Looking Good!    How customizable can we expect the Main Page to be??  For instance, can we include feeds and links to non-Lithium elements (other blogs, discussions, etc.)  and other social media tools (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter)? Does the ability to do that go beyond the current option to put html in the announcements widget?  Can we make it more than the two columns??   Thanks   -- Mike ... View more

There's another way to keep them sorted out which we used on another Ask the Expert where we had very long threads (pages) where the Expert would chime in at the end of the day.  We started out with the default sort of oldest --> newest, but then you could never tell what the Expert post referred to.   In the Lithium admin tool, there's a setting for  "Linear Format Message Sorting Order within Threads" -- set it to "Sort by threading" (you can do this on a board-by-board basis). Then, if the Expert clicks the Reply button on a specific message, the reply will appear right after it.   It has pros and cons -- the pro: when you read through a whole thread, the conversation is obvious; the con: if you pop in once a day to see what is new... you cant find it because the new posts are embedded with their antecedents. ... View more

Thanks for your kind comments about our Ask the Expert Forum at Pitney Bowes. It was a terrific success in terms of drawing in new users, getting users to post and participate, and giving them a sense that we're in touch with their needs and issues -- a dynamic that's not always in play. A big reason for the successes were that each of these events was focused on business-critical issues that were timely because of changing USPS regulations -- people really needed this info! Also... we sent out a million emails promoting it... 🙂   The problem with focusing on such timely issues though is that users are motivated to visit once... but not necessarily more than that. Our struggle is building on the enthusiasm for the event to turn visitors into regular users and participants.  With each event, we have a more returnees, but are still trying to get up to a critical self-sustaing mass. As a result, we end up responding ourselves to an inordinate proportion of posts which, in turn, discourages users from replying - a cycle that sometimes looks hard to get out of. This is the downside of "showing up" maybe too much -- we have experiences at both ends of that spectrum! ... View more