Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Entry Submitted by: Gareth Worsnup (gworsnup) Community Manager Community: Playstation Community  (community.eu.playstation.com) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation  ... See more...
Company: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Entry Submitted by: Gareth Worsnup (gworsnup) Community Manager Community: Playstation Community  (community.eu.playstation.com) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   SCEE Lithium Implementation   1. Playstation Network Account Integration. We have implemented integrated login/authentication on our Lithium platform with our global Playstation Network accounts. This means users can login to our Lithium forums with their Playstation Network ID’s.   2. Custom Ad Serving Technology Integration with Custom Analytics We have implemented bespoke, hierarchical, ad-serving technology across category, board and thread level views. This includes a hero image and video at the top of each board, category and thread page, a standard MPU ad placement on the right hand column on each page and custom background images. Adverts in these areas can be targeted at every level right down to specific threads.   Adverts are also cached to save load and can handle custom translations across the different language boards. In part with this, we have also implemented custom WebTrends tagging tracking the number of impressions, click-throughs and even the number of video plays right down to the percentage of the video watched. Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP (Zend), JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON, Flash, XML   3. Website Integrated Forum Skins. We have integrated many Lithium boards with 1st party game websites. Example: http://community.singstar.com/t5/SingStar/bd-p/717. In these instances, iframes are used to pull in an external website’s navigation and footer elements, while the boards are custom skinned to fit with the theme of the overarching website.   The result is a seamless experience for the user whilst traveling from the main website through to the forums. Single Sign on (cookie based) is also implemented on website integrated forums, where authentication can happens outside of Lithium, yet users are seamlessly logged in when reaching the forums.   4. Featured Boards custom component. A ‘Featured Boards’ component has been implemented across the top of all category pages. Content for the featured board’s panel is created and managed by using feeds from hidden threads managed by our central community team. This means no development is needed, and updates to the featured items can be completely managed by the SCEE community team. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Featured Boards). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   5. Accepted Solutions component. In order to best utilise the Playstation’s support community, a custom component has been developed that surfaces recent and popular discussions (based on Kudos), in part with solved questions or accepted solutions. This content is promoted at the top of the category pages giving new and existing users a quick route to valuable community content. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Recent Discussions & Solved Questions). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   6. User Profile Panel & Post Info - hover-over. In order to simplify the forum design, certain information has been hidden from the main display by using hover-overs or tool-tips. User profile information can be accessed by hovering the mouse over a users profile name or avatar. This reveals user profile information, recent posts, number of posts and registered date. If a users also has a Playstation portable ID, this will be pulled and displayed automatically. Similarly, if users hover their mouse over a thread link, the views, number of posts, kudos and a small preview are also displayed. All of these hover information is cached, meaning its only loaded one time on demand then stored meaning API calls are limited. Technologies Used: Lithium API, JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON.   7. Custom Post styles - targeting admins/MPU's etc. In order to highlight posts made by Administrators, Moderators and MPU’s, we have implemented user targeting, and can target posts by specified user roles and inject specific CSS into their posts. This means that Moderator posts can for example be highlighted in blue to give a clearer indication of their status within the community. Technologies Used: JavaScript, JQuery, CSS.
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Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish... See more...
Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish term referring to the process of mutual giving – the perfect name for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable members are not only the front line of customer support but also a driving force in the running of the company itself. In fact, our tag line is ‘The mobile network run by you’.   We don’t do large call centres and we don’t do big budget advertising. Instead, we rely on our growing user-generated pool of knowledge that is our community, where people get help fast and where customer debate and discussions helps us shape and grow the business. And using this community-based model saves costs and ensures giffgaff is outperforming month-after-month across a wide variety of metrics, from traffic to active members.   Our customers are so helpful we do not need a traditional customer service centre, but use our community support forums instead. Saving us the cost and overheads of traditional CS.   Although giffgaff saves a lot of costs by not having a traditional customer service model, the quality of service is still a high priority, which is reflected in a recent customer satisfaction survey, where our members rated our customer service 9/10 and our Net Promoter score was 73% (in context, according to the NPS website, Google rates as 73% and Apple as 74%).   giffgaff's Community Health Index is 877, which puts giffgaff as a leader when compared to all communities globally serviced by Lithium.   We are seeing these types of results through a combination of programmes we run here with the community, which ensures that any question asked on the community is answered within 90 seconds on average.   But not only does our community help by answering peoples specific questions, we can see 8% of all page views going directly to an accepted solution, guaranteeing a great many call deflections.   With our highly-engaged community, we create a huge volume of content, which gets picked up in search engines, driving more and more traffic to our site. So much so, that we can see 30% of all organic traffic going straight into our community and finding answers to questions they didn’t even know they had!   Of course, just like any other business we look at the retention rates in our business and are able to see the following amazing results over a running twelve month period:   People who’ve received payback are 52% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve activated a friend are 35% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve posted on the forum are 31% more likely to stay with the network  People with more than 5 page views are 41% more likely to stay with the network  Through our community we use a 'member get member' program, which enables people to bring new customers to our business and we are extremely successful with this, ensuring our existing members bring in much more than 25% of our total new customers.   There are as many people who participate in ‘member get member’ activity on our forums as there are not. However, those people who are involved on our forums are twice as likely to bring on a friend. Our members are helping us out with marketing, sales, development, creating anything from marketing materials, to handing out our product to developing mobile applications for us.   In terms of developing the business we use a dedicated Ideas Board, with over 6,000 ideas and more than 50,000 comments and on average an implementation of 1 idea every 3 days.   giffgaff's mutual model paves the way for a new generation of social brands, which provide real consumer value through embracing the passions and skills of their membership communities, whilst growing an army of loyal advocates in the process.   I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoy all the various great things we do with our community.   Without them, giffgaff would be nowhere.
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Company: Skype Entry Submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Support Network  (community.skype.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Global Implementation The Skype Support Network, launc... See more...
Company: Skype Entry Submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Support Network  (community.skype.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Global Implementation The Skype Support Network, launched in June 2011, is Skype’s peer-to-peer support community and provides a direct channel for feedback and exchange between our users and product teams. What happens if you flip on all switches “Community” and put the spotlight on a previously hidden tech support forum? We did just that and turned it into a vibrant location for exchange around everything Skype. Within just over 7 months page views skyrocketed and have more than doubled. A highly engaged, dedicated user base presented with the right tools utilize them every day now to improve theirs and other’s Skype experience.   Several aspects lead to the huge success – both outside and inside the company – of this project, each itself worth highlighting.   Best Global Implementation Reflecting our truly global product we launched the community in eight languages. The landing page was designed to showcase our language communities and the latest activities and hot topics in each of those. Our visitors appreciated the fact that they could exchange in their language and within days we had Super Users covering all time zones around the world   Best Social Customer Experience Program Making the community a place you wanted to stay and return to was our primary goal. That’s why we came up with several programs that rewarded visitors. The Community News highlight weekly activity, discussions and user participation. The highlighted user and topic of the week invited users to stay while longer and engage in the conversation.   We are most proud about our #SkypeTalks live events: Questions raised simultanousy via a dedicated community board and Twitter were replied on by product managers inside Skype. This helped prioritize the next developments sprints through the insight gained and gave the user a very rewarding feedback experience. And in the end it raised awareness of our product features.   Eventually the community has helped us identify and resolve new product issues within 24 hours of launch that would normally have taken days. E.g. the community compiled a list of problematic devices with regards to video calling on Android. Based on that we were able to issue a hotfix within days after our initial release. This extended the list of supported devices and thereby consumer satisfaction.   Best New Community Already the first week after the launch in June 2011 our Community Health Index passed 600 and it’s rise has not stopped yet. We have since passed a score of 700 which put us in line with other Lithium established communities that have been developing for much longer than the 7 months we did.   But the CHI is more than just a number: It reflects that our users are on average getting a reply quicker than via our own customer service. In the majority of cases even answering their question right away providing is with a first contact resolution rate of around 70%. We now engage 3 Million users per month, growing 10% month over month since last June.   Best Community Technical Implementation Another goal of the community switch was to offer answers on new and trending support questions faster and deliver them on a more direct channel.   We achieved that by integrating helpful content (Accepted Solutions) and related topics to our existing copywriter authored knowledge base content on our Skype Support page. A category based selection logic ensures the related topics are pulled from the correct board.   It works as an additional motivational factor to our Super User: “Great to have our work surfaced to more users to get their problems solved”. Eventually this integration serves as an attractive entry point to join the community discussion with latest stats reflecting the activity taking place.   Behind the curtain we also made full use of the Single-Sign-On feature in Lithium. It is not only used for authenticating users to access with their Skype Name, but we also implemented a tight integration allowing Skype Customer Service staff to one-click quickly check back office user data for cases escalated from the community. The sleek integration ensured the feature to be attractive in everyday use.   Best Business ROI Best of all we were pleased to see a 10% reduction in our traditional support costs through reduced number of contacts that we could relate to the introduction of the new Lithium community platform. Much harder to quantify but definitely present are the revenue improvements gained from the increased customer satisfaction through the product improvements we could introduce based on the community feedback. Compared to previous methods if gathering feedback (e.g. through web based forms) the round trip time is much shorter and we can react quicker.   Best SuperFan Story or Insight In the end the whole community stands or falls with our dedicated Super Users sharing their expert knowledge and creative solutions on using our products. They have spent 1½ years online time on their community while it had not even had it’s own birthday yet. During that time they contributed 14% of all content including 38% of the very valuable accepted solutions. As a token of appreciation we highlighted five of them in our end of year awards on our Community news blog with a short interview and portrait.   Our stellar Super User goes by the nickname “TheUberOverLord”, is a self-proclaimed “White Hat” computer expert and contributed 5% of all posts since the launch. His engagement inspired several other users to become engaged and eventually Super users as well.   I want to close with inviting you all to our community and taking this opportunity to thank our community members for their passion and engagement that makes this such a success. We are entering this award as a way of saying thanks to our Super Users!
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Company: Autodesk Entry Submitted by: Brian Kling  Program Manager, Community & Social Media (bkling) Community: Autodesk Discussion Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implemen... See more...
Company: Autodesk Entry Submitted by: Brian Kling  Program Manager, Community & Social Media (bkling) Community: Autodesk Discussion Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implementation   Autodesk has actually had online “discussion groups” for more than 15 years – remember Compuserve?!  In June of 2010 we migrated to the Lithium platform.  Because we already have a well-established community, our focus has been on optimizing our Support and Service participation, getting our organization participate in a sustained manner and to evangelize to our internal business groups how much value this thriving community provides.   The Technology Integration Angle One of our major efforts achieved last year was to answer the question “how do you keep a community open to all customers, but yet provide an enhanced level of customer service to those customers that have paid for an annual Subscription Contract?”    Our solution was to integrate the Lithium platform with our CRM platform (Salesforce).    The key components are:   Identify Subscription Customers – this was achieved when we migrated, but using our own SSO and authenticating against our CRM for Subscription Entitlement.  Internally we can see who has an entitlement, and even what level they are on, and a proper role is auto-assigned.  This authentication occurs every time at login.   Offer enhanced service – this boiled down to four escalation methods:   Automated “No Reply” - A question authored by a Subscription Customer is monitored; if no first Reply is received after 24 hours, a linked case is created in Salesforce and routed to the appropriate support queue. Automated “No Solution” – A question authored by a Subscription Customer that has no further Replies for 48 hours and no Accepted Solutions marked will be escalated into Salesforce to determine if help is needed.  An email is sent to customer asking if they need our help, if yes, then case is routed to appropriate support queue. Manual by Author – Premium level Subscription customers have a “Need an Answer” button on any new question they author.  They can escalate prior to the automated options above. Manual by Autodesk - Autodesk staff can escalate any forum thread into Salesforce, for either internal collaboration, large file transfer, sensitive information, product defect tracking, Content Creation flagging, etc.   The ROI angle Proving some ROI to your executive staff is an important part of a Community Strategy.  Not all ROI’s are easy to measure, and every community really has multiple ROI’s, not just on cost, but also brand awareness, advocacy, etc.  This example is just one of the many possible facets.   Our communities are mostly based on technical support questions related to our many design products.  Customers paying for Subscription Contracts are welcome to come and participate in our online community, but they also have the right to come directly to our Support staff through Salesforce.  As you can imagine, the cost of a technical, 1:1 interaction is vastly higher than that of a peer-to-peer interaction in an online community.  For us, the calculated cost difference is 1000x – yes, one that’s one thousand!   Through SSO we can easily identify which customers posting in our online community have Subscription contracts.  We also regularly survey our customers and ask if their issue was resolved in the community.   For Subscription Customers, if they had a resolution, we then ask them if they would have turned to us for 1:1 support if they hadn’t found their answer in the community.  Here is a perfect opportunity to measure how many of these customers achieve a resolution to their issues without needing to come to us on a 1:1 interaction, which is a direct cost savings calculation.    For our community, in 2011 our calculated cost savings was $6.8M dollars.     This is not all about saving costs, because for lower severity issues that are common to many users, these questions are best served in a public forum where all can then find and benefit from the answers provided.  Further, typically answers come faster from this vast group of community experts, who also know our products better than we do; they use them in the trenches each and every day, in many ways we can’t anticipate or model!   For both angles At Autodesk we use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a common indicator of customer perceived value in our interactions with them.  In Product Support, we measure this in our 1:1 transactions, online communities as well as customer interactions through our partners worldwide.    Our NPS score for online communities has reached or even at times surpassed the NPS for our Silver Subscription 1:1 transactions and our partner transactions, which proves that customers do assess a high value to their online experience.
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Company: National Instruments Entry Submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer Community: National Instruments Community  (forums.ni.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The National Instruments Idea Exchange, which ... See more...
Company: National Instruments Entry Submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer Community: National Instruments Community  (forums.ni.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The National Instruments Idea Exchange, which was established in June 2009, provides a quick, excellent medium of direct communication between our customers and our R&D team. Here at National Instruments, we understand the importance of integrating co-innovation into the product design and development processes.  By giving our lead users the opportunity to provide valuable feedback on our products, not only do we develop better software, but we also demonstrate to our customers that we greatly value their input.   Before the Idea Exchange was born, we first needed to determine how to best incorporate our top users into our development processes.     In order to do so, we needed to learn more about our community members.  A survey of the user base returned the following information:   55% of our customers are "active" community users There is a direct correlation between how active a customer is on the forums and how loyal he/she is to the company. This data reaffirmed our assertion that it would be well worth the effort to pull customers into the NI software development process.       With the main focus being ease of use, National Instruments utilized the Lithium community platform and revealed the new Idea Exchange in the summer of 2009.  Since then, users have submitted over 3,700 ideas – each with candid explanations of why they posted.     Our Research and Development teams monitor the board and reply directly to the customers’ requests. Over the years, the Idea Exchange has expanded to encompass eight different product boards and has received:   Over 3,700 submitted ideas (our initial goal was 500) Over 73,600 votes on ideas 14,565 customer comments Over 56,000 unique visitors Additionally, the LabVIEW 2011 Beta release included 13 new features that were suggested on the Idea Exchange.   In the end, not only did the Idea Exchange alleviate many users’ frustrations by giving them a direct connection to our developers, but it also increased our productivity, as well.  Our engineers now have an exact picture of which new features are most important to our customers.     By placing co-innovation as a cornerstone of the product development cycle, we have been able to produce better products.
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Company: Future Shop Entry Submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Specialist Community: Tech Yeah Community  (community.futureshop.ca) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   Future Shop, Canada’s n... See more...
Company: Future Shop Entry Submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Specialist Community: Tech Yeah Community  (community.futureshop.ca) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   Future Shop, Canada’s number one retail website is owned by Best Buy Ltd and operates over 149 of stores. The Tech Yeah Community has existed for nearly 5 years and has served as a space where customers, Product Experts and vendor partners could connect about the latest in technology.   Future Shop‘s Product Experts have always played a significant role in shaping the direction of the Community, many of them have been active in the community since the day we launched.   When the Future Shop Retail Learning team approached eComm to help find a solution to make training accessible to all Product Experts regardless of their location, leveraging the Community seemed like a natural progression.   The FS-training.ca portal was intended as a one stop shop for associates to learn anytime, anywhere (Canada-wide).   What was built was a Community within a Community that serves as a hub for all of our store associates. Building fs-training.ca wasn't as simple as throwing up some boards, some significant technical hurdles were overcome to be able to host Flash and create an experience that was meaningful for our associates.   In this private community space, our PEs are able to:   read up on the latest products connect with other associates in their categories from across the country  and even more importantly, it gives them a direct line into the Retail Learning team where they’ve been able to share their ideas and connect with the Retail Learning Specialists supporting them at head office.  Registering for the Tech Yeah Community is now part of the on-boarding process for every new associate and where they come to learn and share ideas. It's also an easy transition into the public-facing community where we've seen associates jumping in to share their knowledge with our customers.   In addition to the Continuous Learning, they also have access to updated Product Knowledge, Sales Culture and Retail Process training. The site is also regularly updated with Peer to Peer Learning in the form of Videos, Tribal Knowledge Base articles, and forum discussions which allows our associates to access their training material while they’re on the go or at home.  
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Company: Data.com  Entry Submitted by: Katie Chastek (ktc) Community Manager Community: Data.com (community.jigsaw.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The abundance and pace of changing business data has been a long-time iss... See more...
Company: Data.com  Entry Submitted by: Katie Chastek (ktc) Community Manager Community: Data.com (community.jigsaw.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The abundance and pace of changing business data has been a long-time issue for companies who struggle to manage and keep their data clean and actionable.   With the proliferation of social data, business data management has become an increasingly important and difficult objective.   After revolutionizing CRM a decade ago, Salesforce has a history of taking on challenging industry problems. Launched last August, Salesforce’s Data.com is setting out to transform the business data industry by making data accessible in the cloud and surrounding the data assets with a strong community to provide real-time intelligence.   The Result Data.com’s 4 million member strong community launched in August and is integral to the solution’s success.   Unlike other data providers that solely rely on an algorithm to update and maintain their data assets, Data.com’s community plays an active role in maintaining data accuracy and uploading new business accounts and contacts. Ultimately, the community not only benefits from Data.com’s solution through rewards and offline events, but it also puts customers in a position to succeed.   Just how much does the community contribute? Each month, members add over a million new contacts, allowing Data.com to grow and provide quality data to marketing and sales operations. The most dedicated community members are what Data.com labels Rainmakers and Data Defenders.   Rainmakers are Data.com’s most active users who volunteer to add and update over 500+ business data contacts. In The Corner, Rainmakers join other community members in using the community to contact other users worldwide or network to share ideas, exchange tips and best practices.   In addition to the forums, there is an Idea Exchange for members to add suggestions and ideas to improve their Data.com experience.   Data Defenders are a small group of people in the Data.com community and a part of a data quality protector program who clean records and evaluate data quality. Data Defenders are essentially the quality control leaders in the community. The group flags and graveyards stale or inaccurate data and then corrects the discrepancy – allowing Data.com to have the unique approach of combining algorithm technology with human business data smarts.   Community Collaboration = Customer Success An example of the instant success of Data.com is illustrated through Clairmail, an enterprise-wide mobile banking and payments solution that needed to target new prospects, create a better experience for current customers and reduce time spent on chasing inaccurate data. With Data.com, Clairmail has increased dial effectiveness by 15%, closed 20% more deals and attributed 32% of their overall revenue from business data sourced from Data.com.   What is unique about Data.com for Clairmail is that the community responds in real-time. Clairmail has an advantage over competition with the most up-to-date account and contact information that allows them to find the right people at the right companies at the right time.   Salesforce's Data.com is already accomplishing what it set out to do: build a strong community around business data that allows customers to deliver effective sales and marketing campaigns that grow their businesses. And with over 4 million community members and growing, Data.com has been a tremendous success since launching just six months ago.
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Company: Dice Entry Submitted by: Terry Starr (tstarr) Community Manager Community: Tech Talk (techtalk.dice.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 18 January 2012   I think our Lithium Success team could s... See more...
Company: Dice Entry Submitted by: Terry Starr (tstarr) Community Manager Community: Tech Talk (techtalk.dice.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 18 January 2012   I think our Lithium Success team could speak volumes on why we should win. However, to keep it simple, after attending LiNC 2011 and seeing what was possible, Dice had a vision of where they wanted to be by 2012.   Dice's team had a vision for its tech forum.   Through perseverance, a lot of hard work and dedication, we were able to pull off an incredible transformation:    We completely redesigned and developed a new structure, including the introduction of Talent Communities which has been integrated across all of Dice.com We changed the name to: Dice tech talk. We added a number of new features such as Video, Contests, and Q&A (including Facebook) to name a few, to allow our tech audience to engage more deeply.  The structure was built around the suggested idea that "people interact by topic area, not by style of engagement."  We took this advice from Lithium to heart when trying to integrate Q&A style into a discussion board forum.  We will continue to roll out new programs throughout 2012 and beyond.  A pictures worth a thousands words - and we're hoping that Lithium will review our 2011 community vs where we are today - need we say more?   *******************************   A huge thanks goes out to all those who took on this monumental, but incredibly rewarding effort, particularly my wing-women, Clair Whitmer, Rachel Haskell-Weeks and my wing-men, Steve Butterbaugh, Mark Feffer, James Henry, Adam Fudala - and of course, Jon Wishart and the Lithium team!  
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Company: Best Buy  Entry Submitted by: Gina Debogovich (gina) Community Manager Community: Best Buy US, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation Best Buy is a multi-national retailer with operations... See more...
Company: Best Buy  Entry Submitted by: Gina Debogovich (gina) Community Manager Community: Best Buy US, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation Best Buy is a multi-national retailer with operations across the United States, Canada, Europe, China and Mexico and customers around the world.   In addition to the Best Buy brand, the family of brands includes Best Buy Mobile, The Carphone Warehouse, CowBoom, Future Shop, Geek Squad, Magnolia, MindShift, Pacific Sales.   All these brands leverage social media as a means to connect with current and future customers to raise awareness of their brand, to gain insights and to support customers. From specific brand Forum boards and helpful blogs to engaging on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Pinterest, social media connects with millions of customers.   To help support our global customers, Best Buy USA, Best Buy Canada and Future Shop all use the Lithium Technologies platform. Every year we help millions of customers and facilitate thousands of conversations in multiple languages (English and Spanish for Best Buy USA, and English and French for Best Buy Canada and Future Shop).   As e-commerce continues to increase, more customers will interact with brands online. We also align our blog content strategy with our other social support channels, promotional activity and product releases. For the past year, the global brands have been connecting on a monthly basis to help share out best practices for social and community management.   Our global brands help bring the knowledge from our employees, customers and superusers together on our social platforms.
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Company: BT  Entry Submitted by: Kerry Gulloch (KerryG) Community Manager Community: BTCare Community Forums (bt.com/community) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story   Our superfans are transforming our business via the BTCare Communi... See more...
Company: BT  Entry Submitted by: Kerry Gulloch (KerryG) Community Manager Community: BTCare Community Forums (bt.com/community) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story   Our superfans are transforming our business via the BTCare Community Forums. They have been instrumental in driving the growth of our community by contributing numerous solutions helping our customers, which deflects contacts from our traditional voice or email channels.   The reputation of our CLs to understand and resolve customer issues is second to none amongst their community peers (evident via the kudos and accepted solutions awarded), the mods (what they see day in day out) and other internal business stakeholders (positive feedback from product managers right up to our MD of Customer Service!).   They have been key advocates for us within the community and their desire to help us improve both the community itself and our products and services is evident in the insight they give us. They have allowed us the opportunity for some of our product teams to get closer than ever to the ‘voice of the customer’ in order to drive product improvements by attending event calls and web chats. Identifying changes we can make for the benefit of all our customers, resulting in tangible business benefits…more about that later.   Firstly, let me tell you how we got there…   Our superfan story began in November 2010 and has continued to grow and evolve since then. We think our superfans, or as we like to call them ‘Community Leaders’ are incredible. We wanted to recognise and thank some of the members who really stood out to us. Those members who embodied the ethos of our community as a positive, productive place for customers to help each other with their BT products and services. We wanted to formalise how we recognised these people and let the rest of the community know how great they were.   We did that by creating the CLP – 'Community Leader Programme'.   What is the CLP? The CLP recognises members in the community who help other members in a positive way, they each have a ‘CL’ badge against their name, and have been announced as Community Leaders by the Community Manager. Over and above this we have given some additional privileges to our CLs such as access to a private forum board where they can interact with the Community Manager and moderator team.   We have regular conference calls or online discussions with them to discuss improvements to the community, and have also arranged for BT experts to share their knowledge with them on certain products, such as BT Vision. We have continued to evolve the programme over time, getting our CLs involved in specific product trials so we can use their feedback to improve products before full rollout, and more recently we held our first ever Community Meet Up which they were a key part of.   The Community Meet Up was an opportunity to meet our CLs face to face, cement the relationships we had built, and say thanks for the hours of help they put into our community. It also allowed us to have an open, honest forum with them to get their views on the community, our products and services and collaborate on ways we can improve things. We held this session at the BT Tower in London and also had lunch at the top of the tower as part of our way of saying thanks – the CLs were delighted to get the opportunity to visit the tower which is no longer open to the public. We had some exclusive new product demo’s and our MD of customer service also joined by video link to thank the CLs for their contribution to the community.   As a result of the meetup we refreshed our community homepage, made some board structure changes and fed back suggestions to improve the mobile community experience to the Lithium team. One further change was to introduce selective moderation privileges for our CLs at their request. They now have the ability to move posts, and use this to remove Spam and posts that are in the wrong boards. This has freed up moderator time and the number of abuse reports for spam have reduced dramatically as the CLs are picking them up and quarantining them quickly.   How else has it helped transform our business? The knowledge and advice shared by our CLs has resolved a huge amount of customer problems within the community and this helps us deflect calls from our service channels. The advocacy that is driven by our CLs also helps give a balanced view of issues raised, which is a welcome voice in a support community like ours where the majority of posts are about problems. The CLs are often an objective voice of reason that other customers respond well to.   The CLs have also been invaluable to us when they have become involved in product testing or focus groups to share their views. Their feedback has helped shaped product improvements via early insight and drive further product development before a product goes live to our customer base.   For example, their comments about a change to one of our TV services was fed back to the product team who implemented an update as a result. The CLs were then invited to join the pilot version of the change to give further feedback before the update was rolled out to our customer base. A great example of their feedback making a difference to all our customers.   Here’s some feedback from one of the Programme Directors within our Customer Services function after a call we had with our CL’s:   “As an avid reader on our forums I know their benefit well for our products, but I was blown away last night on a call with our community leaders. I am so impressed that you guys have grown and nurtured people who just want to help our customers, its brilliant …. More people like this definitely make it easier to deal with BT and get quick answers…”   We also have some quite staggering statistics for contributions by the CL group, who: Have contributed 18.7% of overall posts Have authored 28% of all accepted solutions  Have received 35% of all ratings awarded  Have spent 1,038,734 minutes online in our community – almost 2 yrs solid between them and the community itself has only just had it's 2nd birthday!  More recently, the CLs have also set up on a video-calling service so they can contact each other and maintain connections and relationships via video. This is something I have also taken part in as Community Manager. The CLs have used this as a way to share more knowledge between themselves helping each other help more customers – the knock on effect of this additional knowledge sharing has a positive impact on our customers.   Finally, we also asked our CLs what they think of the programme and here’s what a couple of them had to say:   “I have enjoyed getting to know the fellow CL members better and getting good advice/information from them. I also like having a better method of communicating with yourself and the other mods again makes it a more friendly atmosphere.” – imjolly   “CL has been interesting, getting to know the small group of other CL's, mod team and Kerry. I enjoyed testing a product, and solving some functionality issues. CL is about service not status to me, and I find I get a lot out of being part of it and this community.” – AllanQuatermain   Their commitment, passion and energy for helping other members is astounding and we wouldn’t have such a successful community without them. We wanted to enter this award as another way of saying thanks to our CL guys – they’re great! 🙂
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Company: Rogers Communications Entry Submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience     Our Rogers Commun... See more...
Company: Rogers Communications Entry Submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience     Our Rogers Community Forums are still relatively new, having launched late in 2010, so much of our effort in 2011 was focused on building the community and promoting it internally.    To accelerate growth we used many cross-functional platforms. We put a note on our customers’ bills (which increased page views by more than 200%), ran banner ads on our Barker Channel (a promotional television channel for Rogers Cable customers).   We also added it to our Quick Start Menu (an interactive program guide for Rogers Cable customers), and pushed targeted SMS messages to customers’ mobile phones promoting the mobile enhancement we made to our community (which resulted in a click-through conversion rate of 2.6%).   We also incorporated badges driving to the community on our corporate blog and support pages. These combined efforts helped us to effectively double our user base over the third quarter of 2011.   With the community firmly established, we began to focus on the customer experience.   The community helped support our most successful device launch to date. With over 1,400 posts about the launch, we had many insights to share with the rest of the business to improve for next time. And it meant that, for the first time, customers could find answers they were looking for without calling in and possibly waiting on hold. Many customers were also able to answer each other’s questions.   To support the launch, we moved to a dedicated support model for the community, meaning in-house customer service representatives could address Rogers customers’ account-related questions via private message.   Our community is peer-to-peer so, as a way to engage more deeply with our customers, we launched a program called Rogers RevUp. This is a series of expert events held exclusively in the community where a product manager answers questions for a few hours or a full day. It gives customers unprecedented access to decision makers.   During our first RevUp, which was related to our Android product line-up, we saw registrations go up 42% over the daily average. The event was also well-attended by our key Android influencers, many of whom we’d been gathering feedback from over the last few years.   This was a nice way to give them real-time direct access to our product manager for Android-powered devices). Through events like RevUp and the community forums we are able to capture insights, share them internally and ultimately use this feedback to improve customer experience for Rogers customers.   On a weekly basis we create a “top five” report that is shared internally and we have created specific reporting for product teams at launch time. Employees are also invited to visit the community anytime to find out what’s being said about their own products or services. The result of this work is a more vibrant community that consistently generates answers to customer questions but more importantly, it’s a community the helps us improve our business.   ---------- Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless voice and data communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services. Through Rogers Media we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, sports entertainment, magazines and trade publications, and digital media. We are publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B) and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI).   For further information about the Rogers group of companies, please visit www.rogers.com.
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Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience   We are convinced that Sephora... See more...
Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience   We are convinced that Sephora has the best SuperFans on the planet, and also the most engaged.   They spend an average of 396 minutes online a month, and purchase 10x more than our average client! They also have created their own community and support system on BeautyTalk, outside of the usual chatter about beauty and makeup.     Aside from the wildly popular user-created traveling Sephora box program, they also offer each other support during troubling times, and give advice to each other on every subject from financial issues to favorite travel destinations.   That they feel so comfortable discussing so many different types of topics with each other is really a testament to how close the super users in our community are.   Our lounge boards are some of the most popular and active boards in the community, and every time one of our users hits a “hearts” (kudos) milestone in the community, our users throw them a (virtual) party!   It’s really fantastic to see our members rewarding each other and fostering a sense of accomplishment among each other in the community.
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Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Best Social Customer Experience Progra... See more...
Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Best Social Customer Experience Program   Sephora consistently strives to provide the best client experience, beauty expertise and services in the industry, whether it be in our stores, online, or via mobile device. We partnered with Lithium Technologies in September 2010 to launch our online beauty community BeautyTalk with a few high level goals in mind:   To build the Sephora brand and community, To establish Sephora’s expertise in the beauty world, And to drive sales and loyalty But our main objective was simple: to create a space where our clients could get their most pressing beauty questions answered.   BeautyTalk quickly became a thriving and vibrant community, a place where beauty enthusiasts around the world could meet and share stories. But a few months into our launch, we conducted a general client survey and received some interesting results.   We learned that 65% of our clients would prefer to get beauty advice from not only their peers, but from beauty experts as well. And if there is one thing Sephora has no shortage of, it's beauty experts! In August of 2011 we launched our Ask the Experts program with the help of our Sephora PRO artistry makeup team.   Sephora PROs are our handpicked elite team of makeup artists who travel the world to work as key makeup artists at events such as New York and Paris Fashion Week, and The Sundance Film Festival. Together with our highly trained beauty advisers in our call center, 6 PRO team members make up our roster of Beauty Experts, who are online between the hours of 6 am – 9 pm everyday answering beauty questions.   I f a client asks a question in the Ask the Experts board, they are guaranteed a response from one of our beauty experts.   The Ask the Experts board immediately took off, and it is now in the Top 3 most viewed boards in the community.   We are very proud to offer our clients a point of differentiation from other beauty communities in that there is now a place where you can get beauty advice not just from your peers, but from trained experts with experience in the field.   We have also just recently launched a Live Chat program, where clients can get one on one real-time advice from experts in certain fields (past live chats participants have include skincare expert Ole Henriksen, Dr. Dennis Gross and tattoo artist and makeup guru Kat von D).   These live chats have given us a whole new way to engage with clients, and the response has been tremendous, with the chats garnering over 20,000 views each and hundreds of questions.   With our Ask the Experts program, we are bringing the knowledge of trained professionals right to the computer screens of our eager client base and providing a useful, fun and engaging social customer experience.   Feedback from our clients - What do you love about Sephora’s Ask the Experts program?   “Everyone I know turns to me for beauty advice, but it’s nice to know there's somewhere I can go when I have a question too!” - fakeasnonfiction “I love being able to research online before buying and asking the experts questions about the products. They can tell us stuff or about products we would probably never know.” - makeupobesessed “They have really detailed answers that contain pretty much everything you need!” - rockstarg    
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Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 10 October 2011 Our organization tends to be very email-centri... See more...
Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 10 October 2011 Our organization tends to be very email-centric, as many companies are. One of the problems we had with email was the lack of centralization, accounting, and the ability to capture and reuse knowledge.   It’s tough to search through thousands of emails to find an answer to your question. And what happens if you join a group mid-discussion? You don’t get the benefit of prior conversations.    The value of the contributions and the impact experts were making went unnoticed as the mailing lists didn't feed into the overall metrics system.   We decided to go with a community-based platform so we could auto-archive discussions and provide a rich, comprehensive and flexible reputation model. This allowed us to transition into a reusable content model. The adoption rate in our organization has been phenomenal, with many more people visiting than our original roll-out group. In fact, we've gone viral!  Word of mouth has increased our visitors to three times what we expected – and we only launched the community in October.   In order to accelerate wide adoption we have ensured that our community is not a stand-alone tool. It is seamlessly tied to the engineers' workflow and deeply integrated with our other service delivery tools.  To this end we’ve made 100+ enhancements to the basic Lithium community, based on our business needs.   The forums reputation model has helped us acknowledge contributions that would have previously gone unrecognized. Engineers who never participate in email discussions beyond asking questions are actively posting answers in the forums and helping other engineers. And they’re competing to see who can get on our leader board.   But the biggest win for our group at Cisco has been the ability to bring experts together from all areas. Engineers from across the globe are asking and answering questions for each other.   Collaboration is growing and we’re seeing instances of these conversations helping other engineers solve cases faster.   Cases that were taking months to get a resolution are getting answers on our forums within days and solving issues for our customers because of the ease of collaboration in our community.   And it’s accelerating engineer learning, too, as anyone can read documents and update their knowledge on new products and how to troubleshoot issues. And we’re seeing engineers do just that, and helping other engineers with their new skills.   "Tech Zone has been by far the best forum/resource for helping engineers that I have seen in my past 5 years of TAC experience." – Cisco TAC engineer, Anoop Saxena.
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Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Integration Cisco’s internal engineer community 'Tech Zone' was built fro... See more...
Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Integration Cisco’s internal engineer community 'Tech Zone' was built from the ground up by engineers… for engineers. The community developers are also a part of our target audience.   From the beginning we wanted an agile space where we could incorporate constant feedback and enhancements.   When our community opened for business, it came with an Idea Exchange to solicit any and all feedback from our users. Our users did not disappoint.   We started out by identifying where we want to reuse knowledge. We link open cases to posts and articles to track which content is helpful in solving a case.   We wanted search to be front and center in our workflow, so we implemented a search-before-post feature that surfaces related content – and displays the number of kudos and case links right there in the results. And we’ve used REST APIs to deeply integrate our community into our systems, such as our trouble ticketing portal, our knowledge creation strategy, and our corporate instant messaging system.   Our community is also an application development platform. In order to accelerate wide adoption we have ensured that our community is not a stand-alone tool, rather it is seamlessly tied to the engineers' workflow and seamlessly integrated with (and on an equal footing with) the other service delivery tools.  To this end we’ve made 100+ enhancements to the basic Lithium community, based on our business needs. This is where our business drives the tool instead of the tool driving the business. No limited capabilities here!   We’ve taken Lithium’s reputation system and not only incorporated it into our community, but we’ve added custom elements and added our own variables to Lithium’s already strong use of formulas for ranking.   We've built a customized leaderboard to highlight the accomplishments of our users based on our enriched reputation formulas. The result is a reputation system that effectively implements weighting factors to allow us to emphasize our organizational priorities and provides a checkpoint for our engineers.   As we see important behaviors that we want to encourage, we can build additional custom components right into the reputation. This reputation model also feeds into a rich custom metrics portal so engineers can self-evaluate their technical growth as well as arming them with tangible data for performance reviews and career development discussions.   Engineers need a quick way to preview information to see if it’s relevant to the case they are working. So we integrated a locally-grown case preview tool that allows our engineers to preview a portion of a case or bug. This has been hugely helpful in being able to find a quick answer within our community.   And we have even more awesome integrations in the works. Our engineers wanted a way to bump a thread without bumping the reply count, so we’re currently implementing a "raise hand" feature that allows a user to draw attention to a thread in progress in order to ask for additional help.     “The ability to quickly get help from experts and the ease which knowledge can be captured and re-used by others makes Tech Zone the perfect tool for us. I think we should also recognize the [Cisco] and Lithium teams for being so receptive to TAC's feedback and their willingness to tweak/ implement new features, as this is a huge part of what makes Tech Zone successful in my eyes.” – Cisco TAC engineer, Mike Robertson.
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Company: TomTom Entry Submitted by: Kenneth Refsgaard Community Manager (kendoji) Community: TomTom Discussions  (discussions.tomtom.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight When we launched TomTom Discussions on 1st M... See more...
Company: TomTom Entry Submitted by: Kenneth Refsgaard Community Manager (kendoji) Community: TomTom Discussions  (discussions.tomtom.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight When we launched TomTom Discussions on 1st March 2011 we knew that superfans would be important to the success of the community. And it didn’t take long before a few very actively engaged users emerged.   A few months after launch we created a private area for our top users, which marked the beginning of our superuser program. Since then we’ve been consistently awed by the knowledge and passion shown by these customers. We’d like to introduce a few of them.   Great Content:  In the early days of our community, one of our superusers was single-handledly responsible for 10% of the posts on the forums. The truly remarkable thing, though, is his encyclopedic knowle   dge of our products. It’s safe to say that he knows our products better than just about any of us! And we often - only half-jokingly -explain to colleagues that everything he posts should be assumed to be 100% correct.   In the year since we have been live he has authored 250 solutions and posted almost 4,000 times!   Creating that Community Spirit: Two of our superusers have been instrumental in helping us manage the community.   One thorny topic had become quite challenging to manage, when one of our superfans went on a mission to turn things around. He posted in the thread but also made great efforts reaching out in private to the most vocal troublemakers, urging them to be constructive. Most of them changed their behaviour immediately! These noble superfans have helped to maintain a friendly atmosphere on the community for everyone.   Above and Beyond: Several of our other superfans spend countless hours providing direct support to customers who are having problems.   This even goes to the extent of offering to provide help over the phone, or using Google Translate to help customers in languages that they don’t speak! And in our private area we receive a constant flow of valuable feedback from all of our superfans. This can be about product issues, website errors and much more. In fact, some of our colleagues from the product teams have learned that our private area is one of the best places to get timely and accurate product feedback, and have started monitoring it on a daily basis!   We all pay a lot of attention to the private area, and make sure that our superfans have a fast and direct line of communication to us.   There are many more examples we could mention, but possibly the greatest thing we’ve seen happen with our superfans is the warm and friendly relationship they’ve built with each other, and with us.   The private area is a board that’s full of laughter, honesty and mutual support. The bonds that our superfans have built with each other, and their relentlessly helpful and constructive discussions on the community, are infectious – they are really the ‘leaders’ of the community, and we often see new users starting to emulate their behavior (even if they started out as detractors!).   Our community is a great success, but we owe it all to our loyal superfans.    
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation HP Expert Day Events come ... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation HP Expert Day Events come of age around the world   HP customers worldwide got their toughest questions answered by HP Experts.  Hosted on all seven HP Consumer Support language forums, Expert Days showcased HP’s commitment to our customers by engaging in real time, one-on-one, personalized conversations, sharing, and help on a global scale.     Anytime, anywhere... 14 Expert Day events were held in 2011 and early 2012 with hundreds of volunteers, known as HP Experts.  HP Experts located around the world are a valuable resource for community members, an indispensable part of the HP team, and their participation has helped build and grow HP’s community.    Gathering online for 24 hours to answer any and all questions that community members posted to the forum boards, HP Experts physically and virtually came together in various Expert Villages headquartered at HP sites around the world to confer and answer to questions as a team.    Combined with the power of the Lithium Technologies platform, HP customers could talk with experts at their convenience and in their preferred language (English, Spanish, S Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Korean).  So, whether you’re an English speaker in Thailand or a French speaker in the US, HP customers have the ability to access the Expert Day of their choice and get the answers they want via a personal, human, and high-quality support experience.   The numbers tell the story One key measure of the HP’s Global Expert Day program’s success is in the numbers – here are a few we’re especially proud of:   On the English language forum, Expert Day participation grew by more than 50,000 customers between the April 2011 and January 2012 events.  In January, customers from 219 countries had their questions answered during Expert Day. The September 2011 Portuguese Expert Day had 15,000 participants.  Additionally, the number of digital “thank yous” (given in the form of “kudos” on the forum) increased by more than 4000% compared to a normal day’s average. The January 2012 Chinese Consumer Support Expert Day saw a 1526% increase in number of postings over the daily average, while the January 2012 Korean Consumer Support Expert Day saw a 671% hike when compared to daily average. HP began its Expert Day programs for some key reasons: To connect with customers real-time to share and help when they need it To listen and learn from our customers as they share their HP successes and challenges To introduce first-time users to the HP community by meeting and talking live with other HP fans, friends, and experts and getting the most out of their HP products and services .   Progress toward that goal has been overwhelming worldwide:   September’s English-language Expert Day saw a 195% jump in new registrations compared to an average day. September’s German and French Expert Day resulted in more than 325% increase in each language forum’s new registrations vs. an average day. July’s Chinese-language Expert Day resulted in more than 600% more new registrations compared to an average day. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal for HP Expert Days, and based on responses from customers around the globe, the HP Support Forum community is exceeding everyone’s expectations:     “Wow, I get responses from 2 experts so quickly, it’s almost an instant chat” – German Forums Customer, September Expert Day “I am getting to know much more knowledge. Thanks for experts solution, I know more skills on computer”- Chinese Forums Customer, July Expert Day “Wow!!!  It's working.  I can't begin to thank you enough!!! Not enough Kudos permitted to express my appreciation to you for hanging in there until you got the solution to my situation.” – English Forums Customer, September Expert Day “Fantastic…I can now go to bed (it is 10.43 p.m. here) in the knowledge that I can try that first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks once again for your considerable help - you have been very instructive and insightful and your guidance has been most appreciated.” – English Forums Customer,  January Expert Day   Thanks to our fantastic HP Experts, Expert Day events are alive and well.  Come join the conversation. We’ll see you in the forums!    
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Company: Webroot Entry Submitted by: Catherine Buzzitta  Community Manager (cbuzzitta) Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community (Launched after 1 June 2011) Community Launch Date: 2 February... See more...
Company: Webroot Entry Submitted by: Catherine Buzzitta  Community Manager (cbuzzitta) Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community (Launched after 1 June 2011) Community Launch Date: 2 February 2012   Webroot is the perfect example of a company that needed a community. We had a compelling story to tell, a revolutionary product that people wanted to talk about and a loyal army of advocates. Also, customer service and product innovation are at the crux of our business success.   Yet with so many undefined channels of communication, we struggled to have the kind of dialogue we needed to really drive our products forward and to resolve customer issues quickly.   It became clear that Webroot customers needed a place to talk to Webroot employees, ask questions, find answers, suggest ideas for our products, and stay in the loop on security industry news. And so with the help of Lithium’s team and our small project development team, we created the Webroot Community.   RESULTS: Success! It appears that a Community is exactly what our Webroot fan base wanted!   After an initial "sneak peek" launch on February 2, 2012 to about 20,000, we gained 30,000 page views in the first five days. We launched to our entire customer base on February 15th. In just over a month since our public launch, we had over 525,000 page views and over 190,000 user sessions. After one month, we had 770 registered users - 18% being Webroot employees. This metric is a testament to not only our early success in registrations, but also company involvement. We have 34 ideas in our Ideas Exchange and all are reviewed bi-monthly with our Product Team. Half of the ideas have already been scheduled to be implemented in the next quarter. We have 1493 posts and 681 kudos in our Community - with the most activity being in our 'Mobile for Android' forum. This showed us that our users have a lot of interest and questions about our Android app - which then spurred involvement from our mobile team in the Community. WHAT LED TO THE SUCCESS? The "sneak peek" roll out was huge because our highly technical advocates. They enjoy being a part of our betas, so we leveraged that in the Community as well. We featured the community on Webroot’s homepage at the very top of the page, giving it easy accessibility. We promoted the Community on our social channels, in our email newsletter, in our product and at events. Webroot Employees were appropriately trained and encouraged to participate in the Community. We engaged with our superusers early on - PMing them and making them feel important using ranks and roles. We sent a friendly email out on behalf of the Community Manager asking for early feedback from select users. We created an "intro" video, welcoming users to the Community and explaining how to use it. In addition to setting up and customizing the overall architecture of the Community, we also implemented a secure SSL login to remain consistent with our security protocol. (very important to this security-savvy community) We continue to evolve our forums to make it easier for users to set up their accounts (e.g. “Helpful Pointers for New Members,” a new internal-use-only employee forum, and a business forum to launch alongside our new business product). We used the Community to cross-promote offers and sweepstakes.  In just one month, the Webroot Community developed into a knowledge resource for security-related topics and a rapid-fire response system for customer support issues.  In fact, the response was so great we had to bring on additional support team members to remain dedicated to resolving customer issues on the community. As a result, the correspondence between our support team, moderators, administrators, and users has been nothing short of impressive.   And lastly, don't take OUR word for it.   Hear what the Webroot Community has to say!   “Any questions or suggestions about your Webroot product, this is the forum to post them. Excellent Forum.” “I have to say again Congrats to all of the Webroot teams from Development all the way to Support and now the Community Support Forums keep up the great work!” “Thank you to the Webroot support team for all of your efforts! You ALL are the BOMB!” “Well done. Keep up!” "Nice to see Webroot with its own forum and a very nice once as well..I like the forum options...Love WSA keep up the good work."        
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight   HP Exper... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight   HP Experts rock! What’s better than one super fan? Try 140!   In March, more than 140 HP enthusiasts (known as HP Experts) from all over the world gathered in San Francisco at the first-ever HP Social Support Summit to share best practices, explore HP technologies and build relationships.     These top contributors to HP’s award-winning Consumer Support Forums are the strongest influencers within HP’s community. Collectively, they tackle more than 50% of the problem resolution despite making up less than 1% of the forum community membership. They are the life blood of HP’s Forums, and their active participation directly influences the vibrancy and vitality of the 7 HP forums communities.     The global conference showcased the technologies, strategies, and best practices that underpin HP’s social media philosophy. Experts were invited to tour HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA to get a sense of HP’s history and culture.    Speakers from the top ranks of HP and Microsoft, as well as social media and customer service industry experts, treated HP Experts to informational and entertaining talks, while a motivational speaker kept energy levels high throughout the conference. Lithium’s own Chief Community Officer, Joe Cothrel, also jumped on stage for a deep dive on the specific challenges and trends that lie ahead in social media.     There was also plenty of time for fun and conversation as HP Experts joined in morning “fun runs,” collaborated with peers during group dinners, and shared ideas in the HP Oasis break room.  Last but not least, Experts were honored at an awards presentation recognizing the top forum contributors to wrap up the three-day event.    As the highest ranking forum member across all languages, DavidPK received top honors.      The Social Support Summit was a grand event for HP to recognize and reward these volunteers and say ‘Thank You’ to the people who freely give their time to help HP customers.    After the event, HP Experts shared their thoughts on the summit:   ”To do the simplest of things well, and to get a thank you means everything.”   ”This was a beautiful moment and a wonderful experience to meet all the fantastic, talented people from everywhere!” “SoMe team thank you so much for the most extraordinary adventure of my life.” …Daniel_P “Yes, thank you so very much to everyone involved in organizing and attending the S3 events!  It was a grand experience for me in both a personal and professional aspect!” …Kalt “All I can say is WOW! The forum was such a great opportunity to meet folks I have been working with here for years, to trade ideas and learn best practices. The speakers were excellent, the activities were fun and the organization and logistics were really well done.  Kudo's to all of you who made this possible.”…Bob_Headrick The HP team also is taking insights and suggestions from the HP Expert attendees straight to our product and service teams to improve our HP products and service offering. There is no shortage of ideas to share, either: HP Experts attached more than 90 ideas to the HP IDEA Wall at the general sessions.   Katie Harris, HP Summit Event Coordinator notes,”The first annual HP Social Support Summit surpassed all of our wildest expectations.  What a pleasure it was to meet our top members and thank them in person for their tremendous contributions to the HP Communities.”     To encourage ongoing dialogue with and recognition of the Expert volunteer team, HP is committed to continue its ongoing meet-up events around the world.   The meet-ups are informal face-to-face social gatherings that include HP global and regional teams and Experts. The smaller events are just another way to let the Expert teams know they are valued and important to HP and to the HP community.    When asked why they dedicate so much time to the forum, Experts’ answers are almost always unanimous: “We simply like to help and enjoy the challenge of solving issues and spreading a smile around.”    
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI   HP’s Consumer Support Foru... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI   HP’s Consumer Support Forums have saved the company multi-millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of man-hours and – most importantly – has helped millions of customers get the most out of their HP technology.  Now that’s ROI.    With more than 10 million technology support solutions recorded annually and more than 500 million page views since its launch, the HP Consumer Support Forums are a key resource for customers and HP alike.  When more customers find the help and solutions they need, when and where they want and expect it, the more HP delivers best-in-class support.  Community members also help HP engineers uncover product issues and improve HP technologies and products.   In 2011, three main factors led to unprecedented performance, expanded community engagement and overall vibrancy for the forums:   Global Usability Testing:  HP talked with customers around the world and observed how they used the forums.  With this info in hand, HP was able to better understand and make the forums more intuitive and useful for both first-time and seasoned users across the seven language forums     HP launched ForumVille, an online community enhancement program with the specific goal of optimizing the forum experience for all users.  Forumville significantly increased overall response rates to questions and issues, resulting in improved community interactions, Accepted Solutions and goodwill.        After applying rigorous six sigma methodology, ForumVille deployed 13 new enhancements which have been adopted and incorporated into HP’s forums experience.  Highlights include:    The HP Expert Campaign introduced a fun gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to posted threads on our least active forum boards.  This game resulted in a 75% answer rate and 50% response time reduction for the low performing boards during the 2 week period.   This was an amazing way to motivate our top posters:   “Yay!  I'm excited!  It's nice to see something like this being done after all this time”... (Kalt) “Great numbers! Lot of nice efforts there, guys. I am gonna have to give up my 'day job' to compete with all of you...” (CherylG)       The ‘Fall Cleaning’ Campaign for HP Community Managers – The goal of the event was to make many posts easier to find either by adding more keywords so it appears in the search results or by making the title of the post so self explanatory that customers can better identify it being a possible match for their issue.    The community managers introduced a new board specifically for forum first-timers.  The board includes video tutorials as well as other tips and tricks.  It continues to be one of the most widely visited boards on the forums. HP developed a new widget displaying unanswered posts throughout the forum.  The widget allows HP Experts fast and easy access to posts that need their attention most, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers.  HP Experts responded enthusiastically :  “Having access to the posts with no replies will also be very good. It will save those of us helping from having to check every forum”. – Old Geekster “I believe it is very useful for other member in here as well in order to monitor many forums within our expertise area more easily”. - SlomiL “Maybe it has been there a long time but I have just noticed the "Threads with no replies" on the right side of each board and I have been using that tool regularly.  This started in late September.  Don't tell me the feature has been there since the beginning of time :)” “... the single best improvement on the forum”   A new and cleaner look for the HP Support Forums:  Aligning with HP company-wide web and graphics standards, the HP Consumer Support Forums pages took on a more streamlined and colorful community look and feel.     The HP Consumer Support Forums have proven to be an unmitigated success.  In 2011, the forums reached 685 million net page views, including:   5.5M visits a month globally 40M customer solutions delivered 31,000 Accepted Solutions 100,000 Kudos 15M searches 650,000 registered customers Among Lithium's top 250 communities, HP’s English Consumer Support Community ranks:   7th among 250 top communities overall 3rd among 110 high tech hardware and software 4th out of 150 support-oriented communities 7th among 164 B2C oriented communities Lithium’s Consumer Health Index scores consistently rate the HP English Forum above 700   At the current growth rate, the forums will reach one billion page views around November 2012!        Thanks to savings the forums have enabled, HP is reinvesting those dollars in efforts to broaden and grow our social media experience across the world.  It’s HP’s commitment to our customers to be there anytime, anywhere - to listen, engage, and help.
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