Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best New Community   Community: Jigsaw Launch Date: September 29, 2009 Submitted by: Jigsaw Community Marketing Manager Communitygal   As a leading provider of business information and data services that is uniquely crowd sourced by a global community of over 1 million business to business (BtoB) contacts, Jigsaw needed a community platform that provided members with better tools to interact with each other. In September 2009, Jigsaw launched the Lithium community platform and in the spirit of community sourcing--a premise on which the company is founded--allowed its members to nominate and select its own name. "The Corner" is both a reference to the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle and a double entendre for where people go to hang out and talk.   The Corner deserves to win the Best New Community category because it is Lithium's first BtoB business information community and has been enthusiastically embraced by both Jigsaw members and management.   Jigsaw's community members visit The Corner to not just discuss Jigsaw usage and find answers to their questions but also to discuss BtoB topics such as innovative sales strategies, trade prospecting information on companies, and much more. Additionally, The Corner has been an instrumental part of Jigsaw's feedback and customer support systems. Since inception of the Lithium platform, Jigsaw has already implemented 13 product ideas that were submitted by members in the Member Idea Exchange board.   The Corner has been steadily growing in popularity. Page views for the community increased by 355% after launching the Lithium platform compared to the previous message board; unique visitors have also increased by 612%.   Jigsaw also noticed that its members were eager to help each other get the most out of the site. So much so that they've recently started moving its support assets to The Corner as they feel  this would be the right first point of contact for getting help. If other members can't resolve an issue, it goes onto the support team. This shift parallels Jigsaw's philosophy toward community sourcing solutions. The Corner has become a vital and dynamic part of the Jigsaw community and as such, Jigsaw is investing in making it better. The next month will see a new and improved homepage for The Corner that will have a more organized look with tabs and snapshots. New employee blogs are also slated to go up soon, and the next initiative is to create a top sales books board where members submit and vote for their favorite sales books.  
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   -------- Category: Best Community ROI Usecase   Community: Best Buy Submitted by: Best Buy Community Manager: Gina   Conversations are happening every moment on the internet about the Best Buy brand and the products we sell. About two years ago we decided to join the conversation and engage customers both on our own Community as well as the blogosphere.   Best Buy provides a bilingual Community "Best Buy Unboxed" that integrates a forum, Twitter, blogs and videos to connect customers with other product users as well as our Blueshirt and Geek Squad Agents to create solutions together. Technology products continue to increase in complexity producing the epiphenomenon of techno-stress.    At Best Buy we realize that we cannot provide all the answers; what can provide is a platform to aggregate information and facilitate connections.   Whether it is customer to customer or customer to employee, we recognize that knowledge is often contained in pieces. By facilitating connections our customers are able to have both pre- and post-purchase support.   A recent analysis of the ROI of community determined that factoring in call deflection and sales influence, the Best Buy Community provides about a $5 million dollar benefit to the organization. In 2009, the Best Buy Community assisted over 2.5 million customers who posted over 79,000 messages and read over 81 million messages.   While there is a dedicated team of Community Connectors who regularly engage with customers on the Best Buy Community, about 95% of the conversations on the community are peer-to-peer support. Read Lithium's new Best Buy Casestudy
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best Community Anecdote/Story   Community: TVG Launch Date: July 7, 2009 Submitted by: TVG Community Manager zoerem     A few cliques developed early on in the TVG Community and as the months progressed the defined friendships between many members became obvious.   But there were two particular community members who seemed to be getting quite close. After much speculation from various members, rumors started circulating. Two very prominent members were at the center of the gossip and before long, the truth came out: Novice and Augustwest were in love. They declared their passionate love for each other in a post entitled “Love Story: Novice and Augustwest.” It all started with a private message on the TVG Community. One led to thousands, and PMs led to emails. After a month or so, they were planning to meet up in person and take a vacation together. When they met face to face they realized that the strength of their love wasn’t limited to virtual reality.   They were truly in love. The announcement to the community of their successful relationship did nothing to settle the gossip. It just caused the subject matter to vary slightly. Amusing posts were started with titles such as “If Augustwest and Novice were stallion and mare... what would their foal be named?”   And surprising gratitude was given under posts entitled “Why did you join the TVG Community.” The next round of posts about the two members were speculations on when we’d hear wedding bells and see Novice and AugustWest live on TVG saying “I do.”   While marriage isn’t on the forefront of the minds of the happy couple, they have moved in together and thank the TVG Community for allowing them to find the love of their lives.   Check out some posts here: http://community.tvg.com/t5/TVG-Viewer-Mailbox/LOVE-STORY-Novice-and-Augustwest/m-p/49147  
  If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are ope... See more...
  If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best New Community   Community: TVG Launch Date: July 7, 2009 Submitted by: TVG Community Manager zoerem     The TVG Community officially launched in July of 2009 and since has become the fastest growing horse racing community in existence.   With approximately 13,000 members the TVG Community is also well on its way to becoming the largest horse racing community out there. Our biggest competitor, Pace Advantage, has just 13,300 members and is growing at a much slower rate.   See the attached chart for a direct comparison of our growth rates. Here are some quick stats on the TVG Community:    13,000 members ~ 7,000 weekly visits ~ 300,000 weekly page views Over 4,000 weekly posts The TVG Community didn’t get to where it is now without reason. We have been working diligently with Lithium Technologies to provide the best features for our members. As you can see in the attached screen shot, our homepage is full of customized modules to make it more appealing to our customer base. Some of our most prominent features include:   Central Flash Module, updated on a weekly basis Twitter feed featuring tweets from our TV channel’s on air talent Unique ranking structure pertinent to horse racing Video and Photo pages featuring various races Blog page with TVG Talent Blogs and guest blogs from prominent industry bloggers Superuser program entitled The Turf Club, for our most prominent users TVG Knowledge Base in existence for less than one month and already 140 articles We also have the great opportunity to cross promote on our horse racing television network and our online wagering site www.TVG.com. Tune in to TVG to see our Community commercial shown every hour on our television channel, and the screen shot of our parent site www.TVG.com, with a Community tab and promotional graphic. With all of our new features, many more in the works, and our great customer base, we plan to keep on growing at such a fast rate!    
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best New Community   Community: Aflac Launch Date: October 24, 2009 Submitted by: Aflac Community Manager NateKlein     The Aflac Duck has been so many places that we thought, why not send him on a swim?  That's when the Duck Pond was formed.  The Duck Pond is a closed community forum where Aflac's online billing accounts can connect, share and learn from other Aflac account administrators by asking questions, providing answers and submitting ideas online.   In less than four months, more than 18,000 account administrators have joined the conversation ... that's 10.2 percent of our eligible accounts out there quacking about Aflac!  They have given us some great ideas - three of which are now on our strategic roadmap for implementation during the 2Q 2010. These suggestions will reduce call volume, enhance the customer experience and improve account retention.    We have posted blogs to help Aflac accounts improve the customer experience and blogs that include tips on using social media. Soon, we'll start the conversation on how to make corporate sponsorships work for our accounts.  In addition to our featured blogs, the many threads have allowed our accounts to solve issues, raise concerns and sing the praises of Aflac's various services.   Overall, there have been more than 117,000 page views, over 32,000 message views and over 200 message posts -amazing considering Aflac accounts usually visit the site once a month to pay their bills.   Lastly, Aflac has to put some dollar figures to this analysis to make it worthwhile:    Along with our web redesign and the ability to showcase how secure online payment transactions are via the Duck Pond, there has been a three percentage point increase in the number of customers that pay online.   Although this increase may be small, its effect is large, because moving that figure in a positive direction provides Aflac with additional annual cost avoidance for processing and materials of more than $95,000 - and that number continues to climb!  
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best Community ROI Usecase   Community: Verizon Submitted by: Verizon Community Project Manager Hollyb   The Verizon forums http://forums.verizon.com/ has quickly evolved into something much more than a technical support forum. In fact, the forums are now touching many parts of the company in some way and are rapidly becoming more and more integrated into the overall communication strategy. In 2009, the media relations team began blogging in the community, using the Verizon blogs as a tool to release company updates, information and press releases.   The blogs serve as a primary touch point to the media as well as conversation portals with our customers about important topics such as how Verizon as a company is helping local communities, or the latest advancements in wireless technologies.   More specifically, the Verizon at Home blog is now one of the first places consumers and media can look for news of upgrades to existing services or announcements of new Verizon products and services. The Responsibility Blog is a place for Verizon to showcase our corporate responsibility and share how the company has contributed to foster improvements in education, the environment, health care, accessibility and Internet safety. The Verizon Small Business blog provides relevant news, trends and service information aimed at helping small businesses increase their bottom-line. In addition to the blog, The Verizon Small Business group is also taking advantage of the forums by starting small business discussions and providing more ways for small businesses to promote themselves through the forums. The forums have also become a center point of other social media activity happening online. In addition to the linkages between Facebook and YouTube, Verzion has implemented a Twitter integration which lets members interact with Twitter directly from the forums. This integration allows Verizon’s technical support team to actually find customer questions and problems happening on the social web, and pull them back into the forums for discussion and resolution. In 2010, a customer Advisory Panel was formed with the use of the forums. This panel serves as a private focus group so Verizon can get real feedback from our customers on products, services and ideas. The Verizon forums have become a place where Verizon managers and executives can have two way conversations with customers, understand needs, and respond quickly. It has evolved beyond a technical help forum and become integrated into a core piece of Verizon's communication strategy with its customers.
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   -------- Category: Most Innovative Community   Community: Future Shop Submitted by: Future Shop Community Manager, LauraB   Made up of over 130,000 Future Shop Product Experts, customers and vendors, the Community Forum has connected tech-enthusiasts and newbies from all across Canada and facilitated more than 220,000 posts around technology news, products, and services. Unique to the Future Shop Community is the Avatar, who is known as Aaron in the English Community and Fred in the French.   The Avatar serves as a guide to the Future Shop online experience by searching the site and the community for answers to technology related questions. Since launching in June 2007, the Avatar has facilitated close to 9.5 million searches, with 36,000 questions getting submitted through to the Community if the answer couldn't be found in the search results. The Avatar acts as a virtual host who communicates with the visitor via pre-recorded videos. Users can ask the Avatar a question and it will search the Community, Buying Guides, Tech Spotlight articles, and Recently Asked Questions.   The Avatar element is especially unique as it connects a different group of customers - a group who might not be as willing to join a community, but still want to benefit from the large knowledge-base - to the larger group who are likely to be able to provide an answer to their question. Aaron and Fred are positioned as Future Shop Product Experts with the goal of taking the in-store experience and expanding it to the online space. Both Avatar personalities have several Easter Egg videos that are popular searches with customers (try asking Aaron to "dance" or "sing"). They are accessible from the futureshop.ca homepage and the Expert Advice page. The Avatar has facilitated millions of customers in finding solutions to their techno-stress in an innovative and entertaining way. Avatar: EN: http://www.futureshop.ca/learnmore/LMhome.asp FR: http://www.futureshop.ca/learnmore/LMhome.asp?logon=&langid=FR Community: EN: http://www.futureshopforums.ca FR: http://forumsfutureshop.ca
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!   ------ Category: Best Community ROI Usecase   Community: Verizon Submitted by: Verizon Community Project Manager Hollyb     Verizon launched http://forums.verizon.com/ at the end of 2008 as part of the company’s esupport initiatives to help both wireless and residential customers find answers to their support questions in the most efficient way possible. The primary goal of the support forums was two fold: helping customers find resolution to their support questions quickly, as well as helping Verizon cut down on customer support costs by decreasing call volume. In a little over a year since its launch, the Verizon team was excited to see the peer-to-peer support among customers on the forums rapidly grow and continue to thrive. Long-time Verizon customers were taking time to help newer Verizon customers solve everything from most common technical issues like how to set up their voicemail to more complex issues like making their new FiOS TV work with their Xbox.   A group of Community Leaders soon formed, consisting of volunteer Verizon customers who spend hours each week taking time to research and find answers to their fellow community members’ questions.   The Verizon forums quickly accomplished the first goal, by providing customers with a place to work out their technical problems quickly, efficiently and in a peer-to-peer environment. The explosive growth in the Verizon forums was captured in their 2009 numbers. The Verizon community saw an increase in new member registrations by 177%, an increase in posts by 347%, and an increase in page views by 300%.   But perhaps the most impressive impact of the Verizon community was the significant decrease in call-volume which resulted in dramatic savings in support-related costs.
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find o... See more...
If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more now   ------ Category: Best Community Business Integration   Community: Staples Submitted by: Staples Program Manager, Retail Communications Alissa   Behind the Button is an internal community for Staples store managers to connect with one another, solve problems, share best practices, and provide feedback.   A vital resource for 6,000 store managers across the US, Behind the Button has become an integrated tool in the day to day operations of stores and has changed the way the Staples Home Office communicates with them. In addition to the store managers and field leadership, a group of Home Office subject matter experts representing functional areas such as merchandising, operations, HR, and marketing are active members of the community. These Home Office experts have proven to be a key benefit of the community, providing answers to store questions and using feedback gathered from the site to refine programs and influence change. Senior leaders at Staples love to leverage Behind the Button for its Live Chat application - it has been most popular with Divisional Senior Vice Presidents as it gives them the ability to have personal interactions with all the stores in their regions when travel for face to face meetings is not possible.    There have been more than 25 Live Chat events on the community in 18 months. From the President of US Retail to initiative leaders looking for feedback on a new program, Chats have become a go-to communication vehicle to connect with stores across the country in one action-packed, hour-long session. The newest feature of Behind the Button, "Inspired Ideas", will further integrate the community into Staples business when it launches in May. The new ideas module will replace the company's static Idea Exchange program with a more dynamic application that leverages social collaboration on the community. After all, it's the associates behind the Easy Button that know the business the best, and the Behind the Button community gives them a voice, not only to help each other be successful in their jobs, but to impact change within the company. In the words of one Behind the Button user to his fellow community members: "This community is in my opinion, the most underrated, valuable resource that we have... And every post that every one of you put up is a testament to the culture that makes this company successful."