, Maldives, Myanmar, Tunisia, and Algeria. Today, Ooredoo serve more than 90 million people internationally.   However, our Ooredoo Community is cozy when it comes to size. We focus on Qatar’s market that has around 2 million people. We launched Community on May 2014, so we are barely one year old.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction intiatives   Every person in Qatar has at least one device or service from Ooredoo. Due to our verity of services, we have high pressure on our customer service. Although we support our customers on many online and offline channels such as our website, Facebook, twitter, snapechat, instagram, call center, and shops, but we wanted to do the extra mile and offer our customers a unique experience where they can get help from their peers. This is where Lithium role comes!   We launched our forum around a year ago, but we are already seeing it grow nicely with members, quality content, and getting picked up by Google Although we haven’t done aggressive paid campaign, so this growth is mostly organic.   Ooredoo’s initiative to always offer what is new and different is what attracts customers to it. Peer to peer, social support forum, such as the solution that Lithium offers isn’t a common trend in Qatar or even the region. Being the first of its kind has pros and cons because it is harder to educate the public about these forums. The choice of having a young female community manager is also an indication of unorthodox practice, because Ooredoo is all about the end result and not following what is common or average.   Being keen on customer satisfaction, we wanted to hit three main areas: Humanize our brand Weather you are an Ooredoo staff or regular customer on Community, we encourage the user to show his character. Our style of writing is more casual. The result? Customers started to change the image of a faceless corporate, and having names associated with Ooredoo such as the team working on Community like me, and other Ooredoo staff members. Own our content You saw a solution of how to restart your Wi-Fi device of Facebook five months ago. Today, your Wi-Fi started to act up and you need this valuable post, could you find it? With many social media channels like Facebook, twitter, and instagram, it is very tiring and sometimes impossible to find old content. Owing our content meant hassle free to our customers. And it was a win/win solution for our product team that could monitor feedback and gain market research info in a way, AND our customers who don’t have to wait on the phone for many cases. A hub for customers to share, chill, and be heard Increasing enthusiasm level toward our brand get personal with our customers, know who they are, what changes they need, and what they like to watch as a movie so we can include it on our Mozaic service, and many other scenarios.   Our results   There is a causality effect between Community and decrease in customer complaints, but we don’t think it is a direct causality.   However, we have many posts from our super-users, and active users who expressed their satisfaction, or promoted our Ooredoo services on Community countless times, such as this topic that gave a review to our most common services:     This is an example of a user (who’s not a super user) who gave review on Mozaic service. In return, one of our senior experts on Mozaic replied to every points the user gave, provided future plans, and offered beta trail chances for the user to test. Here are some of the reactions:    

Company: AT&T Categories: Best Community ROI Entered by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Community Name: AT&T Community URL: forums.att.com Partnership – That’s the reason the return on investment for AT&T’s community has increased so dramatically.   In late October, 2010, AT&T and Lithium partnered to refine, polish and consolidate three different communities birthed at different times for different purposes from different AT&T business units. Our Wireless, DSL & Internet and U-verse communities operated largely independently without shared authentication, common design or similar structure.   After fixing “the outside” of AT&T forums in October, 2010, we then leveraged our Lithium partnership to address “the inside” in February, 2011.   Following Lithium’s advice on best practices, we analyzed months of customer data, board content, etc, to totally overhaul our community organization, categories and navigation.   The community likes the changes, and we like the ROI.   The ROI results to date include:   A steady increase in Board Replies since initial 2010 consolidation – in fact, an average of 310 vs. 164 Board Replies daily    Our members are more engaged – answering more questions – deflecting more calls.   A 16% increase in call shed savings January 2010 – January 2011  A 14% increase in call shed savings February 2010 – February 2011  A 14% increase in call shed savings March 2010 – March 2011    The mission of AT&T is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. We believe our community is a growing contributor in fulfilling that mission.    

Company: AppDynamics   Entry submitted by: Steve Levine (appslevine) Senior Product Manager, Community                       Community: AppDynamics Community (http://community.appdynamics.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     We are a leader in the explosive Application Intelligence space. Our users are very technical and we provide enablement to this audience through our Lithium Community. We strive to maximize customer satisfaction and adoption and see that clearly in the stats coming from Lithium Social Intelligence each week.    The community is linked from our .com site, directly through our software product and outbound e-mail marketing campaigns. We also obtain subscribers through organic search on the web. Our boards are divided into a small number of product categories. By creating hoards of new company-generated rich media content alongside user-generated, we now believe to have the algorithm for technical enablement and have measurable results coming in regularly.      In order to create a framework where product management, engineering, education, customer success and the SE orgs are able to create their own enablement content on Lithium, we devised an HTML/CSS widget scheme with some 40 different templates.  The framework allows Idea boards to be used to host completely custom page layouts implemented by widgets. This includes video embedded players, image lightboxes, styled titles and body text with standard layout rules. We stage new content right on production using a ‘curator’ role assigned to reviewers. Our own page code enforces this so it isn’t seen by the public until we unlock it.   We also moved all of our Studio components into an offline Ruby environment called ‘Middleman’ which is used in conjunction with GitHub to stage content and code outside of our Staging site before pushing it.  This way we created an optimized, development environment spanning multiple time zones and geos. We can now adjust and preview any Studio function offline in our Middleman environment before pushing to stage and then test in stage before using Studio Publish to push to prod.  Robots push the studio components back up from Github in seconds and can do it incrementally.      We provide what is represented inside the AppDynamics circle. Average users come in with questions and lacking knowledge, and the advanced/expert users and AppDynamics team help them become experts themselves. This is based around Content > Experts > Analytics as depicted in the below graphic.  We have measured increased subscriptions and higher engagement metrics in the new content areas. Our traffic in the 90 days prior, from September 2013 to December 2013 was 70k page views, 20k visits with 10k uniques.  In the 3 months since the new content went live, from Dec-20 2014 – March 20, 2014 views increased 15% to 80k, visits 18% to 24.5k and uniques by 24% to 12.9k. We have also seen heavy downloads of our product extensions which are hosted on the community. Product extension downloads went from 0 to approximately 600 in 3 months.  Extensions development grew from 0-62 in that same period. Sales have queried community engagement metrics during land and expand lifecycles in order to leverage user behavior against sales strategy.   Additional Technical Accomplishments   Front-End Development Approach In order to refresh and re-layout our community site from scratch, we needed a hi-fidelity approach to customization. Using studio with its myriad browser-based text editors was not going to provide the version control and scalability we required. We completely refreshed both the CSS and layout substantially and ran code on every page to hide most of the HTML coming down from Lithium and replace it with modified page code.  This allowed us to mash up REST calls to Lithium’s back-end with our custom layout code to get the pages to look like we needed them to, including the home page. We did this efficiently by timing DOM loads with code execution (JavaScript) so the user experience remained sub-1-second.   By using GitHub to maintain all development branches, we rarely experienced an out of sync codebase.  Teams in India and the US worked independently on separate branches with no conflicts, saving precious time during rapid deployments. (2-week agile sprints). We also maintained the ability to deprecate code and revert production in the event of regressions.  Our progress was hyper fast with an extremely low bug count and we refreshed and rebuilt the community in 6 months, faster than any other project of this magnitude in the company’s history.   Custom User-Based, Off-Site Analytics Facility Initially we did not have an API to retrieve user behavior against actual users at scale. However, we were able to implement page code that monitors button events for downloading product extensions. Each time a registered user clicks this button, we capture their user info, time/date and the extension they downloaded and store it in an offsite Django-based MySQL db.  We can then pull log files of these actions and generate dashboards of this behavior.  This is very useful to sales teams in the midst of upselling enterprise customers. In addition to our custom analytics we also instrument every page of the community with Google Analytics tag code and report it (minus user info) to GA.

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!