Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capab... See more...
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capabilities to enhance the influence of Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers, enabling them to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration and share it directly with Cisco customers.  We implemented more than 80 custom components in Lithium to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and fits within their standard workflow. We utilized Lithium's REST APIs to create an externalization channel to migrate the most useful articles from Tech Zone to Cisco.com.  Moreover, we extended our platform to enable our partners to collaborate with us on joint customer opportunities and challenges, and to retain these interactions as part of corporate memory.   The business impact for Cisco's TAC grew significantly in 2013 due to increasing participation driven by further integration of the Lithium platform within the existing workflow, mobile access, and content externalization.  Articles published on Cisco.com that resulted from collaboration within Tech Zone received 1.7 million views and saved Cisco nearly $10M due to case avoidance from February 2013 through January 2014.  The rate of cost savings due to external articles has grown significantly each quarter, and this trend is projected to continue.  For example, the quarterly cost savings increased by 48% over the last two fiscal quarters.   The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) is staffed by over 3,000 engineers; this team spans 20 TAC facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries and in 17 different languages.  Cisco's TAC, enhanced by Lithium's capabilities, continues to change the way engineers think about collaboration with robust, organic Social Knowledge Management Environments.  Powered by Cisco’s Intellectual Capital Transformation group (ICT), Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for these engineers to collaborate, share and publish valuable content directly to customers via the web or mobile applications.  Since its launch over two years ago, Tech Zone has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves partners and customers.  In addition, Tech Zone influences other engineering and consulting business units inside Cisco seeking similar benefits from Social Knowledge Management Environments.            Since its origins, Tech Zone has been pushing the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment (SKME) is and what it can become. In addition to Lithium out of the box capabilities, we have enhanced the collaboration experience of the engineers with features such as:        Raise Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. This feature was enhanced by allowing users to subscribe to raised hand events, enabling community experts to be easily notified when other engineers need assistance.     You can enable this subscription under your My Settings > Notification Settings            Solution Buddy Solution Buddy powers the reuse of the Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content directly within the salesforce.com interface that will assist the engineer in solving the customer issue quickly without the need to search or leave the salesforce.com interface.            Externalization Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we created a path from within Tech Zone to externalize valuable content to our corporate website at Cisco.com. In addition to powering the externalization channel, we created a publishing lifecycle widget that lets engineers know the state of articles within the externalization pipeline:            Collaborative Review for External Publication To reduce redundant efforts to externally publish the same article, engineers can now see and join other engineers that are preparing an article. If no engineers are working on the same article, the default option is 'Initiate External Publication'. However, if engineers are already working on the document, others may 'Join'. Engineers may 'Unjoin' at any time, and if the engineer is the last to 'Unjoin',  the available option is 'Cancel External Process'.     Example actions for collaborating on external publication of documents        Related Content One of the key missions of Tech Zone is promoting content reuse. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we want to ensure engineers are consuming and leveraging already existing content, and adding to it as appropriate. With this in mind, we developed a widget that returns articles and posts containing content similar to the one being viewed (especially content related to the linked case in salesforce.com).            Empower External Publication of Naturally Captured Content Discussions that have accepted solutions will trigger the button "Share it for External Publication". This button triggers the Lithium feature "Start Article" from a discussion.          Me Too Integration with Case Linkages We enhanced the Lithium "Me Too" feature by triggering a pop-up to capture the case number in which the engineer is facing the same issue as described in the thread.        Label Widget We implemented a widget to highlight the labels assigned to the article being viewed. If the engineer clicks any of these labels, a list of all articles containing that label is presented.            Injecting Content Impact into Federated Search Results Results from our enterprise search engine now take into consideration the Content Quality Factor (CQF), which means the most valuable and useful content will be presented at the top of the search results. In addition, discussion threads with posts marked as Accepted Solutions will also appear at the top of the results.    Tech Zone's success is the result of three main components:   End-to-End Content Creation and Consumption: Collaborations between TAC engineers often contain large amounts of information spread out over multiple emails, messages, and tools. Tech Zone is able to act as an environment that captures and compiles these chunks of information into cohesive articles that can be cataloged and later referenced by engineers experiencing similar problems. The most helpful articles are published outside Cisco where they can be directly consumed by customers either on the corporate website or via the Cisco mobile application.   Fully Integrated Workflow: Tech Zone takes collaboration to the next level by not only providing an environment for TAC engineers to work together, but also integrates within the existing TAC workflow.  The Solution Buddy application binds Tech Zone with the TAC engineer case handling tool, MyWorkZone (Salesforce.com), to surface relevant Tech Zone content for assisting engineers in solving open customer issues.   Solution Buddy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhbWZ4L3s   Reputation and Gamification: Gamification is leveraged to drive user engagement and innovation. Tech Zone recently launched a competition called "Knowledge Champions League" to empower engineers and drive the creation of valuable content in their respective technology spaces by teaming them up with similar engineers from different countries. Winners will be able to travel around the world to meet their colleagues.   Another successful gamification initiative was the “Best Greasemonkey Widget Contest,” for which engineers competed to create widgets that could enhance the Tech Zone user experience. Over 300 engineers submitted unique widgets and several were selected by the engineers to be implemented directly into Tech Zone.   1) Value Tech Zone initially focused on creating an internal repository for content that TAC engineers could leverage to collaborate, improve, and reuse to better solve customers’ cases. The next step was to share this content with Cisco's customers by externalizing TAC-authored content from Tech Zone to the Cisco website. These externalized articles have saved Cisco a total of nearly $10 million from February 2013 to January 2014.   2) Participation Participation in Tech Zone has skyrocketed since its launch. Tech Zone's user base has increased by 103% since 2012 to more than 26,500 registered users and content has grown by 145% to more than 23,300 TAC-authored articles. Although Tech Zone initially targeted TAC engineers, the user base has grown exponentially; so much so that the original TAC engineers represent only 21.6% of the population of Tech Zone.     Feedback from TAC engineers:    "Tech Zone has given a lot to TAC newbies like me and I sure would want to give back in whatever way I can!" - Vinay Raichur, Voice TAC Engineer from India    “This is an excellent website, I didn't know this existed until a couple days ago. The reason I like Tech Zone is the contributors are doing a fantastic job explaining concepts in simple and easy to understand language. I myself was able to understand quite a few concepts.” - Rahul Munot, Sales Engineer from US   Tech Zone has successfully created a model for dynamic corporate memory, displaying how knowledge can be leveraged, not only internally, but externally across Cisco as well. So well, in fact, that other organizations within Cisco and Cisco partners have requested Social Knowledge Management Environments similar to Tech Zone.   3) Mobility Starting December 2013, content from Tech Zone has been included in the new Mobile application (Cisco Technical Support), available for both iOS and Android. Since then, there have been almost 18,000 application downloads, and TAC authored articles from Tech Zone have received a total of almost 12,000 mobile views. The addition of these documents to the Cisco Technical Support mobile app has been well received by the Tech Zone community.   Feedback from customers:   "[Tech Zone Docs] are the publicly available documents that TAC has written to recommended best practices or address common customer issues, and many of them are pure gold! …Priceless" - Review by Ethan Banks, Network Architect, Chase Paymentech Solutions, Co- Host of Packet Pushers  
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Organization Game Changer    CommSec is Australia’s leading online trad... See more...
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Organization Game Changer    CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    In launching a Community with Lithium, we have become the first major broker affiliated Community in Australia, giving us a key point of differentiation for our customers.   Recognizing the breadth of assets we have to draw on, we have built the Community experience around the ability to connect and learn from other traders, our expert analysts and our customer support teams.     We have realigned our business in a number of key areas to make it a success: -       The existing social team has been expanded to encompass Community management -       We’ve created specific environment for daily analyst commentary and encourage debate around this content -       In seeking to increase the ability for customers to make information easy to find and self serve, we have taken our FAQ library and expanded this into TKB content, adding a new level of depth and opportunity to cross promote where applicable in the forums. -       We have established a specific area for our new traders to tap into the collective knowledge of our other customers and support teams, with a dedicated team created to manage our customer support through this, and other social channels.   For us as a business, it helps create a better educated investor and at the same time facilitate greater customer experience and self service.   In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   Our new to trading board remains the 4 th most popular board within the Community, and has ~ 50% response rate on questions asked being answered by other Community members.
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trad... See more...
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where  those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    Building on the out of the box Lithium platform, we introduced a number of customizations at launch, including:   Automatic Board Assignment   To facilitate a breadth of discussion, our Community has been divided up into a range of boards, including general markets, charting, sections for new and advanced traders and sector specific boards to discuss individual stocks.   To make it easy for users to find the right boards, we created a stock code field in the new post pages which automatically assigns the best board for a post, and turns the stock code into a tag automatically.     Most discussed Stocks   The automatic assignment of a stock code to a tag helps us drive the Most Discussed Stock module that runs across various parts of the site and allows users to get an insight into the stock discussions that are trending over the past 5 days (this time period was set at a period dictated by the community).   This is presented at a Community wide level on general pages and the Community homepage, and at a sector specific level on board relating to areas such as materials and tech stocks.     Stock Sentiment   A further enhancement to the post creation page is the ability to add a sentiment towards a particular stock. This is built on conditional logic, and will only appear if a stock code is added. Users can select one of 5 types of sentiment – buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, sell – depending on their opinion of the stock at that particular time.   We then add this aggregated sentiment to the most discussed stocks to give a rounded picture of the Community’s activity and discussions.     Live Stock Pricing   We have also integrated the ability to buy and sell directly from the discussions.   At the top of stock specific discussions, we have included live pricing information about the stock, covering current price, change, bid and offer, 52 week high and low and volume. From there we offer users the ability to add a stock to their watchlist and alerts, get a detailed quote, as well as buy and sell.       We see the Community as an important piece of the overall research customers should do in deciding what stocks to purchase.   We have integrated the ability to interact with Community from a number of our key areas of the site.   Watchlists:    Quotes and Research:      In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   We have seen in excess of 13,500 trading actions commenced from Community – either addition of stocks to watchlists, or quotes, and over 3,000 trades placed via the platform.  
Company: Advent Software  Entry submitted by: Al Castillo (Al) Solutions Manager, Advent Direct Community Community: Advent Direct® Community (https://community.advent.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     Advent Software has ... See more...
Company: Advent Software  Entry submitted by: Al Castillo (Al) Solutions Manager, Advent Direct Community Community: Advent Direct® Community (https://community.advent.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     Advent Software has a 30 year history of technology leadership in the investment management industry. Our client base spans over 4,400 firms, from established global institutions to small start-up practices, in nearly 60 countries. We view our clients as collaborators, and are constantly seeking to improve our solutions to break down boundaries between systems, people, and information.   Technology as an industry, whether consumer-facing or in the enterprise, is becoming increasingly personalized for the individual user, and as a technology company, Advent strives to be at the forefront of that trend. In November 2013, Advent Software unveiled Advent Direct® Community, a new, interactive way for Advent clients and partners – from disparate parts of the investment management industry – to connect, share information, and learn best practices. In what is so frequently an adversarial and information-hoarding environment, Advent Direct Community provides a unique opportunity for financial industry practitioners and firms to engage with each other and with Advent in an open, personalized, collaborative, and transparent forum.   With Advent Direct Community, we set out to design a website that mirrored our goals of building a personal, transparent community while also providing a simple and familiar experience that would be true to the overall Advent brand. The community design thus is consistent with the look and feel of other Advent properties – simple but bold, sophisticated colors and graphics that reflect our business and client base. From the beginning, we included members of our Marketing and Product teams to ensure that everything from menu navigation and other user interactions to font and color was on par with the high standard we set for other Advent applications.   From the very first click on the landing page, the user experience is all about personalization and ease of use. Instead of sifting through cluttered information that may or may not be relevant, new users answer a few brief questions at the onset and are then presented with customized content personal to their particular interests, minimizing the number of clicks to get to that relevant, recent content.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY PERSONAL LANDING PAGE     For example, when a user decides to “follow” a product on Advent Direct Community, they are auto-subscribed to the Lithium discussion board for that product, their menu is customized to include a direct link to the discussion board, and a product tile is added to their home page. The tile uses a “counter” approach to highlight contributions from the last seven days on the Lithium platform – Discussions, Answers, and Ideas – and it also provides a count for new and recently updated knowledge base articles. With a single click on any product tile line item, the user can see a list of the three most recent items and by clicking an item link they can view the conversation.  Alternatively, they can start a new discussion or view all discussions. Three distinct actions, one click. ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD     The Lithium platform has proven immensely valuable in serving as a conduit between Advent and our clients. Through the discussion area and “Idea Exchange” areas of the site, it has enabled us to deliver on our promise of transparent communication and acting on client feedback. We are particularly excited about the “Idea Exchange”, a relatively new feature of Advent Direct Community, where users can suggest, share, and vote on new ideas for Advent products. This has generated a number of constructive ideas that we are incorporating into new releases for our products. The Idea Exchange is, in effect, co-creation between Advent and our clients in action.  In addition, the Lithium platform enables users to give peers a visual “kudos” for post contributions, something which users have particularly glommed onto and helps build a network between Advent product users. Posts that are the most active or receive the most kudos are the most prominently displayed.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY IDEA EXCHANGE       “I love how Advent has gamified Advent Direct Community. I really thrive off getting kudos from other users and rising to the top of the leadership board. I’ve also enjoyed the clean design, which allows me to navigate the site very easily. There aren’t a lot of things that distract me from finding what I need.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   “The design isn’t simple, but it makes things simple. I can see all the information I want to see right when I login and decide if I want to go further or go back to it later. It’s far from basic, but the design of the site makes it easy and basic for me to easily navigate to all the information that’s relevant to me with a scroll of the mouse.” – Tom Harmke, Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Reaves Asset Management   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY BOARD ANNOUNCEMENTS     We attribute the professional, vibrant, and friendly design of the site to the remarkable success Advent Direct Community has seen almost immediately after launching. Within just three months Advent Direct Community surpassed Advent’s previous client portal in registration numbers, with 8,500 registered users. Ninety percent of registered users visit monthly and about 1/3 visit on a weekly basis. The number of unique visitors to our core products boards is consistently strong and growing – double-digit growth for our Axys, APX and Moxy products.  And users aren’t just visiting more often; they’re starting more conversations, getting more replies, and the number of answers being generated by the community is increasing.   “The enhancements to Advent Direct Community make me feel like Advent is interested in my success and my development personally because they are creating ways and avenues for me to quickly become a subject expert in my field. I didn’t really have a great connection with other Advent product users before and now I am easily able to find users who are in the same position as I am. I can reach out to these users and get the information that I need while at the same time create a strong network of professionals that allows me to excel at my job.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD      
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Autodesk, Inc. is a leade... See more...
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services. The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.     Business Results          
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Autodesk, Inc. is a l... See more...
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services.     The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.   Business Results           Video entry   This video was used as an internal resource to provide an overview of the background and future of the Autodesk Community. We distributed it to all employees during the marketing phase of the community launch, just prior to the public release in the beginning of November.    Watch our video: https://autodesk.box.com/s/lcod9ztxrxfm7jexjyfd    
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D ... See more...
Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     Autodesk Community Redesign   In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services. The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.     Focus of redesign:          Update the look and feel        Improve the navigation        Increase offerings for interactions        Create a visually appealing and personal experience   We feel that we have taken a major step in accomplishing what we were set out to, after listening to our Community and what their needs were.   User Benefits:   The Autodesk Community redesign will deliver member-driven changes to enhance the structure, feature set and visual design of the community – all intended to deliver answers to our customers as quickly as possible and ease unnecessary overhead contributing to the community.   We have updated the look and feel, creating a true destination for our Community. We have improved the overall navigation, creating an intuitive interface for our Community to be able to find information easily. We have “up-leveled” our Idea Station and Articles to the front page for easy access. We are also highlighting our Community members (Expert Elites), which should help to increase our activity within member profile pages. We will also be updating the ToS of the Community to add Creative Commons licensing to all community content.   Business results           Watch our video showcasing our redesign: https://autodesk.app.box.com/s/lcod9ztxrxfm7jexjyfd
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTrave... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTravel.com Should Win The Lithy Award for Best Community Design   The Barclaycard Travel Community is a one-of-a-kind design with an emphasis on travel photos that creates an aesthetically beautiful website. Community Members are encouraged to explore the site for travel inspiration and share their travel experiences to earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates.   A few key areas that differentiate the Barclaycard Travel Community design:   Real time home page updates display Community Members posted Travel Stories. Community Members enjoy an immediate gratification of seeing their Travel Story and photos directly on the Home Page. Rotating photo slide area of home page highlights the visual nature of the design and enables the Community Manager to highlight Blog and User Generated Travel Story content. Design includes an easy-to-post Travel Story process that includes a drag and drop options for uploading multiple photos seamlessly. Customized Blog Content area highlights the visual assets of each blog post as well as the Expert Travel blogger profiles. Enhanced Discussion area includes a real time Twitter feed. Revolutionary capability for both Barclaycard Arrival™ cardmembers and non-cardmembers the ability to earn miles for sharing their travel stories redeemable for travel rewards or Amazon e-certificates. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Travel Community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page features a rotating image area with emphasis on visually engaging photo content.      Cascading Travel Story tiles feature Community Member generated travel stories that emphasize the visual allure of exploring travel adventures.     Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page also contains an interactive map that encourages visitors to explore Travel Stories via location.     Barclaycard Travel  - Home Page & Search       Barclaycard Travel  - Easy Travel Storytelling     Barclaycard Travel  - Designed Blog Content     Blog format provides a highly stylized design that focuses on photos and expert travel blogger bios for easy consumption.     Each blog contains photos, kudos and comment capability as well as the ability to share out easily to social networks.     Barclaycard Travel  - Customized Discussion         Barclaycard Travel  - Unique User Profile     Barclaycard Travel  - Email Designs   Community members also receive Daily Alert emails when they have earned miles in the community. This follow-up email communication has increased engagement.     A monthly Travel Community Newsletter helps to drive increased registrations and provides an update on trending topics and blogs within the community. User generated content is also prominently featured.        
Company: Microsoft  Entry submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Community (http://community.skype.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   The Skype Community has earned a seat at the t... See more...
Company: Microsoft  Entry submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Community (http://community.skype.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   The Skype Community has earned a seat at the table of all levels of the business by delivering:   Ideas –Two major product teams are currently fielding new ideas for their products from the Community with more to come. Interactions – The Skype Community is made up of both users and staff, allowing previously unseen levels of direct contact with end users.   Insight – Weekly feedback reports to product, marketing and operations are fuelled by inputs from the Community.   Influence – The Community is viewed as a strategic communications asset distinct to social media, blogs, service status and promotional channels.     Since its launch over two years ago, the Skype Community has been the best destination to discuss and learn about all things related to Skype. With over two million registered users across eleven languages, it is a well-established community with deep roots in Skype’s user-base. For that reason, our recent initiatives to develop the Community further have looked into the way Skype does business day-to-day and create meaningful change on behalf of our users.   These efforts have been a resounding success due to the ability of the Skype Community to deliver on four key promises to the business and shift the thinking within our organization.   Ideas   A good community has the ability to provide a feedback loop in the tail end of the product development cycle. A great community provides clear and direct user input before the development cycle even begins.   More and more product teams are sponsoring idea boards on the Skype Community to gauge user interest and help shape development priorities for their products. At the moment, Skype for Windows desktop and Skype for Windows Phone both have idea boards open, and Community ideas are already making their way into products as a result.   These idea boards, and their promotion through Skype’s social media channels, have been highlighted by the Social Media Examiner as a “great example” of learning from customers what they really want.     While we expand this initiative to cover more of Skype’s products, other teams have not ignored the potential of the Community to generate ideas. The Skype Tips & Tricks blog recently published the first two articles in a series the Community requested through a Lithium poll.     Tapping into this resource has brought Community into the heart of Skype decision making for the good of all its users.   Interactions   But the Skype Community is more than just a bank that we withdraw ideas from. In order to grow a community there must be some give and take, and we encourage Skype staff to get involved on the Community as well.   Members of staff who make frequent visits to the Community earn themselves the title of Staff Champions. They do sterling work in rewarding our users for their contribution to the Community, but the staff find the experience rewarding too. When we asked one of our Mac developers what was the best thing about being on the Community, he answered:   First of all, it’s not always easy to know what users think about Skype – Community provides one way of finding out. It feels great to see a user's reaction to receiving a reply from an actual developer.                         In addition to our regular contributors, we also create live events for users to interact with us. Most recently, we organized the first Ask Skype event using the Lithium Groups feature. For an hour, three program managers answered questions about our iOS client as submitted by Community users.     Creating this direct engagement between our staff and users is invaluable in putting users at the heart of our decision making. As user-focused decision making is a fundamental value at Skype, the Community is widely respected internally for filling that role.   Insight   Another way in which the Skype Community has changed how we do business is by providing insight into user thinking, experiences and issues. In Skype, this information is one of the driving forces behind a weekly Product and Customer Experience report. The PACE report is voraciously consumed by the product development and marketing organizations, as well as core operations teams.   What makes the Community unique in this space, and lends weight to its voice in the Skype business, is users’ ability to confirm, clarify or contradict each other’s reports. This often serves to provide a more holistic understanding of issues than can be found in one-to-one contact channels. This makes Community a sought after voice in any and all user focused discussions.   Influence   If you were to ask ten people what the best way is to communicate with your users, chances are you’d get eleven different answers. For better or worse there are no shortage of channels through which businesses talk to users, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find the distinctions between them.   The Skype Community, however, has managed to carve a niche for itself separate to social media, blogs, service status bulletins and marketing channels. It is recognized as a channel which has real influence amongst our user-base on all levels of the business.   The Community is sought out by the business as the best place to land communications which:          Request information or log gathering          Address widespread threads of discussion in the user-base          Provide solutions for small to medium size incidents or bugs   This growth of the Skype Community as a communications channel was an organic shift in the business which resulted from recognition of the authority of the Community. That authority stems from the user-base, which the Community represents faithfully throughout the Skype business.                                                                 ***   The Skype Community has changed the way Skype does business, whether it’s feeding the user voice into product design, allowing users and Skype staff to interact directly, providing insight post release, or enabling meaningful communications. The ideas, interactions, insight and influence provided by the Community have made the business sit up and take note. That’s a good thing too, because the Community speaks with the voice of the user.   If you think this is impressive, wait till you see what we’ve got coming up. Keep checking in on the Skype Community throughout the year as we continue to expand these initiatives with more idea boards, Ask Skype events and other innovative ways to drive Community into the core of our business.    
Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Courtney Pannell (cocopannell) EN Community & Social Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Whether you’re a mom-and-po... See more...
Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Courtney Pannell (cocopannell) EN Community & Social Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop in Austin asking an AdWords question via Twitter or you’re a global corporation in Dublin landing on an AdWords Community thread via a Google search, we want to be involved in that moment of connection. The AdWords team aims to form connections with our advertisers, advocates, and influencers, to improve both product functionality and brand perception.   To forge those connections, our digital strategy has been to create a social ecosystem for AdWords, one of Google’s main products. Our social channels — Community, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook — are not silos; we think about how each can drive traffic to all our social properties, assist in content creation, and amplify our brand message.   DRIVING TRAFFIC   Over the past year, traffic to our Community grew by nearly 3x, our Twitter follower count increased by 350% to 175K, our Google+ subscribers surpassed 1.1M, our Facebook fans grew to 75K, and our YouTube viewership grew by 80%. Put simply, we’ve used this social ecosystem to bolster traffic to all our channels and grow our brand’s reach.   Specifically looking at the Community, our growth strategy has focused on increasing traffic via organic search and social referrals. Our organic search traffic now constitutes nearly 60% of our overall traffic globally, as we’ve worked to refine our content to more closely align with what users search for help with.   Not only has our social promotion helped to increase direct awareness of our content, it may also have increased the visibility of community content in search results. We also see that visitors from social channels have nearly twice as high a pages/visit count as a regular user, so we have a great opportunity to interact with an engaged audience.   CREATING CONTENT   In the past year, AdWords underwent a significant launch called Enhanced Campaigns. Our Top Contributors were prebriefed on the update and helped us create nearly 100 unique content pieces to support the launch. In promoting this content, we utilized our multi-channel approach and saw a boost on all our properties.     As you can see above, we put a premium on rich media content, and we identify potential topics for videos and Hangouts on Air from our social media and Community interactions. An example of this strategy in action is our weekly #askadwords video series. For each episode, we solicit user questions on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ using the hashtag #askadwords. After uploading the video to YouTube, we promote it in the Community and on social channels to encourage engagement. The video series just passed its 20th week running and now regularly has 1K viewers per week.   BUILDING AN ARMY OF ADVOCATES   Instead of being a megaphone in our social ecosystem, we really want to empower influencers to share our content and amplify our message. Obviously, our Top Contributors have been a huge part of this for many years, but in the past year, we’ve also tried to identify social influencers that extend beyond the Community.   In identifying these social influencers, we do outreach to try to get them involved in the Community in a meaningful way. We are hosting several global influencer events this year to assist with this, and below is an example of a Community highlight we did with David Szetela, arguably one of the most influential people in the PPC space. He’s now writing articles for us in the Community.     Obviously, the fact that we use Lithium for our Community platform and LSW for our social responding/publishing makes it quite easy for us to grow and maintain this multi-channel social ecosystem. We’re able to see how beneficial our social traffic is to our Community growth, we’re able to identify budding influencers in the Community, and we’re able to easily promote all our content seamlessly to social channels via LSW.   This multi-channel social ecosystem has also made us re-evaluate the appropriate channel to communicate product and support launches for the first time. Although our product blog is typically the venue for such announcements, we’ve seen great success first posting updates to Google+ or the Community. Below is an example of a launch that we promoted solely on the Community at first, where it garnered the attention of online industry publications.             In addition to pure reach, we’re also interested in engagement: pages/visit on the Community, RTs/clickthroughs on Twitter, +1s/clickthroughs on Google+, Likes/clickthroughs on Facebook, and watch time on YouTube. Visitors to the Community from social referrals are twice as engaged as regular visitors, and in many markets, Community content shared on social networks is the content with highest levels of engagement. Our creation of this social ecosystem enabled us to build brand loyalty as well as educate and support our advertisers in new and creative ways.  
Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AdWords is one of... See more...
Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. AdWords customers can access customer support via phone, email or chat channels and get in touch directly with a Google online specialist on a “one-to-one” basis. Google’s online specialists are subject-matter experts trained on a variety of Google online marketing tools. The online specialists provide support and help educate advertisers about the variety of advertising solutions.   Since early 2012 the AdWords Communidade discussion forum in Portuguese is the main platform for online conversations around Google’s online marketing tools, where users can discuss any relevant topics with other users and specialists from Google. We saw an opportunity to maximize the efficiency of direct customer support through active and deep engagement in the one-to-many channels in Portuguese, essentially scaling the “one-to-one” support model into “one-to-many”.   Internally the “one-to-one” and “one-to-many” customer support are provided by two different teams, and each would have a different set of success metrics. In the “one-to-many” team each market would have one Community Manager responsible for nurturing their online AdWords Community. And from user feedback, we know that users react well to a variety of Googlers engaged and creating content in the Community, especially when Googlers represent and actively share content from their various fields of expertise. Having high-quality online content available within a click, when a user is trying to solve an issue, can help customers save time and improve their knowledge, while having a direct impact on reduction of escalations to the “one-to-one” customer support teams.   Having an extensive content base created by online specialists from the “one-to-one” support team brings multiple benefits to customers. This is why establishing a productive relationship with the “one-to-one” customer support team is important, and is the reason why the Community Manager and the managers of “one-to-one” local teams in Brazil partnered to be able to offer an improved customer experience to local advertisers.   Bringing two teams to work on a shared goal proved to be initially an organizational challenge. The answer was to create an agile project team within the 1-to-1 support team that would focus on deliverables for the AdWords Communidade and social channels. The game changer with the team in Brazil was the amount of online specialists involved, and the variety of tasks they were completing.     Google’s full-time Community Manager for the Portuguese Community & Social channels received support to engage 13 online specialists into AdWords Communidade. The specialists had 1-2 days per week that they could to create content in various text and video formats, such as:   1) Articles with tips and use cases of AdWords to support various online marketing goals;     2) Quizzes to draw attention and give an opportunity to better learn about various features;     3) Hangouts on Air from online specialists from the AdWords customer support team two times per week. They focused on a variety of topics for new and advanced advertisers, for example: #sosadwords series was dedicated to the most popular escalations to the customer support team. The Hangouts are streamed live in the AdWords Communidade, and are available as recordings after that. The goal was to scale the content to as many advertisers as possible, and in a few months the team achieved over 800 viewers per Hangout with some topics reaching audience of over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. The feedback from advertisers was excellent: they see this as a great way to learn. Needless to say that the Hangouts on Air would not be possible without having subject matter experts from the customer support team actively engaged.     The Googlers from the one-to-one support teams became an active part of the user Community, by extensively sharing their experience with making most of the advertising solutions. In a way this means breaking the “wall” between the company and its users. We believe we have established a successful partnership between 1:1 customer support and 1:many team, which can become a model for community managers to adopt when designing org structure. Why we think this worked in case of AdWords Communidade is a good training of online specialists and breaking down the deliverables into specific workflow tasks with clear expectations on deliverables and success metrics (example of a task: conduct X Hangouts on Air with a minimum of Y Pageviews).   Looking at the bigger picture, we believe that by providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   We were able to significantly increase the amount of new content pieces created, in particular build a good cadence and scale with the Hangouts on Air. On average the Hangouts received around 800 viewers with some topics getting as many as over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. All in all, hundreds of up-to-date and relevant pieces of content were created, which indirectly shows in the high % of traffic from organic search channel: over half of users come after performing a search query at Google.com.   This organizational structure in Brazil allowed for a faster user acquisition to the  AdWords Communidade(as compared with other AdWords online communities across different markets). In 2013 the traffic to AdWords Communidade grew 4x y/y, and in 2014 the growth stay high at ~3x year over year, which means that in January 2014 there were three times as many visitors as in January 2013. The growth was supported with high level of engagement as seen from the high speed of response: typically 4 out of 5 new questions receive a response within 6 hours.         
Company: Cortol Consors  Entry submitted by: Clemens Eckstein (CCornerstone) Senior Expert eBusiness Community: Die Wissenscommunity von Cortal Consors (https://wissen.cortalconsors.de) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   ... See more...
Company: Cortol Consors  Entry submitted by: Clemens Eckstein (CCornerstone) Senior Expert eBusiness Community: Die Wissenscommunity von Cortal Consors (https://wissen.cortalconsors.de) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Cortal Consors is a leading direct bank for investment: from trading to long term savings.   With sustainable innovations and a modern interpretation of banking services.   Our mission statement – what is our attitude? As a leading direct bank for private investment, we liberate our clients from the restrictions of classical German banks.   We empower them to self-directed financial independence with all the support the client demands. Our know-how, our ability to innovate, the independence of our product offerings, and our unique passion are what drives us.   »Cortal Consors is the first address for self-directed investment.« Our Business Goals -       Financial Empowerment of Banking Customers -       Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship with Customers -       Innovation leader   The Lithium software builds the foundation for the three business goals described above.   Financial Empowerment:   Using the Tribal Knowledge Base we have the perfect platform for building and gathering trusted content.   The Forum offers real and up to date help for customers and place to discuss about financial markets. Since many long-term customers have gathered significant knowledge and experience in a wide array of banking topics the community allows us to tap this resource.   The Blog is another way for us to provide well-founded education to our banking clientele.   Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship:   Next to our presence in the forum and blog where we able to answer the questions of our customers we also provide the possibility to rate & review our products and services as one of the first banks in Europe.   This is a bold move for us since it puts great power in the hands of our customers. By allowing this open and public feedback from existing customers on our own platform we provide absolute transparency on our strength and weaknesses. The strong integration of our customer support in case of bad reviews allows us also to communicate, solve issues and build up a trustworthy relationshop.    Our Business Results:   As it's only been 1 1/2 months, we are still undertaking the first steps. However, below you'll find some KPIs which already show significant improvement in comparison to our old “Knowledge” area.      Most Creative Promotion or Launch (Video Entry):   The promotional video -       Array of possibilities within the community (Community, Wiki, R&Rs,…) -       The development of a newbie to successful investment -       Social interaction   Together we know more – The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge   No matter if beginner or professional: The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge gives customers a voice. It provides a platform to communicate and supports its users to make the best financial decision. The new Websection Knowledge is supposed to address a wide target group. Every user should be able to help others with their expertise or can ask for help – there are no stupid questions.It´s important that users have fun to exchange their knowledge and that they are empowered to push their financial concerns further.   We want to convey all these contents in an easy, comprehendible and entertaining way. This is why we transport our message with moving images.   Our storytelling focuses on personal stories because its more emotional and less educational. The idea is to show by means of a personal success story how the Websection Knowledge works. Furthermore it boosts the attention and also the capacity for remembering.   The concept "Open Kitchen" is based on the idea that cooking brings people together: beginners learn from professionals, ideas are exchanged, like-minded persons get together, people support each other. We think: This is what the Websection Knowledge stands for and this is why we chose it to build the frame of our storyboard.   View our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0gAUDIIf5w&feature=youtu.be      
Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Plat... See more...
Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Constant Contact®, Inc. wrote the book on Engagement Marketing™ — the new marketing success formula that helps small organizations create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. Through its unique combination of online marketing tools and free personalized coaching, Constant Contact helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect and engage with their next great customer, client, or member. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has long championed the needs of small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create and build successful, lasting customer relationships.   Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Constant Contact also has offices in Loveland, CO; Delray Beach, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY and London, England. Constant Contact has been honored with numerous industry accolades and has ranked on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for five years running, most recently at number 179.   In 2013, the company continued to make significant product improvements across our offering of online marketing tools. Knowing that change can be difficult and feedback can only make our products stronger, we needed a way to harness our valuable customer feedback without incurring significant cost or introducing a new technology to monitor. We wanted the feedback to be readily available to the Product Owners and easily actionable for varied members of a multi-leveled support team.  As a company that highly values the customer experience and promotes transparency, we wanted the feedback to be public and accessible to all of our customers.  We also wanted our customers to be able to monitor the status of their ideas. Finally, as our early tests with other tools indicated, many of the “feedback ideas” our customers submitted were actually support issues that required moving out of feedback into a place where that support could be received in a timely manner. By knowing the areas where our customers had the most issues and using their ideas to further the products in the direction the customer wanted, we aimed to increase not just the usability of our products but also customer loyalty.   After evaluating out of the box products, we decided to develop our own “in product feedback widget” that would provide an avenue to learn more about our customers’ reactions to system changes and provide a quick way to incorporate feedback into the product development cycle. We decided to base this widget on the Lithium platform.   We determined that the idea exchange within Lithium provided the features we wanted:   the ability to vote and raise the most critical ideas to the top; a direct line to the customer making the suggestion to ask for more details when needed; the capability to rapidly move “Support” issues to the appropriate area of the Community to be answered by peers or our trained Community team; a way for our customers to easily see the status of their ideas; the ability for multiple people to view, edit and comment on ideas from all areas of the company be it product, support, or another; and an easy and visible way for our product team to demonstrate their empathy and involvement with our customers.   We added the widget to multiple pages within our current products and most critically to a new version of our Contacts Management tool.  With this widget, a customer clicks one button and provides their feedback directly to the people that can make the changes.   Due to the success of the widget in 2013, in 2014 we are implementing the widget across hundreds pages of our product and dividing this feedback across 16 idea exchanges in the Community.  The success of the widget is evident when you glance at how many posts exist today:   In Contacts alone (granted the most active area of our feedback forums, but also the most critical as we rolled out this new tool), we received 4600 ideas, 3498 comments and 274,056 page views to that area alone between July and December!  The product team has been able to deliver 71 implemented ideas that are directly attributable to the Lithium feedback widget.   Another area where we launched a redesign was in our Library area. The feedback through the widget was vital for improving the new design. The new design began rolling out on August 28 th , 2013. Between this date and December 2013 we received 949 ideas, 624 comments and 12,478 page views. So far, we have been able to implement 14 ideas based on this feedback.   Customers are given a “feedback” button within the flow of a task. Pop ups were not used to avoid distracting an engaged customer while the pervasive nature of the button on multiple screens allows a customer to enter feedback at any friction point.     When a customer clicks the feedback button, a pop up window appears. The customer selects a topic (labels), enters a subject, and then enters text (the idea body). They click “post to public forum” and the idea is posted to the idea exchange as a new idea with the right labels. There is also an opportunity here for the customer to identify that they need help. If the customer chooses “Get Help” from the drop down they post directly into a corresponding product board for help from the Community.      Once an idea is submitted, the window closes and a customer can continue wherever it is they left off. Feedback is a gift to us while not being difficult for the customer to provide.      
  Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: VIP forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia... See more...
  Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: VIP forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband.   In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers.   Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information’s.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.     THE STRUCTURE In August 2013 we launched the first telco brand community in Croatia.   It is a small step in the world but big in Croatia where customers  don’t forgive unfriendly functionalities & illogical designs, because community is here for the users, not for designers or employees!   Well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.   During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   We made it clear in structure, transparent at the glance, light to use and spend time, easy to find answers & support.   We are the first telco community which is open to non-Vip & Vip customers with the intention to get customers help themselves.   COVER PAGE CALL FOR ACTION   FRONT PAGE BIG VISUAL BUTTONS – we are offering a way for a customer to Registrate / Login in to our community with these BIG buttons, familiar colors and sentences that are describing the action.     After customer login, he can now use his visual designed User Panel:   On the right side MENU of the cover we have visual help icons (links) to support customer  if this is his first time on Forum:   After customer login, he can now use his personalized custom component which depends on his rank and role: Personalized links Greeting and user avatar Last user posts   MENU CUSTOM COMPONENT TAB beneath main category icons allows customers to have an overview of what's new in a few seconds!     And depending on if user is logged in or not, he can see the personalized posts he didn’t read from the last visit to the community:     CSS CUSTOMIZATION   We made lot of CSS customization in our community but the latest demands from our community members were this three for better functionality and visualization:   Provided better “SOLUTION PROVIDED” visualization:   Provided better “QUOTE” custom visibility and automatically @mention the user we quote:   MOBILE VERSION   Cover page easy to use! Very similar to desktop version which is also available for mobiles. Same icons, structure & features are now available to customers!                
Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac)Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia... See more...
Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac)Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband. In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers.    Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.   REORGANIZATION AND PROJECT KICK-OFF   In just 4 months by reallocating right resources on Vip Forum project, together with support of Lithium partner, Vipnet managed to successfully launch the unique place (Vip forum) for online discussions about telecom technology, products and services in Croatia.   Reorganization was done by shifting a true gamer in the heart, from direct customer care phone/email support into responsibility of developing what was proved to become a self-maintaining and self-developing crowd source care center.   This was highly appreciated by forum members, because, one of their kind is managing the forum.   THE LAUNCH  (Video streaming conference)   In order to present Vip forum to a targeted audience, the launch of Vip forum was done via online press conference streamed directly on the Vip forum where journalists, as well as all new community members had a chance to ask questions (to our company MCO and Community Expert) directly on the forum and received answers in real-time.   With this innovative approach to launch presentation, Vipnet opened a new path for presenting all other new projects and products.   And of course, internally Vip Forum is supported by new line processes in company. We are especially proud of our process which is proving maturity of our organization and also is supported by our MCO – customers should test devices & services!   INVOLVING OFFICIAL MOBILE PHONE REPRESENTATIVES   Aside from customers, the significance and importance of Vip forum has also been recognized by several major players in telco manufacturing industry, such as HTC and Nokia, who have chosen to be present as active users on the forum, providing direct support to its customers.   With this move our customers gain additional benefit, not only from Vip as a telecom company, but also from official mobile phone representatives which they use:                                
Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in ... See more...
Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband. In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers. Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.   Vip forum represents a new crowdsourcing platform intended for gadget and online discussion enthusiasts seeking fast, simple, precise and competent answers to all their questions concerning telecommunication technologies, products and services.   Vip forum was launched at the end of August 2013 as Vipnet’s first crowdsourcing platform. In just six months, Vip forum has become a unique place for online discussions about telecom technology, products and services in Croatia.   In its first 6 months of existence, Vip forum has generated 600,000 visits and a pool of 1600 registered users, which have proven to be very active with more than 12,000 posts.    Out of 1600 registered users, approximately 10% are active* continuously on a monthly basis. (*active members are those which have one or more posts per month – counted as one; not included are members who only login and read)     The idea to have an engaged community that is self-sustained has been achieved, since crowd ratio is constantly above 90% (ratio of user posts over moderator posts).   High scores of satisfaction were given by forum users in recent surveys conducted: 96% found or got an answer for their question 90% do not have a need for any other contact towards Vipnet (through customer services or shops) Vip forum NPS is 51%    BUILDING USER ENGAGEMENT   Vipnet’s vision from the very beginning was to create a place where everyone is welcome, not just Vipnet customers, and to create a non-censored playground where users can show their personal knowledge and expertise by providing valuable content.   To embrace this crowdsourcing concept and to start building user engagement, well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.      During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   Whole usability testing was done directly on the forum, enabling participants to be recognized as co-creators of new community.   During this trial, the forum received an excellent SUS* score from users which participated in SUS survey questionnaires => 87,5   (SUS* - the System Usability Scale ISO standard ISO 9241 Part 11, Measures Usability &  Learnability)   Beta testing purpose, besides functionality test, was also to gather pre-SuperUsers which will actively participate in forum after the public launch.   The purpose is fully accomplished, all beta testers are still active on Vip forum, and they alone provide a high percentage of answers to community questions.   Also, they are now a pool of usability testers for other Vipnet products and services, as independent and respected telco enthusiasts.    
Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier comm... See more...
Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company and one of the most honored companies in the world. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and internationally.   The AT&T Community was founded in 2002 as a place for AT&T wireless customers to engage in online peer-to-peer support. Initially, the community continued to grow with minimal investment from AT&T. However, in 2010, two main factors stagnated community growth:   1.         Fragmented engagement that resulted from additional product lines being added to the community.  (A U-verse community was added in July, 2007, and a DSL/Internet community in August, 2009.) 2.         Consumers were turning to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and other unbranded communities.   At the same time, the proliferation of connected consumers led to a drastic increase in customers which expected to get support from and engage directly with brands on digital channels.   From 2002 until 2012, the AT&T Community was home to a group of grassroots community leaders, a combination of citizen and advocate influencers participating in the forum and providing support. The community leaders engaged in discussions and answered questions in their areas of expertise with little interaction with each other. The solutions provided on the forums - a key metric for a support community - stalled with no signs of growth, despite community leader participation.   In 2011, AT&T leadership made the strategic decision to increase investment in the community to help customers get support 24/7 on social channels. We knew an appealing program would drive success by spurring our influencers to engage in more dialogs, create more solutions, and give us feedback. We needed their participation to improve the quality of our content and get valuable feedback on multiple initiatives.   We created an influencer program – the “Award for Community Excellence” (ACE)” - to formally identify and engage both citizen and advocate influencers. In preparation for a late 2012 launch, we engaged experienced outside vendors – including Lithium - to ensure we created a scalable, sustainable program. They analyzed the opportunity, performed a competitive analysis and aligned our team on influencer business objectives.  We concluded that we needed to improve the reach and connectivity of the influencer network, the ability of individuals to influence both content and their own presence, and the degree of enthusiasm towards the AT&T Community.   AT&T delivered the ACE program which identified and nominated outstanding community achievement. Selection methodology has two steps: First, a quantitative analysis determines users who demonstrate top participation in the community based on key metrics, and second, we perform a qualitative analysis to evaluate whether or not those top users embody the influencer attributes we wish to recognize. The quantitative analysis is performed by pulling the metrics for the community members and applying an algorithm that ranks them based on the number of posts they made, solutions they provided and kudos they received. (Kudos are a feature that allows one community member to say “thanks!” to another community member.) We then narrow the list of members under consideration to those who scored above the standard deviation of the dataset. Our community managers then use a qualitative scorecard to grade each member’s performance against key influencer attributes. We use a three-point scale to grade each member on:   •           Exhibiting a neutral to positive degree of enthusiasm towards AT&T •           Having visited the community recently •           Frequency of posts •           Quality of their replies •           Two-way engagement with community members and AT&T •           Authority, credibility and expertise   We established a cutoff score from the resulting scorecard to identify potential recipients (nominees) of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE.)    Program components include:   a. “ACE of the Month” recognition in the public community and “with photo” in the private ACE category  On our home and on our category pages:      In the private ACE blog:     b. Monthly newsletter (in our first-ever use of the blog style) c. Custom signature green-ribbon badge d. Unique ACE role (ranks include Professor, Guru, Expert, etc.) e. Occasional, infrequent AT&T-branded small gifts f. Personal assistance with any AT&T-related service issue g. Additional moderation privileges   In 2013, we improved the program with: a. Selection and induction of new ACEs b. Creation of a video promoting the ACES linked to from our ACE Page   c. Development of an AT&T Philanthropy program specific to ACEs.  ACEs nominated dozens and ultimately selected five local 501C3 charities to each receive $5,000 gifts from AT&T.   ACEs accompanied AT&T External Affairs managers in delivering checks. ACE dcookie (second from right) and her son with AT&T External Affairs presenting a $5,000 check to the local 501C3 charity she nominated – The Arc of Luzerne County   d. Offering ACEs the opportunity to attend a quarterly conference with AT&T SME’s to cover topics of mutual interest – including community enhancements e. Opportunities for ACEs to trial AT&T online tools   Today the AT&T Community Forums boasts 59 ACEs representing 23 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.  The ACEs represent a cross-section of our Community and our customer base with professions including a chemist, NASA engineer, butter co-op manager, orthodontic assistant, film producer, seamstress, retiree, etc.     Lithium – as our long-time platform partner – worked with us to create:   a. A rotating carrousel of ACE avatars and stats on our home page  b. A dedicated ACE information page to which every ACE signature links c. A private ACE category in which AT&T and the ACEs can communicate freely and within that private space – our first-ever blog usage d. Right-rail recognition of “ACE of the Month” e. A trial of @mentions in the private ACE category In addition, we consult with our Lithium Success Manager frequently to share ideas and Lithium moderators routinely advise of threads of interest involving ACEs.   One of the greatest outcomes of the program is the change in perception of AT&T and the community that has occurred since the program began. Our survey showed that 30 percent of ACEs said that the program improved their opinion of AT&T.  The kudos use has increased by 36 percent since the program launch. This tells us that our members are more engaged and that they find the AT&T Community to be a helpful and supportive environment.    The last and perhaps greatest outcome of the program has been the increase in customer solutions provided on the community. The monthly average solutions have increased by 58 percent since the launch. This increase provides huge benefit back to AT&T by allowing us to focus on assisting customers with other important service needs, since many questions are answered on the AT&T Community. The solutions are high-quality content that can be reused throughout att.com and found in search results.    The ACE program has greatly benefitted AT&T by building stronger relationships with top influencers, who in turn increase their participation on the community and assist customers with answers to support questions.   The program is popular with the ACEs themselves. The ACEs rated their satisfaction with the program as 8.8 out of 10 on our inaugural survey designed to measure ACE experience and gather feedback. ACE achiever Dcookie expressed her appreciation of the program in the ACE Community in February, writing: “… maybe some of us would have never met or chatted if it hadn’t been for us becoming ACEs. I found that there are really good people here that I’m happy to have met. So I thought I’d say, THANKS, to whoever thought of this idea, it was a good decision…”     We are building strong relationships with the ACEs. Before the launch of the ACE program and its improvements, we did not feel that we could engage the top influencers for feedback because we lacked a connection with them. They were on our community helping our customers, but we had no way to formally and consistently thank them. Now we continually learn about them through the ACE of the month posts, collect their feedback and ideas in conference calls and the private ACE Community, connect with them about support issues and keep up an ongoing conversation. In fact, 90 percent of the ACEs cited the connection with AT&T staff (specifically, our full-time ACE program manager) as being a favorite program component in the survey.   Before the launch of the ACE program, top users did not communicate with each other across product lines (e.g. a Wireless top user never crossed paths with a U-verse ® top user). Now the ACEs have great relationships with one another, sharing information and ideas amongst themselves in the private ACE Community. Our survey found that 74 percent of ACEs cited the connection with other ACEs as being another favorite component of the program.  The ACEs regularly congratulate one another for being named ACE of the month or for having one of their solutions highlighted within a support article on att.com.  Recently, a U-verse ACE and a Wireless ACE shared knowledge in the ACE Lounge to solve a product problem. A third ACE chimed in and authored an easily-understood history of telephony that we subsequently published in the larger, public community.  Another ACE has authored his own technical guide.   We are grateful to Lithium for helping build our ACE program.  We’re proud of our ACEs and delighted with the success we’ve seen with the program. We’ve designed the program to be sustainable and enduring and we will continue to recognize and thank exceptional community contributions in the years to come.    
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Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone(http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best... See more...
Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone(http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   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 was created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other to solve their queries. This gamification programme not only encourages greater customers/users participation but also promotes new useful content creation. The 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.   Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and 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. In addition to this programme, Heros have created 134 helpful and resolute new posts. With these new posts, Heros have provided an increase of the Vodafone Spain forum visits volume by over 67K (an average of 500 visits per new Hero post). In addition, Heros helped to get an incremental 20% SEO in comparison with the previous year.   More about the Vodafone 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 whilst they help each other to solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/users participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and contents 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 resolutive 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,  VodfoneHero 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 on 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. Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and 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. In addition to this programme, Heros have created 134 helpful and resolutive new posts; with these new post Heros have provided an increase of the Vodafone Spain forum visits volume by over 67K (an average of 500 visits per new Hero post). On the other hand, Heros helped to get an increment of 20% SEO in comparison with the previous year.  
Company: Spotify  Entry submitted by: Meredith Humphrey (Meredith) Community Manager Community: The Spotify Community (Community.spotify.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Spotify is a music streaming service ba... See more...
Company: Spotify  Entry submitted by: Meredith Humphrey (Meredith) Community Manager Community: The Spotify Community (Community.spotify.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Spotify is a music streaming service based in Stockholm, Sweden that is currently available in over 55 markets. With over 24 million active users and over 6 million paying subscribers, our customers use Spotify to discover, share, listen, and organize their music.   This growing customer base has also meant a need for various customer support channels since Spotify’s launch in 2008. In February 2012 we launched our Spotify Community with Lithium and now have over  200,000 registered users. Our Community is now top source for customers with queries on everything from their account to device troubleshooting, maintenance, product feedback, and music discussion.   Since the launch of the Community in 2012 up until mid-2013 we also had a core group of around 20 Super Users. These included users that were newly, currently and formerly active across the boards.   Our main focus for the past year was encouraging the growth of our Super Users across the Community so that self-help was promoted across the forums as we continue to look toward Spotify’s future growth.      We’ve always taken great effort to reward the Super Users that make their way to the Spotify Community.   Using Lithium’s metrics, we determine the Top 10 Super Users each month and recognize them in our Community Blog. These Top Contributors are rewarded with anything from Spotify merchandise, a month of free Premium, a blog post on our official news site, and branded playlists.    Those Super Users are also invited for other perks including Skype calls with team leaders for Q&A sessions, access to early version of updates, and direct emails to some Spotify.   However, we knew in 2013 that there was still a large untapped group of users that would make great additions to our Spotify’s Super User team. With close to over 200,000 registered users there was clearly room for improvement and retention with interested users.   We also knew that our Lithium Community was the place to find these brand advocates and Super Users that are vital the future of Spotify’s support channels.     In an effort to not only encourage new Super Users to become active, but also to raise awareness of Spotify’s Community and praise the efforts of our current Super Users in 2014, we established the Rock Stars Program in November 2013.      "The Rock Stars Program is really an extension of what we were already doing organically over the years. Since we've made it something more concrete, we've seen a massive increase in the funnel of new Super Users in our community. We're grateful to have so many new fans who are passionate about our brand and helping people." – Rorey Jones, Spotify Global Community Manager   Previously, when Moderators reached out to welcome users that stood out in their accepted solutions, kudos and post count it became clear the benefits of being of a Super User were intangible and difficult to grasp.    Thanks to the Rock Stars Program (RSP), all the benefits of being a Super User are now visible to everyone—not just the Super Users already getting perks.   The Rock Stars Program is a three-tier system: Registered Users, Rising Stars, and Rock Stars.   The first step in the program invites all registered users to simply start posting. They can then rank up 26 different music-themed positions as they start participating in the Community. Our ranks were adjusted to go from “Newbie” and “Casual Listener” up another 26 musical ranks, including “Gig Goer”, “Festival VIP”, “Garage Band”, Radio Producer”, “Singer” and at the top “Senior Producer”.   Users that are gaining kudos, writing accepted solutions, getting to know staff and bringing a great disposition to the forums are then invited to be Rising Stars. For three months these users are given access to a few private boards, meet the staff, and start learning more about Spotify.   At the end of three-month period they can be invited to be Rock Stars—the rank given to top group of Super Users.   Rock Stars are defined as users that are actively helping other customers, gaining kudos, posting accepted solutions, and establishing relationships with Moderators. In the RSP, Rock Stars have a rank structure as well—they can rank from “Label Star” up another 14 ranks to “Musical Legend”. Finally, Rock Stars that slowed in participation and left the community are retired as “Veterans”.   Once a Rock Star, there are different roles users can take as a member of “the band”: The Fun Master, The Protector of Newbs, Community Yoda, The Ideas Guardian, The Blog Maverick.   When we launched the RSP we invited our established Super Users to join as Rock Stars right away. We then invited some new users to join as Rising Stars so they could learn a bit more before gaining all the Rock Star perks.   The public, tiered structure the RSP provides has given users an incentive to start participating, getting to know staff and increasing their overall presence in the forums.    When comparing the month after the launch (November) and the second month after the launch (December), our Accepted Solutions were up by 19% to 611 while Completed Registrations were up 18% to 12,264 from Dec 7, 2013 to Jan 7, 2014.   Our Overall Topics also increased by 11% while Logins and Overall Posts increased by 5% and 6% respectively.   Since the launch of the RSP not only have we seen not only a jump in the User Sessions per month by 4% to 3,869,869 and Searches by Users up 27% to 60,303--but we’ve seen an increase in the post frequency and quality from best top Rock Stars.   At the end of the first three months we nominated four of our Rising Stars to become Rock Stars. We then initiated another six Rising Stars to the program.   Our top Rock Star Peter has increased his post count by 20%--now averaging 85 posts a day. Marco has been a consistent top 10 Super User for years and has increased his post count by 169%.    With these results just four months after the launch, our team is eager to see what a full year of the program will bring.  Our ever-expanding Spotify user base means the need for knowledgeable, supportive Super Users is become more vital to our Customer Service future and we want the Rock Star Program to be at the center of the Community.   To give you a proper tour of our Rock Star Program, let us introduce the Spotify Community Moderator Greg.  He’ll take you through the register user’s journey through our Community and into the Rock Star Program. See you backstage.    Watch video here:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/4cwsu93abq3by8i/LithyProgramLaunchSpotify.mp4      
Company: Best Buy  Entry submitted by: Gina Debogovich (Gina) Senior Manager Community: Best Buy Unboxed (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Best Buy is the world’s largest multi-channel consumer elect... See more...
Company: Best Buy  Entry submitted by: Gina Debogovich (Gina) Senior Manager Community: Best Buy Unboxed (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Best Buy is the world’s largest multi-channel consumer electronics retailer with stores in the United States, Canada, China, and Mexico. BestBuy.com is among the top ten retail websites in the United States and we have the number one customer loyalty program of its kind. There are more than 1 billion visitors to our website and 600 million visits to our U.S. stores each year. Our Blue Shirts sales associates and Geek Squad Agents are committed to delivering on our Customer Promise:   1. The latest devices and services — all in one place 2. Knowledgeable, impartial advice 3. Competitive prices 4. The ability to shop when and where you want 5. To support you for the life of your products   Our online community brings our customer promises to life.  It is an online destination that connects our customers, Community Super Users, Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents together.  The Community provides impartial and knowledgeable advice that is crowdsourced through these peer-to-peer interactions.     In 2013, we re-designed our Best Buy U.S. online community (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) making searching for content even easier. We recognized that it was cumbersome for customers to locate helpful information embedded within earlier threads and that topics would sometimes repeat because the content was not easy to locate. Visitors are now served a large "ask a question" box which searches published content and peer-to-peer support.   The re-design resulted in a 500 percent increase in searches since November 2013. As a result, customers found the information they were looking for and we saw a twelve percent decrease in the number of posts. Through identifying hot topics and trends, we publish knowledge articles for customers to understand policies, procedures, buying guides and troubleshooting.