I'm "forum" all the way, although I've discussed this frequently with people here at NOW TV, and also on occasions with our contacts at Lithium. Most of the people I've discussed it with seem to prefer "community" though. Here are my thoughts...   The two Lithium "environments" (I'll use that as a neutral term!) that I've run have both been semi-assisted. That is, beyond support from community members, there's been a customer service team on hand to answer questions that others can't. From the small amount of research I've done, many people perceive the word "community" to refer to something that isn't officially assisted by a company, and so some are unwilling to ask for help there as they just want a straight answer from the company itself. I think if you asked a random selection of people what "community" means in an internet world, there'd be a fair chunk of people who'd reference sites like Facebook and Twitter, and if they did mention forums, they'd be ones more geared towards conversation than help and support. That's the main reason I prefer "forum", as it better suits the purpose of my site, which is to deflect customer service contacts and help people get answers faster.   As for what I actually have at the moment, I do use both words publicly. Our Lithium platform is used for the NOW TV Help Forum, but also a separately skinned (and almost completely independent) NOW TV Blog. The blog's purpose is completely separate from the help forum, but both run from the same community platform with shared logins for people using them. So I use "Help Forum" to refer to the help bit, "Blog" to refer to the blog, and "Community" to refer to the overarching structure and the people that use it.   Whilst that's my general opinion on this, I also sometimes think that if you've achieved the right behaviours from people using your site with the current name, then it's a moot point. Why change it if there's nothing you want to change in the behaviour? General conversation can happen on a support forum, and can be really vibrant, but maybe people just don't want to use it for that. I introduced the name "Help Forum" to try and make it clearer to people what they could expect from the site, but if you're achieving your KPIs, don't bother.   TLDR: I just prefer the "F" word to the "C" word 🙂   Tom ... View more

@JMcJohnston I can't help with the first question, but regarding the second, the normal reporting in LSI is all I find I need to measure popularity of a particular idea. In the Content section of LSI, you can view all ideas and rank them in order of page views, votes or comments. You can rank based on other things too, but those three give the best indications of popularity I think.   Cheers,   Tom     ... View more

Great topic!   A few comments based on my experience at NOW TV...   We had the ideas exchange already set up when I joined the company. Given we were operating almost like a startup, it made sense to collect ideas from customers to shape our future.   The first challenge with that, though, was that we'd already got a clearly defined product roadmap, which meant some ideas which were requested over three years ago still aren't implemented today (for example subtitles and surround sound). This can cause increased negativity from customers who had a heightened expectation of you intoducing things they asked for.   Secondly, the ideas submitted vary greatly in their scope. As we're a content provider via apps, customers will ask for new device support, increased functionality on devices, specific bits of content to be added to the service, and even extra TV channels to be added. There's not really a lot we can do on the content related things, so again, we get customer disappointment off the back of those requests.   Lastly, people don't like searching before they submit an idea, in my experience anyway. When I finally got round to sorting our ideas section out, there were over 1200 individual submissions. About 300 were content related, but the remaining 900 were all to do with general service improvements. After going through them and merging duplicates, I had about 110 ideas remaining. There were A LOT of duplicates!   So, to summarise my recommendations:   Set and manage customer expectations of what adding an idea means, ie. that you won't always be able to do what they want. Avoid disappointment Clearly define the scope of what ideas can relate to, so you don't get ones submitted that you've absolutely no way of implementing Have a clear process in place for managing submissions to merge duplicates, or stop them occurring in the first place   I've tackled this fairly primitively, but effectively, with this set of rules/instructions. My ideas board is locked to new posts, with that message linked at the top. If people want to submit a new idea, they follow the steps there to submit a new topic elsewhere on the forum, and then I move the topic over. I also edit the idea title to make it clearer for others to understand.   Cheers,   Tom     ... View more

@fifiproffitt I like that looping idea, had never considered that before.   On the first Lithium community I ran, we ran out of ranks and just added a bunch of new ones above with even cooler names. That can be a challenge though, as you won't always be able to think of better things to add in above.   On the one I'm running now, I deliberately made the ranking structure really long to begin with (we have about 60 standard ranks members can reach), and calculated that based on heavy participation, it'd take maybe 3-5 years to reach the top. The key is to keep monitoring where everybody is though, and move the goalposts if people are getting too close too quickly!   A personal favourite of mine is treating each rank title like a tier, which is something else which comes from games. So rather than a rank called Contributor, then the one after being called Regular, I have Contributor 1, Contributor 2, 3, 4, 5, then onto Regular 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It means people's titles don't change so often, but I think that the feeling of moving up a level matters more to people than the actual name of that level.   Thanks,   Tom ... View more