Company:   SolarWinds Company background:   SolarWinds was founded 1999. Today it has more than 2,400 employees and 275,000 customers worldwide. Our core mission is to provide purpose-built products that are designed to make jobs easier for IT professionals.   Contact:   Ben Garves Title:   Senior Product Manager Related URLs:   THWACK  Gamification Points Store Example Annual Digital Conference Example Monthly Live Web Series Example Mission/Gamification Example Product Forum Example Lithy category:   B2B Community Innovator 1. Describe the innovation(s) and how you settled on the decision to innovate (user request, Lithium suggestion, internal idea, etc.)   Our journey from JX to Core Lithium is just beginning, but we're bringing our JX customizations along during our migration. This will make us the most advanced community on Lithium. Includes: missions, gamification, store, event plugin, livecast capabilities, license validation, product integration. 2. Tell us about how you made it happen   Did you stage it first, who got an early look, how you drove adoption/use, and any iterations you had to make to get it right. We've adopted a mantra that "good enough isn't good enough". We use ideation to allow our community to suggest and vote on our next new features and work closely with our marketing and product teams to understand what we can do to make their jobs easier and mobilize the community on their behalf. 3. What were the results?   Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Our community is seeing unheard of adoption from both our internal teams and external members. We have a core group of 70+ content-generating external 'mvp' members, nearly 7,000 daily active users, 2,500 daily active participants, 122,000+ pieces of unique content, and more than 150,000 members. THWACK Store Because we are gamified site-wide, users accumulate points. On top of being able to climb a competitive leaderboard, we also keep a second value of "spendable" points in a swag store we've built. This way users can spend their points without having their leaderboard standings affected. We've also integrated with a fulfillment vendor so orders are automatically fulfilled whenever a user submits them. We've built functionality to bulk-award points, prizes, and digital items. An example of a digital item would be a user being able to purchase a voucher to participate in a certification exam for one of our products.   License Validation Our Product Managers love to mobilize the community to test betas of new product releases. We've integrated with our Customer Portal so we can validate licenses and allow users with active software licenses to download beta versions of software. They are also allowed into a special permissions area in which they can post/comment/ask questions/provide feedback about the beta.   Product Forums We've built a product forum for our core SolarWinds products. This is a space in which users can easily find resources and ask product-specific questions without feeling like they're in a plain old forum-based experience.   Virtual Conferences We host THWACKcamp, the SolarWinds version of a tech conference. THWACK hosts 5000+ live streamers and chatters as they participate in two full days of hour-long sessions on the state of the IT industry. This uses our live chat integration (below) and is gamified to award enrollment and participation. THWACKcamp 2018 registration has only been open for a week and we already have 1100 registrants.   Missions & Gamification New questions unlock daily, bringing users back for participation. Points are awarded for correct answers. Users with all correct answers each week are entered into an award drawing. At the end of each month, another grand prize drawing is completed for users who managed 100%.   Live Chat Webcasts We host a monthly live webseries called "SolarWinds Lab", along with an annual virtual conference called THWACKcamp, which hosts 5000+ simultaneous attendees and chatters.   Integration w/SolarWinds Products  Product-specific feeds are brought in, along with the ability to upload/download content and templates to/from the community directly to/from the products.     ... View more

I don't think any single person in this Lithium JX community is a stranger to the pain points of the original Jive Community Manager Reports. As your single native out-of-the-box solution on the original Jive-x community platform, the Community Manager Report plugin offers only an ultimately meager window into the success of your community.   At SolarWinds, we've been playing with and finding creative ways to show community statistics and raise internal awareness about our community's value to our leadership teams. I noticed a tremendous amount of frustration about accessible analytics this week at the Austin Lithium Customer Advisory Board meeting, so I'm here to share! I should probably add a painful disclaimer that many cloud-based communities may not have access to add the same functionality.     1. DTM SolarWinds has built their overall web philosophy around a container-based layering. Our web properties are all housed within a parent container we manager through Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM). This container allows us to add event-based and page load rules to pages. We then built some basic analytics code to capture whenever an action or page load is completed. We then have the ability to track all activity occurring within THWACK in a semi-standard Adobe Analytics dashboard.   Depending on who you are, this either sounds easy but isn't easy, or sounds difficult and is difficult. If there's one lesson you should be able to take away, it's that thinking outside the box can get you the data you need. Don't let the generic platform dictate your ability to defend the work you do.   Side note: DTM also allows us some additional page load opportunities to deploy social retargeting pixels, and some fun marketing tools like munchkin codes. This way, visitors to specific portions of our site can have Facebook and LinkedIn ads displayed to them which speak directly to some of the product pages they were peeking at on THWACK. Munchkin codes, on the other hand, auto-populate any available Marketo data.   2. CMP Code URL Appending Yeah. You read that right. We love our acronyms. What this translates to, is that we add a code to our URLs when a user visits THWACK. If anything they visit is related to a specific marketing campaign, the CMP code tells us at the time of a product trial download or purchase what from THWACK triggered the purchase. Why is this important? We can attribute all business the community helps close. Hello ROI.   Apologies for not being able to go super in-depth. It's part of our secret sauce, but I wanted to at least tell you there are more options out there than guessing analytics.   Here's a reminder of how terrible the Community Manager Reports are, just in case you've been avoiding them.   ... View more

I like to think SolarWinds has a pretty solid corporate sense of humor, especially surrounding that little four-letter word:   GDPR. From the placard on the door of my boss's office reading "GDPR Readiness Valedictorian" to the various satirical Game of Thrones "GDPR is Coming" knockoff stickers you can find in various cubes, it's hard to miss the ominous feeling.   Don't feel dread, get read...y. Get ready. GDPR doesn't have to be painful, but it's also safe to say it can't be a one-size-fits-all solution. What you need to do is get yourself a plan. Plans solve problems, prevent breakdowns in communication, and (most importantly) cover you, your community, and your company's **bleep** in the scenario that you do eventually come across a request to be forgotten, or a request for data portability.   Oh, yeah, those. If you're catching up on the Geedz (pronounced "jeedz" - it's something only I call GDPR, but feel free to help it catch on), the General Data Protection Regulation entitles European Union citizens to certain rights with their data. Of which, thinks like the right to be forgotten and the right to data portability are covered.   Now, in the words of any good Texan, "I ain't got no legal expertise, so y'all will want to consult yer company legal teams on this."   To me, there are a couple of steps you can go through to make this easier than starting from scratch:   Meet with your company's legal team. They're busy people, but they'll appreciate you being proactive about this. As with all laws, GDPR is up to interpretation. Some companies will opt to read the law in its strictest form, some may be a little lax. Your legal team will be able to give you guidance as to how your company will comply. Complete a discovery and write everything down. What systems are you using? What private information do those systems capture and store? Educate yourself on how Lithium is helping us prepare in their ongoing development of the Lithium JX product.   Here's a thread with some details. Make a plan. Given how your company wants to comply with GDPR, what systems you're using, and what information those systems have, how are you going to comply with the various facets of GDPR? If you want an example of a plan, I posted mine   here for you. I guess you can party, at this point.   I know this isn't migration-related, but I hate seeing y'all suffer. Welcome to 'compliance'! Ben Garves THWACK Community SolarWinds ... View more

I like to think SolarWinds has a pretty solid corporate sense of humor, especially surrounding that little four-letter word: GDPR. From the placard on the door of my boss's office reading "GDPR Readiness Valedictorian" to the various satirical Game of Thrones "GDPR is Coming" knockoff stickers you can find in various cubes, it's hard to miss the ominous feeling.   Don't feel dread, get read...y. Get ready. GDPR doesn't have to be painful, but it's also safe to say it can't be a one-size-fits-all solution. What you need to do is get yourself a plan. Plans solve problems, prevent breakdowns in communication, and (most importantly) cover you, your community, and your company's **bleep** in the scenario that you do eventually come across a request to be forgotten, or a request for data portability.   Oh, yeah, those. If you're catching up on the Geedz (pronounced "jeedz" - it's something only I call GDPR, but feel free to help it catch on), the General Data Protection Regulation entitles European Union citizens to certain rights with their data. Of which, things like the right to be forgotten and the right to data portability are covered.   Now, in the words of any good Texan, "I ain't got no legal expertise, so y'all will want to consult yer company legal teams on this."   To me, there are a couple of steps you can go through to make this easier than starting from scratch:   Meet with your company's legal team. They're busy people, but they'll appreciate you being proactive about this. As with all laws, GDPR is up to interpretation. Some companies will opt to read the law in its strictest form, some may be a little lax. Your legal team will be able to give you guidance as to how your company will comply. Complete a discovery and write everything down. What systems are you using? What private information do those systems capture and store? Educate yourself on how Lithium is helping us prepare in their ongoing development of the Lithium JX product. Here's a thread with some details. Make a plan. Given how your company wants to comply with GDPR, what systems you're using, and what information those systems have, how are you going to comply with the various facets of GDPR? If you want an example of a plan, I posted mine here for you. I guess you can party, at this point.   I know this isn't migration-related, but I hate seeing y'all suffer. Welcome to 'compliance'! ... View more