Hot off the heels of raising $53.4M at the beginning of the year, we’ve been building out our R&D team and investing heavily in the Lithium product suite.  I couldn’t be more proud of the results.  Our Summer 2012 Release includes the following highlights:   LITHIUM RESPONSE   Do you feel like you’re drowning in unanswered Tweets and Facebook posts?  You’re not alone.    Consumers increasingly expect to receive support on social networks, but most businesses lack the tools and best practices to handle the ‘social channel’.  Lithium Response has been designed from the ground up to help customer care teams meet this challenge.      Lithium Response increases agent efficiency by 20%, helping you address more posts with fewer resources.  We ensure that incoming posts are automatically filtered, prioritized, and routed to the best resources.    We also provide supervisors with critical metrics for managing agent and team performance, such as Time to Average Response, Flush Rate, NPS, and more.   Lithium Response works seamlessly with your Lithium Community, helping you keep staffing costs under control.  Agents can insert links to community knowledge articles with a single click, making it easier than ever to drive traffic to your lowest cost service channels with every reply.    Nobody does Social Support better than Lithium.  Period.     GROUPS   Wouldn’t it be great if you could enlist your most trusted users to help you expand your community?  With Lithium Groups you can do just that.  Selected users can create their own conversation spaces for teams, betas, user groups, fan groups, advisory boards, and more.    Anyone can join an open group, but admission to closed groups is controlled by the group administrator.  When users join a group, they are automatically subscribed to email notifications, ensuring everyone stays up to date and connected to the conversation.   We’ve been using Groups internally since June, and it’s had a big impact on productivity.     RATINGS & REVIEWS   If you’re selling products online, your website visitors expect to see product reviews.  Impartial feedback from strangers increases buyer confidence, which translates into higher conversion rates and transaction size.   Lithium Ratings & Reviews reside on your product pages alongside Lithium Q & A and help you increase traffic through SEO.   Seamless integration with your Lithium Community allows website visitors to click into rich member profiles and quickly determine 1) are reviews authentic , and 2) are they written by ‘someone like me’.    We’re a big believer in driving ROI by putting your website at the center of your social strategy.  Lithium Reviews, Q & A, and Community are a killer combo that can drive millions in incremental sales.     LOOKING FOR MORE INFO?   We’ve got you covered.  You can see short product tours on our new Summer Release website page, or request a live demo .  Lithium customers can also download release notes in the Lithium.now area of the Lithosphere.     Justin Schuster is Lithium’s VP of Product Marketing.    He leads an elite team dedicated to taking Lithium products and solutions to market.  On the Lithosphere he is JustinS and on Twitter you can follow him on @justin_schuster ... View more