Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Aruba Networks  Entry submitted by: Sean A Rynearson (srynearson) Chief Airhead Community: Airheads Community (http://community.arubanetworks.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   We believe that buying a product is ... See more...
Company: Aruba Networks  Entry submitted by: Sean A Rynearson (srynearson) Chief Airhead Community: Airheads Community (http://community.arubanetworks.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   We believe that buying a product is just the first step. A User needs support after the buy. Community is a more efficient way of supporting end customers.   Lithium helps us reach our customer and answer their questions in a cost effective manner.      Hi, I am Sean Rynearson, Chief Airheads for Aruba Networks. That is just a fancy way of saying I am the community manager. This is our submission to the Lithium Platform Innovator Lithy.   We believe that buying a product is just the first step. A User needs support after the purchase. An online community is a more efficient way of supporting end customers. Lithium helps us reach our customers and answer their questions in a cost effective manner.    Our online community is very important to us. It is a place for Aruba customers, partners, and employees to connect and discuss Wireless and networking technology.   I started off my career as a contracting engineer working on Aruba gear. Many times I have depended on the Airheads Community to help me solve technical problems.     We currently have over 4000 unique logins this year, 450 unique participants every month with over 300 thousand active views a month. Our community is growing fast.   Our web-based community is amazing, but the times have changed. Or Users are not always in the office or on their laptop. We call this new concept #GenMobile .   Users need the same functionality on the go as they do on their laptop. Mobile browser interface is ok but we needed something with more usability. Something that is more intimate with the user.    Introducing the New Airheads Mobile App.      Using Lithiums REST API and the user/message calls we were able to build a mobile experience that gave users competing functionality over the Web based Interface.   We implemented some key Community function: Single Sign-on Support Full menu support Multiple discussion board functionality Knowledge base access Blogs Events Incredible search   Community Functionality is great but we also threw in some amazing user functionality: User Posts and comment  Kudos Share on social media Friends Private messages User Profiles   Is our Community now #Genmobile Ready? Mobile Community Functionality-- Check Mobile User Functionality-- Check Amazing online members-- Check We are good to go.   With the combination of community and user functionality along with the great minds of our online members, we have a solid community no matter if you are on the go or in the office.   Feel free to try out our new Airheads Mobile APP.  And send us feedback. Thank you.   Our business results 1300 unique app logins within the first month 2000 downloads   Watch our video here: 
Company: Vodafone Australia  Entry submitted by: Timothy Hanslow (Tim_h) Community Care Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Vodafone Australia is the t... See more...
Company: Vodafone Australia  Entry submitted by: Timothy Hanslow (Tim_h) Community Care Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Vodafone Australia is the third biggest mobile network provider in Australia and has a 20-year history of providing excellent value to its customers. In 2010, network issues driven by the sharp uptake in smartphone use created problems for our customers, that saw our customer sentiment and NPS drop rapidly. The launch of Vodafone Community came at a time when our customers needed support, a place to share, talk to one another and to get information to us, and for us to talk to them directly.    Vodafone launched the Community almost three years ago as a way for customers to communicate with us. It gave customers a voice to talk to us openly and publicly. We loved the Community for the customer interactions, their honesty in saying “me too” with other’s issues, and their support and information in solving one another’s issues. Lithium provided the platform we wanted to get the incredible expertise our customer base and let them work together. We named the Community because of its goals. Our customers were going to be having these conversations anyway so we wanted to ensure we were part of them.    We’ve built something genuinely exciting and different on top of the platform.   Our community is modified a lot from a default Lithium Community with major changes already made to the layout and functionality available. We’ve taken the amazing functionality of the platform and rearranged it to fit our needs and used REST to build whole new functionality on top of it.   New options We’ve repurposed labels in the forums as a new type of content tag and tied it into our other custom work to tie in with data stored per user. We’re displaying content in colour coded groups across the top of threads. Users are using labels without even realising it. New custom content stored on user profiles allows us to store “devices” for a user to identify which mobile/s they are using and which they’ve had in the past. We display this information on their user profile and in their avatar hover. We tie this data together with the repurposed labels (two different data sets) and indicate on a thread where the conversation is about the device a user has. It adds a quick visual flag that this conversation would have something of value, or that they can add value too.   Forum navigation has been replaced with a custom component that displays the forum navigation structure above the fold. We’re letting people get to content quickly and see the options available to them without scrolling or hiding it behind multiple tabs.   “My devices”  is a custom built set of pages displaying content matching labels. We custom built product pages to house related conversations and piece them together with labels. We’ve designed it to use 1 or multiple labels in a single page and a label can exist in multiple pages. This allows us to drive customers to a single point of interaction for a topic of interest, even when those posts fall into multiple boards and categories.    Avatars across the site now feature a hover card that displays username, posts, kudos, custom device data, etc. It provides a great deal of information on demand but keeps it out of the way when not in use. The other major driver was to get information about our members visible in multiple places. You can quickly see a users details from whatever page you see their avatar. Leaderboards, contributors, post histories, recent posts, etc.   Page stats are now featured on each page at the top right. This varies from page types but shows details like total view count, contributors and their avatars, post count, etc. We use this across the boards, forums, categories, user profiles and REST keeps it updated in real time. It provides a common visual anchor to the top right page.   User logon and profile details are moved into an interactive dropdown at the top right. We’ve minimised the text at the top of the forums but left the options accessible by creating a widget that expands on mouse click. Users can quickly get to their profile, community help or sign out without taking up screen real estate.     “My Posts” is a new sidebar widget showing the last posts a user made. To keep engagement high and let people return to conversations in progress we show them the last posts they were in on every page. It’s one click from wherever you are to get back into a thread you recently posted in. It keeps users on site and moving in conversations they want to take part in.   Redesign of existing options Forum threads now run a 3 column layout with a tiny left column containing the avatar. We’ve recreated the avatar=>post relationship from other social channels to let users quickly visually scan for posts from known entities. We’ve then pulled all the non post specific data and moved into the avatar hover cards. The result is a clean simple interface without a left column of data to get in the way. As users read left to right we’ve minimised clutter to the left to keep people engaged in the conversation.   The sidebar has been moved into forum threads and contains similar content across the Community. We dynamically adjust widgets and deliver the same type, but different specific content on all pages.   “Post a message” lives at the top right column across the entire community. From boards, forums, topics and even the front page users are one click away from jumping into the conversation. We’ve removed the barriers and prevented people from searching for the right place to post and just made it as simple as possible for them to contribute.   Our TKB has two significant design changes, authors are out and contributors are in. We’ve  reshuffled the fields and only show the contributors to a post and not the author. This lets our internal team publish, edit and work with content from our members but keeps the contributors as the public face.  It’s another big way to reward our users for the content they produce without needing them to do extra work to see their name in lights.   We’ve also built custom javascript to hide elements of a TKB article from a query string passed via the URL. We’re using this to personalise articles for users as we need to, but leaving the full article content ready for others to find. We’re taking a full set of troubleshooting steps and showing people just what they need to see. The best of both worlds.   Our NPS continues to climb, and month on month customer sentiment improves. The Community page views and unique visitors continue to climb quarter on quarter.   Our new features are providing tangible benefit to customers with a direct uplift in resolution rates, and a decrease in time to resolution. Both staff and super users are engaging in a higher % of posts and delivering consistently better results because of customer profile data.
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capab... See more...
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capabilities to enhance the influence of Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers, enabling them to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration and share it directly with Cisco customers.  We implemented more than 80 custom components in Lithium to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and fits within their standard workflow. We utilized Lithium's REST APIs to create an externalization channel to migrate the most useful articles from Tech Zone to Cisco.com.  Moreover, we extended our platform to enable our partners to collaborate with us on joint customer opportunities and challenges, and to retain these interactions as part of corporate memory.   The business impact for Cisco's TAC grew significantly in 2013 due to increasing participation driven by further integration of the Lithium platform within the existing workflow, mobile access, and content externalization.  Articles published on Cisco.com that resulted from collaboration within Tech Zone received 1.7 million views and saved Cisco nearly $10M due to case avoidance from February 2013 through January 2014.  The rate of cost savings due to external articles has grown significantly each quarter, and this trend is projected to continue.  For example, the quarterly cost savings increased by 48% over the last two fiscal quarters.   The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) is staffed by over 3,000 engineers; this team spans 20 TAC facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries and in 17 different languages.  Cisco's TAC, enhanced by Lithium's capabilities, continues to change the way engineers think about collaboration with robust, organic Social Knowledge Management Environments.  Powered by Cisco’s Intellectual Capital Transformation group (ICT), Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for these engineers to collaborate, share and publish valuable content directly to customers via the web or mobile applications.  Since its launch over two years ago, Tech Zone has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves partners and customers.  In addition, Tech Zone influences other engineering and consulting business units inside Cisco seeking similar benefits from Social Knowledge Management Environments.            Since its origins, Tech Zone has been pushing the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment (SKME) is and what it can become. In addition to Lithium out of the box capabilities, we have enhanced the collaboration experience of the engineers with features such as:        Raise Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. This feature was enhanced by allowing users to subscribe to raised hand events, enabling community experts to be easily notified when other engineers need assistance.     You can enable this subscription under your My Settings > Notification Settings            Solution Buddy Solution Buddy powers the reuse of the Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content directly within the salesforce.com interface that will assist the engineer in solving the customer issue quickly without the need to search or leave the salesforce.com interface.            Externalization Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we created a path from within Tech Zone to externalize valuable content to our corporate website at Cisco.com. In addition to powering the externalization channel, we created a publishing lifecycle widget that lets engineers know the state of articles within the externalization pipeline:            Collaborative Review for External Publication To reduce redundant efforts to externally publish the same article, engineers can now see and join other engineers that are preparing an article. If no engineers are working on the same article, the default option is 'Initiate External Publication'. However, if engineers are already working on the document, others may 'Join'. Engineers may 'Unjoin' at any time, and if the engineer is the last to 'Unjoin',  the available option is 'Cancel External Process'.     Example actions for collaborating on external publication of documents        Related Content One of the key missions of Tech Zone is promoting content reuse. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we want to ensure engineers are consuming and leveraging already existing content, and adding to it as appropriate. With this in mind, we developed a widget that returns articles and posts containing content similar to the one being viewed (especially content related to the linked case in salesforce.com).            Empower External Publication of Naturally Captured Content Discussions that have accepted solutions will trigger the button "Share it for External Publication". This button triggers the Lithium feature "Start Article" from a discussion.          Me Too Integration with Case Linkages We enhanced the Lithium "Me Too" feature by triggering a pop-up to capture the case number in which the engineer is facing the same issue as described in the thread.        Label Widget We implemented a widget to highlight the labels assigned to the article being viewed. If the engineer clicks any of these labels, a list of all articles containing that label is presented.            Injecting Content Impact into Federated Search Results Results from our enterprise search engine now take into consideration the Content Quality Factor (CQF), which means the most valuable and useful content will be presented at the top of the search results. In addition, discussion threads with posts marked as Accepted Solutions will also appear at the top of the results.    Tech Zone's success is the result of three main components:   End-to-End Content Creation and Consumption: Collaborations between TAC engineers often contain large amounts of information spread out over multiple emails, messages, and tools. Tech Zone is able to act as an environment that captures and compiles these chunks of information into cohesive articles that can be cataloged and later referenced by engineers experiencing similar problems. The most helpful articles are published outside Cisco where they can be directly consumed by customers either on the corporate website or via the Cisco mobile application.   Fully Integrated Workflow: Tech Zone takes collaboration to the next level by not only providing an environment for TAC engineers to work together, but also integrates within the existing TAC workflow.  The Solution Buddy application binds Tech Zone with the TAC engineer case handling tool, MyWorkZone (Salesforce.com), to surface relevant Tech Zone content for assisting engineers in solving open customer issues.   Solution Buddy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhbWZ4L3s   Reputation and Gamification: Gamification is leveraged to drive user engagement and innovation. Tech Zone recently launched a competition called "Knowledge Champions League" to empower engineers and drive the creation of valuable content in their respective technology spaces by teaming them up with similar engineers from different countries. Winners will be able to travel around the world to meet their colleagues.   Another successful gamification initiative was the “Best Greasemonkey Widget Contest,” for which engineers competed to create widgets that could enhance the Tech Zone user experience. Over 300 engineers submitted unique widgets and several were selected by the engineers to be implemented directly into Tech Zone.   1) Value Tech Zone initially focused on creating an internal repository for content that TAC engineers could leverage to collaborate, improve, and reuse to better solve customers’ cases. The next step was to share this content with Cisco's customers by externalizing TAC-authored content from Tech Zone to the Cisco website. These externalized articles have saved Cisco a total of nearly $10 million from February 2013 to January 2014.   2) Participation Participation in Tech Zone has skyrocketed since its launch. Tech Zone's user base has increased by 103% since 2012 to more than 26,500 registered users and content has grown by 145% to more than 23,300 TAC-authored articles. Although Tech Zone initially targeted TAC engineers, the user base has grown exponentially; so much so that the original TAC engineers represent only 21.6% of the population of Tech Zone.     Feedback from TAC engineers:    "Tech Zone has given a lot to TAC newbies like me and I sure would want to give back in whatever way I can!" - Vinay Raichur, Voice TAC Engineer from India    “This is an excellent website, I didn't know this existed until a couple days ago. The reason I like Tech Zone is the contributors are doing a fantastic job explaining concepts in simple and easy to understand language. I myself was able to understand quite a few concepts.” - Rahul Munot, Sales Engineer from US   Tech Zone has successfully created a model for dynamic corporate memory, displaying how knowledge can be leveraged, not only internally, but externally across Cisco as well. So well, in fact, that other organizations within Cisco and Cisco partners have requested Social Knowledge Management Environments similar to Tech Zone.   3) Mobility Starting December 2013, content from Tech Zone has been included in the new Mobile application (Cisco Technical Support), available for both iOS and Android. Since then, there have been almost 18,000 application downloads, and TAC authored articles from Tech Zone have received a total of almost 12,000 mobile views. The addition of these documents to the Cisco Technical Support mobile app has been well received by the Tech Zone community.   Feedback from customers:   "[Tech Zone Docs] are the publicly available documents that TAC has written to recommended best practices or address common customer issues, and many of them are pure gold! …Priceless" - Review by Ethan Banks, Network Architect, Chase Paymentech Solutions, Co- Host of Packet Pushers  
Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Brief Company Info: Sony... See more...
Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community, where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   The biggest innovation we brought was to re-purpose the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries.   Gallery integration on homepage, achieved by REST API calls to retrieve recent contest entries:   The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily be managed on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated. Finally, small customizations have been added to improve user experience, like adapting “new entry” buttons based on what users want to submit: a photo, wallpaper or a board post.   Slideshow:   Data display of image detail:     Gallery entries:     Photo detail view:     We create a single competition each month that is referenced from multiple language communities. We adapt the page language of this competition page depending on the country user’s are accessing it from.   Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( English version):     Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( German version):     In addition to the photo gallery, Lithium is now fully integrated into our web presence, by sharing the same navigation, authentication and search functionality. This way, we can display the same header/footer navigation in different sites, which also has an integrated central authentication system. When a user is logged in in our marketing site, we also authenticate him in community, and retrieve its user details to welcome her in community header.      Search on our global website shows results from our community as well and customers can directly access our community to discuss with other customers. This is achieved by REST API calls to the related language community, incorporating the search term. As a result, we retrieve number of results in community and the first 3 results to display in an overview page to our users. Also support website is linked to our community by targeted REST APIs to give customers the best experience when looking for solutions. Here, we adapt the REST APIs based on product model and product category, to ensure users get the most relevant data as result.   Search on Global site with links to community search results:     Support Webpage, giving link to community results in each product support page:   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   The new community is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional product features   Simplified navigation:     Search bar:  
Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Google recognizes... See more...
Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Google recognizes the opportunity to help SMBs improve their businesses through adding features which improve their advertising campaigns. AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. Advertisers can use the wide range of features available in AdWords to create campaigns to accomplish their business goals while staying within their budgets, helping to improve their return on investment and acquire additional customers.   Providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   According to Nielsen (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/which-forms-of-advertising-do-consumers-trust-and-act-on-the-most-36767/attachment/nielsen-trust-in-advertising-sept2013/), 68% of customers are more likely to adopt a product or feature if it is endorsed by other users. In 2013, the AdWords Community team explored the link between active usage of communities and impact on the depth of product adoption. The key goal for the team was to shorten the gap between “Learn” and “Try it out”.   Adwords Community homepage   The first step for the Google team working on this project was to connect the activity on the community to activity in an advertiser’s AdWords account. This was achieved by improving the integration between Lithium platform and the Google infrastructure. Second, the AdWords Community team took a list of key product features they felt would be most helpful for their customers’ AdWords success and mapped discussions, threads and articles to this list via custom tags. Additionally, AdWords community managers created and curated content on the most important product features. On the backend, the team connected the customized tags with the AdWords accounts, and noted activity in the accounts after views of the tagged content.   When a thread has a solution, a Community Manager or one of the Top Contributors can select from a list of custom tags to trigger the reporting.   The custom tags allow to attribute the content piece to a specific product feature.   Measuring ROI of support forums is a step-level change. Google is a numbers-driven company, and it was important for us to unlock a way to measure impact of the content from support forums on the bottom line.    In around 1 out of 4 cases the users would take action in their advertising account within 48 hours of viewing content that had a specific recommendation for a feature. This result is 50% higher than in other online help resources with non-user created content. Additionally, with the community’s lower cost and scalability a single recommendation can contribute to hundreds or thousands times more feature uptakes that in the case of a single 1:1 support interaction.
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trad... See more...
Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where  those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    Building on the out of the box Lithium platform, we introduced a number of customizations at launch, including:   Automatic Board Assignment   To facilitate a breadth of discussion, our Community has been divided up into a range of boards, including general markets, charting, sections for new and advanced traders and sector specific boards to discuss individual stocks.   To make it easy for users to find the right boards, we created a stock code field in the new post pages which automatically assigns the best board for a post, and turns the stock code into a tag automatically.     Most discussed Stocks   The automatic assignment of a stock code to a tag helps us drive the Most Discussed Stock module that runs across various parts of the site and allows users to get an insight into the stock discussions that are trending over the past 5 days (this time period was set at a period dictated by the community).   This is presented at a Community wide level on general pages and the Community homepage, and at a sector specific level on board relating to areas such as materials and tech stocks.     Stock Sentiment   A further enhancement to the post creation page is the ability to add a sentiment towards a particular stock. This is built on conditional logic, and will only appear if a stock code is added. Users can select one of 5 types of sentiment – buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, sell – depending on their opinion of the stock at that particular time.   We then add this aggregated sentiment to the most discussed stocks to give a rounded picture of the Community’s activity and discussions.     Live Stock Pricing   We have also integrated the ability to buy and sell directly from the discussions.   At the top of stock specific discussions, we have included live pricing information about the stock, covering current price, change, bid and offer, 52 week high and low and volume. From there we offer users the ability to add a stock to their watchlist and alerts, get a detailed quote, as well as buy and sell.       We see the Community as an important piece of the overall research customers should do in deciding what stocks to purchase.   We have integrated the ability to interact with Community from a number of our key areas of the site.   Watchlists:    Quotes and Research:      In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   We have seen in excess of 13,500 trading actions commenced from Community – either addition of stocks to watchlists, or quotes, and over 3,000 trades placed via the platform.  
Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Plat... See more...
Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Constant Contact®, Inc. wrote the book on Engagement Marketing™ — the new marketing success formula that helps small organizations create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. Through its unique combination of online marketing tools and free personalized coaching, Constant Contact helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect and engage with their next great customer, client, or member. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has long championed the needs of small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create and build successful, lasting customer relationships.   Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Constant Contact also has offices in Loveland, CO; Delray Beach, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY and London, England. Constant Contact has been honored with numerous industry accolades and has ranked on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for five years running, most recently at number 179.   In 2013, the company continued to make significant product improvements across our offering of online marketing tools. Knowing that change can be difficult and feedback can only make our products stronger, we needed a way to harness our valuable customer feedback without incurring significant cost or introducing a new technology to monitor. We wanted the feedback to be readily available to the Product Owners and easily actionable for varied members of a multi-leveled support team.  As a company that highly values the customer experience and promotes transparency, we wanted the feedback to be public and accessible to all of our customers.  We also wanted our customers to be able to monitor the status of their ideas. Finally, as our early tests with other tools indicated, many of the “feedback ideas” our customers submitted were actually support issues that required moving out of feedback into a place where that support could be received in a timely manner. By knowing the areas where our customers had the most issues and using their ideas to further the products in the direction the customer wanted, we aimed to increase not just the usability of our products but also customer loyalty.   After evaluating out of the box products, we decided to develop our own “in product feedback widget” that would provide an avenue to learn more about our customers’ reactions to system changes and provide a quick way to incorporate feedback into the product development cycle. We decided to base this widget on the Lithium platform.   We determined that the idea exchange within Lithium provided the features we wanted:   the ability to vote and raise the most critical ideas to the top; a direct line to the customer making the suggestion to ask for more details when needed; the capability to rapidly move “Support” issues to the appropriate area of the Community to be answered by peers or our trained Community team; a way for our customers to easily see the status of their ideas; the ability for multiple people to view, edit and comment on ideas from all areas of the company be it product, support, or another; and an easy and visible way for our product team to demonstrate their empathy and involvement with our customers.   We added the widget to multiple pages within our current products and most critically to a new version of our Contacts Management tool.  With this widget, a customer clicks one button and provides their feedback directly to the people that can make the changes.   Due to the success of the widget in 2013, in 2014 we are implementing the widget across hundreds pages of our product and dividing this feedback across 16 idea exchanges in the Community.  The success of the widget is evident when you glance at how many posts exist today:   In Contacts alone (granted the most active area of our feedback forums, but also the most critical as we rolled out this new tool), we received 4600 ideas, 3498 comments and 274,056 page views to that area alone between July and December!  The product team has been able to deliver 71 implemented ideas that are directly attributable to the Lithium feedback widget.   Another area where we launched a redesign was in our Library area. The feedback through the widget was vital for improving the new design. The new design began rolling out on August 28 th , 2013. Between this date and December 2013 we received 949 ideas, 624 comments and 12,478 page views. So far, we have been able to implement 14 ideas based on this feedback.   Customers are given a “feedback” button within the flow of a task. Pop ups were not used to avoid distracting an engaged customer while the pervasive nature of the button on multiple screens allows a customer to enter feedback at any friction point.     When a customer clicks the feedback button, a pop up window appears. The customer selects a topic (labels), enters a subject, and then enters text (the idea body). They click “post to public forum” and the idea is posted to the idea exchange as a new idea with the right labels. There is also an opportunity here for the customer to identify that they need help. If the customer chooses “Get Help” from the drop down they post directly into a corresponding product board for help from the Community.      Once an idea is submitted, the window closes and a customer can continue wherever it is they left off. Feedback is a gift to us while not being difficult for the customer to provide.      
Company: AppDynamics   Entry submitted by: Steve Levine (appslevine) Senior Product Manager, Community                       Community: AppDynamics Community (http://community.appdynamics.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator    ... See more...
Company: AppDynamics   Entry submitted by: Steve Levine (appslevine) Senior Product Manager, Community                       Community: AppDynamics Community (http://community.appdynamics.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     We are a leader in the explosive Application Intelligence space. Our users are very technical and we provide enablement to this audience through our Lithium Community. We strive to maximize customer satisfaction and adoption and see that clearly in the stats coming from Lithium Social Intelligence each week.    The community is linked from our .com site, directly through our software product and outbound e-mail marketing campaigns. We also obtain subscribers through organic search on the web. Our boards are divided into a small number of product categories. By creating hoards of new company-generated rich media content alongside user-generated, we now believe to have the algorithm for technical enablement and have measurable results coming in regularly.      In order to create a framework where product management, engineering, education, customer success and the SE orgs are able to create their own enablement content on Lithium, we devised an HTML/CSS widget scheme with some 40 different templates.  The framework allows Idea boards to be used to host completely custom page layouts implemented by widgets. This includes video embedded players, image lightboxes, styled titles and body text with standard layout rules. We stage new content right on production using a ‘curator’ role assigned to reviewers. Our own page code enforces this so it isn’t seen by the public until we unlock it.   We also moved all of our Studio components into an offline Ruby environment called ‘Middleman’ which is used in conjunction with GitHub to stage content and code outside of our Staging site before pushing it.  This way we created an optimized, development environment spanning multiple time zones and geos. We can now adjust and preview any Studio function offline in our Middleman environment before pushing to stage and then test in stage before using Studio Publish to push to prod.  Robots push the studio components back up from Github in seconds and can do it incrementally.      We provide what is represented inside the AppDynamics circle. Average users come in with questions and lacking knowledge, and the advanced/expert users and AppDynamics team help them become experts themselves. This is based around Content > Experts > Analytics as depicted in the below graphic.  We have measured increased subscriptions and higher engagement metrics in the new content areas. Our traffic in the 90 days prior, from September 2013 to December 2013 was 70k page views, 20k visits with 10k uniques.  In the 3 months since the new content went live, from Dec-20 2014 – March 20, 2014 views increased 15% to 80k, visits 18% to 24.5k and uniques by 24% to 12.9k. We have also seen heavy downloads of our product extensions which are hosted on the community. Product extension downloads went from 0 to approximately 600 in 3 months.  Extensions development grew from 0-62 in that same period. Sales have queried community engagement metrics during land and expand lifecycles in order to leverage user behavior against sales strategy.   Additional Technical Accomplishments   Front-End Development Approach In order to refresh and re-layout our community site from scratch, we needed a hi-fidelity approach to customization. Using studio with its myriad browser-based text editors was not going to provide the version control and scalability we required. We completely refreshed both the CSS and layout substantially and ran code on every page to hide most of the HTML coming down from Lithium and replace it with modified page code.  This allowed us to mash up REST calls to Lithium’s back-end with our custom layout code to get the pages to look like we needed them to, including the home page. We did this efficiently by timing DOM loads with code execution (JavaScript) so the user experience remained sub-1-second.   By using GitHub to maintain all development branches, we rarely experienced an out of sync codebase.  Teams in India and the US worked independently on separate branches with no conflicts, saving precious time during rapid deployments. (2-week agile sprints). We also maintained the ability to deprecate code and revert production in the event of regressions.  Our progress was hyper fast with an extremely low bug count and we refreshed and rebuilt the community in 6 months, faster than any other project of this magnitude in the company’s history.   Custom User-Based, Off-Site Analytics Facility Initially we did not have an API to retrieve user behavior against actual users at scale. However, we were able to implement page code that monitors button events for downloading product extensions. Each time a registered user clicks this button, we capture their user info, time/date and the extension they downloaded and store it in an offsite Django-based MySQL db.  We can then pull log files of these actions and generate dashboards of this behavior.  This is very useful to sales teams in the midst of upselling enterprise customers. In addition to our custom analytics we also instrument every page of the community with Google Analytics tag code and report it (minus user info) to GA.
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Barclaycard US is the 9 th largest credit ... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Barclaycard US is the 9 th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that social media provides the opportunity to change the dialogue between banks and customers and we are committed to building deep loyalty with our customers.   Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind out latest innovation, Barclaycard Travel, where a portion of Barclaycard customers are invited to join a community, share their travel experience and earn more miles for their next trip. We are living the values of changing the dialogue and earning customer loyalty.   BarclaycardTravel.com is a one of a kind travel community where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel experiences and earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates. Here are 6 ways that highlight how BarclaycardTravel.com has innovated on the Lithium platform:       Uses Lithium gamification capabilities and backend activity data to grant Barclaycard Arrival Participation Miles to community members     Tracks and manages a unique system that manages separate community experiences  for cardmembers and non-cardmembers.  This allows for granting different point values for the two community member types.     Uses Lithium blog as a travel storytelling container for members, revolutionizing the way people share and remember their travel experiences     Integrates with Google Maps™ and includes the capability to geotag blogs so they are  searchable on Google Map interface     Allows Search travel stories with filtered data leveraging profile data and Google Maps to enhance the experience     Beautiful design overlay on search and storytelling board to leverage gorgeous community travel photos.    Barclaycard Travel – #1 & 2 Gamification & Miles = Loyalty   Profile page displays badges, miles earned, key profile information and the travel stories members have shared. Miles notification speaks to cardmembers and non-cardmembers – and the miles they have. Both sets of miles have distinct, real cash value.      Barclaycard Travel – #3 Blog as Travel Storyteller     Barclaycard Travel  - #3 Blog as  Travel Storyteller      …and once  opened, the full story can be explored.     Barclaycard Travel  - #4 Google Maps Provide Stories with Visual Context     All of the details the storyteller has provided are mapped using Google Maps data.     Barclaycard Travel  - #5 Filtered search to find stories   This module allows members to search for stories that will be tailored for them based on their profile.     Barclaycard Travel  - #5 Map Search   Members can expand the map and search for the last 250 stories.     Barclaycard Travel – #6 Design     Lithium provides a beautiful home for these travel stories and stunning photos from the community – throughout the site Lithium modules are simply and elegantly displayed enticing members to interact with the stories.     Our business results   In just 5 months since the marketing launch, Barclaycard Travel has added close to 50,000 registered users, had nearly 1M page views and granted 8.5M credit card miles to customers. We are very pleased with these early results and all due to the innovation we’ve been able to achieve leveraging Lithium’s platform.