Company: Microsoft  Entry submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Community (http://community.skype.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   The Skype Community has earned a seat at the table of all levels of the business by delivering:   Ideas –Two major product teams are currently fielding new ideas for their products from the Community with more to come. Interactions – The Skype Community is made up of both users and staff, allowing previously unseen levels of direct contact with end users.   Insight – Weekly feedback reports to product, marketing and operations are fuelled by inputs from the Community.   Influence – The Community is viewed as a strategic communications asset distinct to social media, blogs, service status and promotional channels.     Since its launch over two years ago, the Skype Community has been the best destination to discuss and learn about all things related to Skype. With over two million registered users across eleven languages, it is a well-established community with deep roots in Skype’s user-base. For that reason, our recent initiatives to develop the Community further have looked into the way Skype does business day-to-day and create meaningful change on behalf of our users.   These efforts have been a resounding success due to the ability of the Skype Community to deliver on four key promises to the business and shift the thinking within our organization.   Ideas   A good community has the ability to provide a feedback loop in the tail end of the product development cycle. A great community provides clear and direct user input before the development cycle even begins.   More and more product teams are sponsoring idea boards on the Skype Community to gauge user interest and help shape development priorities for their products. At the moment, Skype for Windows desktop and Skype for Windows Phone both have idea boards open, and Community ideas are already making their way into products as a result.   These idea boards, and their promotion through Skype’s social media channels, have been highlighted by the Social Media Examiner as a “great example” of learning from customers what they really want.     While we expand this initiative to cover more of Skype’s products, other teams have not ignored the potential of the Community to generate ideas. The Skype Tips & Tricks blog recently published the first two articles in a series the Community requested through a Lithium poll.     Tapping into this resource has brought Community into the heart of Skype decision making for the good of all its users.   Interactions   But the Skype Community is more than just a bank that we withdraw ideas from. In order to grow a community there must be some give and take, and we encourage Skype staff to get involved on the Community as well.   Members of staff who make frequent visits to the Community earn themselves the title of Staff Champions. They do sterling work in rewarding our users for their contribution to the Community, but the staff find the experience rewarding too. When we asked one of our Mac developers what was the best thing about being on the Community, he answered:   First of all, it’s not always easy to know what users think about Skype – Community provides one way of finding out. It feels great to see a user's reaction to receiving a reply from an actual developer.                         In addition to our regular contributors, we also create live events for users to interact with us. Most recently, we organized the first Ask Skype event using the Lithium Groups feature. For an hour, three program managers answered questions about our iOS client as submitted by Community users.     Creating this direct engagement between our staff and users is invaluable in putting users at the heart of our decision making. As user-focused decision making is a fundamental value at Skype, the Community is widely respected internally for filling that role.   Insight   Another way in which the Skype Community has changed how we do business is by providing insight into user thinking, experiences and issues. In Skype, this information is one of the driving forces behind a weekly Product and Customer Experience report. The PACE report is voraciously consumed by the product development and marketing organizations, as well as core operations teams.   What makes the Community unique in this space, and lends weight to its voice in the Skype business, is users’ ability to confirm, clarify or contradict each other’s reports. This often serves to provide a more holistic understanding of issues than can be found in one-to-one contact channels. This makes Community a sought after voice in any and all user focused discussions.   Influence   If you were to ask ten people what the best way is to communicate with your users, chances are you’d get eleven different answers. For better or worse there are no shortage of channels through which businesses talk to users, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find the distinctions between them.   The Skype Community, however, has managed to carve a niche for itself separate to social media, blogs, service status bulletins and marketing channels. It is recognized as a channel which has real influence amongst our user-base on all levels of the business.   The Community is sought out by the business as the best place to land communications which:          Request information or log gathering          Address widespread threads of discussion in the user-base          Provide solutions for small to medium size incidents or bugs   This growth of the Skype Community as a communications channel was an organic shift in the business which resulted from recognition of the authority of the Community. That authority stems from the user-base, which the Community represents faithfully throughout the Skype business.                                                                 ***   The Skype Community has changed the way Skype does business, whether it’s feeding the user voice into product design, allowing users and Skype staff to interact directly, providing insight post release, or enabling meaningful communications. The ideas, interactions, insight and influence provided by the Community have made the business sit up and take note. That’s a good thing too, because the Community speaks with the voice of the user.   If you think this is impressive, wait till you see what we’ve got coming up. Keep checking in on the Skype Community throughout the year as we continue to expand these initiatives with more idea boards, Ask Skype events and other innovative ways to drive Community into the core of our business.    

Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category:The Organization Game Changer   Powered by the Lithium platform, we are shaping the new Social Knowledge Management Environments (SKMEs) that are transforming the way employees and customers create, consume, iterate and reuse knowledge across the enterprise. Through collaboration with partners and customers, we jointly address customer opportunities and challenges, capture, transform, and evolve intellectual capital across organizational boundaries into knowledge assets; while keeping stakeholders informed at all stages of our processes. We are converging Social & Enterprise Collaboration, Content Management and Knowledge Management within our SKMEs. Through our methods and capabilities of delivering SKMEs, we are able introduce new ways of thinking about how we do business as an organization.       We are part of Cisco Services – specifically the Services Transformation organization responsible for Intellectual Capital Transformation (ICT). Our goal is to transform the way we capture institutional knowledge at Cisco by not only changing business processes and outcomes, but changing the way people think about social knowledge and collaboration. We are doing that by delivering capabilities in which users can collaborate to solve problems and quickly identify solutions as candidates to be knowledge assets. Additionally, we’re evolving our workflow for content and knowledge management dynamically, thereby transforming our processes from three down to one. We are successful when people across the company are freely creating intellectual capital with each other in such a way that others can reuse it and improve upon it later. By realigning the way we do business, we focus on reducing costs and increasing revenue. These focus areas are nothing new to any business. However, we achieve this transformation by disrupting the how and why of our business workflows to achieve greater efficiency and improve customer satisfaction through four foundations:  Collaboration Opportunities, Expertise Acceleration, Content Lifecycle, and Knowledge Trace Back   By leveraging the Lithium platform we are able to deliver the following foundational benefits:   1) Collaboration Opportunities: Aligning our business processes across organizational boundaries, we are changing the way we interact and operate as a business. Using the tools that enable our Social Knowledge Management Environment, we provide real-time collaboration and push our business activities internally and externally. For example, we have a company-wide initiative that crosses over many areas of responsibility (silos). We need a source of truth for gathering information and connecting with others. We host discussions around the initiative that include our approach, the relevancy of what we're doing, why we're doing them and manage the projects connected to the initiative within our collaborative environment. We leverage Lithium to accelerate our ability to disrupt the usual way of doing business by bringing information into one place. It allows experts to find each other and a community can form around it. This has created a more transparent and collaborative culture.   2) Expertise Acceleration: Our Social Knowledge Management Environment expedites the processes of transforming new knowledge workers into experts, and sharing / contributing new information dynamically. For example, a relatively new executive needed a quick consultation and advice about a project. At the same time, he joined one of our webinars around the topic of securing networks. This webinar led him to Cisco Community Connector where he was able to explore, communicate and collaborate with his peers in other companies and industries. The result was an increase in his connections, more knowledge around his topic, and a greater network of resources than he had before. Just by being involved in the community, he gained the real-time knowledge that he needed to recommend the right solutions for his company.   By increasing this executive's ability to learn and be mentored, we've extended the learning process outside of the traditional training model. Learning new skills is enabled from within the platform by giving users and knowledge contributors instant access to knowledge from a variety of sources they didn't have previously.     3) Content Lifecycle: In the past, collaboration occurred in environments—such as email, document storage, and IMs—that didn’t require users to rethink the normal workflow or that was not engineered to facilitate easy content retention. Now with our Social Knowledge Management Environments (SKMEs) we not only retain the collaborative exchange, we are able to flag and promote these exchanges into knowledge articles that can be reused and distributed. This has enabled us to do a baseline exercise that wasn’t possible before. Now we’re able to isolate what’s appropriate to share vs. what’s not truly needed. And we keep content up-to-date, dynamic and searchable. It no longer lives on someone’s hard drive, inaccessible to everyone else.   Using the collaboration abilities in Lithium, we’re able to identify opportunities to share information across the enterprise and out to customers. This leads us into a proactive way of managing content within a team, versus the old way of being reactive. Additionally, we’ve become more transparent as an organization by allowing all users to contribute to knowledge (at any stage) instead of creating ideas, documents, and processes in a vacuum.   4) Knowledge Trace Back: Our SKME enables real-time tracking of an asset’s provenance. It provides the ability for us to identify who our knowledge experts are and how we get to them. We have better understanding about the contributors to our knowledge and our knowledge base.   Our Social Knowledge Management Environment connects experts to their contributions, making it possible to trace back and discover the true origin of any knowledge article. This capability drives deeper engagement through incentives, fosters scalable mentorship programs, reduces duplicate efforts, and enables a more efficient business process and streamlined communications. For example, a customer’s environment was changing rapidly due to new leaders, new deliverables, and unknown factors specifically around BYOD demands in a corporate environment. The challenge was finding a way for the customer to increase his knowledge base and insight into industry practices. We assisted this by connecting him with Cisco BYOD experts and colleagues he didn’t previously have a connection to. It removed obstacles and created a new collaborative network that didn’t exist previously.   As the Intellectual Capital Transformation (ICT) team within Cisco Services, we push the limits of the nature of collaboration. We not only extend and grow our capabilities—providing a comprehensive view of our team activities to various stakeholders—we use our knowledge-sharing and foundational approach to extend the thinking of new groups looking to use social knowledge management. It is about the dynamic, collective nature of social collaboration coupled with knowledge management that signifies the value of the activities producing, retaining, and reusing our intellectual capital in innovative ways. What's different? We're connecting people who hadn't been connected before and removing barriers to cross-functional and cross-industry knowledge through collaboration. It's about leveraging business process and workflow and establishing integral relationships with our technology that impacts the value of true social knowledge collaboration. We connect those senior level managers to each other so they can increase their expertise, learn more, create new content via white papers, or collaborate on things they may not have gotten a chance to do without this dynamic environment. We are creating a whole new model within Cisco that we, in fact, showcase in our own business processes that can be leveraged within any business function. Given the dynamic nature of collaboration we are able to connect experts with users, where before they would have never known the others existed. Moreover, we are able to scale in such as way that an expert can provide mentorship to many peers virtually rather than one or few in traditional mentoring models.   It all starts with conversations, which lead to the community, which provides the connections.  As word spreads, more people hear about it and want to be involved. The community naturally grows and produces reusable knowledge because of the ownership the community members take in making it a success. By measuring the number of accepted solutions to questions, the activity of discussions and knowledge bases, and overall user activity within the social knowledge management environment, we improve customer satisfaction and employee effectiveness—all of which can be measured in productivity time.   By leveraging our social knowledge management environment, ICT has reduced the time required for meetings, increased awareness and visibility internally and with our stakeholders, and has been able to move projects forward without the need for additional resources. Additionally, these same methods have enabled our stakeholders to have full visibility into what we are doing and the upcoming priorities, which has resulted in improving their own ability to move their initiatives forward in a more timely manner.  

Company: Rogers  Entry submitted by: Margaret Tsuji (MargaretT) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     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, magazines and trade publications, sports entertainment, and digital media.   Our goal is to be first to easily connect Canadians with what matters next and we offer better ways of living and working to Canadians who embrace technology.     Creating a better customer experience is one of our corporate strategies. As such, in August 2013, we launched Rogers Idea Box which is a co-creation platform based on Lithium's idea exchange technology. Idea Box lives within the Rogers Community Forums and is a place where users can submit/comment/vote on ideas to improve customer service and support, Rogers.com, the MyAccount App, and Rogers Stores.                We are the only major Canadian telcommunications company to host a co-creation platform/idea exchange.    Idea Box was so successful that we were also able to leverage it to collect ideas about the community forums itself (and we were able to archive the "Community Feedback" board).  And we are now looking at expanding Idea Box to include categories such as products, services, and pricing. Furthermore, we are now being approached by other areas of the business who want to leverage Idea Box.   When customers provide feedback to us via Twitter or Facebook, we now have a place to point them to; Idea Box is a place where they feel their ideas will be heard and not just a virtual suggestion box.   Idea Box's impact to our business: - We have received over 170 ideas in six months; 11 ideas have been launched, 9 are being reviewed and 8 are in progress. - Without doing a splashy PR campaign, news of Idea Box's launch was picked up by sites like Mobile Syrup and Eye on Mobility with comments like “It’s one more way that Rogers is trying to improve the dialogue with its customers.” and “This could be a step forward for customer service.” - Launching Idea Box drove traffic to our community in a normally quiet time of the year; the week Idea Box launched, we saw a 22% increase in page views and a 10% increase in unique visitors.  Traffic during Idea Box launch week was actually higher than our usual peak time around the iPhone launch! - We’ve even seen users going to other forums to ‘share’ their idea and encourage votes!  http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28993963-Rogers-Standalone-Modem-Ideabox        

Company: Fox Sports Australia  Entry submitted by: Shae Marlow (ShaeM) Community Manager Community: The Crowd (http://thecrowd.foxsports.com.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design     FOX SPORTS is Australia’s leading producer of sports television coverage and is home to Australia's favourite subscription TV sports channels, as well as Australia's number one general sports website – foxsports.com.au.   FOX SPORTS’ mission is to take fans closer to their favourite sports than ever before. We feed the passion of fans and give them access to sports, players and insights like they’ve never had - offering them an entertainment experience like no other, every day of the week.   Sport is incredibly tribal and controversial topics arise every day that people want to talk about. Our vision was to offer the more passionate sports fans a seat at the table to discuss the hottest topics with the best sports talent in the country.   The Crowd is a new FOX SPORTS community forum which offers fans and readers a place to offer their comments, thoughts and opinions on what is happening in sport at any time – the ultimate home of sports conversation in Australia.   The Crowd key outcomes: -       Own share of voice of sports conversation in Australia -       Build fan engagement by providing a platform for fans to interact with the best sports talent and key influencers in Australia -       Monetise through third party advertising   FOX SPORTS Australia is the leader in delivering sports entertainment and so in order to bring a new and innovative digital product to life in a competitive market, it was important to align with Lithium.   Lithium provided a market-leading platform for FOX SPORTS to launch The Crowd with immediate community vibrancy and the most innovative user experience – a forum at the forefront of sports communities in Australia. The Crowd has been the most important digital product to come out of FOX SPORTS Australia in five years.   Lithum has enabled The Crowd to integrate existing FOX SPORTS digital and social strategies as a way to drive deeper engagement with fans, with immediate success. The key differentiators of the FOX SPORTS community include:          FOX SPORTS designed and developed the community in a short six-week period and within a limited $30,000 budget.          It differs from most forums in that the platform is for enthusiast conversation and not necessarily customer service and product support.            A new approach was needed in building a less traditional community to create revenue through third party advertising.          FOX SPORTS adopted a new and innovative style to the standard Lithium forum homepage. Two bold design customisations included, making latest content the key feature and demoting the search toolbar.          To ignite and excite existing FOX SPORTS users and attract Australian sports fans in an established market, it was critical the Lithium based community was developed with the FOX SPORTS brand and personality at the forefront.   Customised features of The Crowd community include: Designed the homepage with a dynamic latest content feature for all sports as the centre of the community Repositioned the search toolbar to the middle of the homepage so users levitate to latest user discussions instead Branded and surfaced ‘Loudest crowd posts’ on the homepage and board pages   Integration of FOX SPORTS talent. Specific ranking icons, names and professional avatars were created, ensuring FOX SPORTS Presenters and Journalists etc are clearly identifiable    Easy navigation for fans across FOX SPORTS digital platforms. For example, from the FOX Football website when a user clicks The Crowd in the main navigation bar, they’re taken directly to Football community board (and not The Crowd homepage)    A targeted and alternating brand image on the homepage, where a logged in user is excited by   ‘ALWAYS TALKING SPORT’ but a logged out user is enticed with ‘JOIN THE CROWD’    Integration of ‘Latest sports stories’ feed from FOX SPORTS, to bring users closer to the latest sports news and ignite discussions A sports ‘scoreboard’ featuring stats of The Crowd’s current activity Kudos renamed as 'points' to keep track of who’s scoring the highest    Moderators renamed as Referees, to reiterate who’s responsible for presiding over the community    Avatars designed with FOX SPORTS brand and theme in mind, where users can select either their own favourite guernsey number or their favourite sports star’s    Early and direct feedback from key influencers has been extremely positive:   “Thank you, I think this would be a great tool for sport chatter... was unique to see Paul [Kent] replying.”   “Having a recognized sports brand such as FOX SPORTS in Australia to be able to express an opinion, participate in a debate or observe an alternative perspective will be great in the long run.”   The immediate community vibrancy has exceeded all KPIs, including traffic and growth metrics as well as over 2000 posts in the first six weeks.     

Company: BRP  Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     BRP: Who we are, what we do and what’s our story!   BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.   What makes your heart race? How often to you take the time to smile ear to ear and share good time with your family   We push ourselves for it. We come together to earn it. We try and try and try again to reach that prize. It's our motivation, our inspiration to move forward. It's the reason why we stand back up every time we fall. What are we talking about?   We are the company that invented the snowmobile and we've built 3,000,000 sleds to date!!!!!     We are not bringing you to the water; we are the company that brings the water to YOU.     We believe in a world where everyone can experience the exhilaration of the open road.     The riders. The ultimate rush. The Can-AM off-road thrills are never-ending.     LIVING THE LIFESTYLE. SHARING THE PASSION.   Take a deeper look at our culture in this short but powerful video: BRP - The history is made of stories   The community The BRP Community links all of the BRP dealerships and BRP together across the world to share advice, technical expertise and to connect in a completely different way. This community is the ONLY one in the power sports industry.   Our Community is a private Business to Business community and has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young but have shown a tremendous growth and success since our go-live.   For years our North America after-sales support department have supported our dealer network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Considering our large dealer network, our continual growth of business, the complexity of vehicles and the large call volumes, we needed to change our methods of supporting our dealers.   Combined with the complexity of questions, the increasing volume of requests, the dealer survey results and the on-going frustration of not being able to provide more added–value in our customer lives, we decided it was time to change. We needed to look at the service experience and the structure of our after-sales department to address the challenges our network was facing in their day to day and meet their expectations of our company.   We decided to change our call center to a contact center by using new technologies to move towards a Dealer service transformation (DST).   2013 was the year of transformation for our BRP North-American after-sales service team and we changed the way we interacted with our dealers.   The changes took place with 4 key pillars 1)    Leveraging our Knowledge center 2)    Increasing the community usage and integrating it in our dealer`s day to day operations 3)    Introduction of webcases to receive questions from our dealers 4)    Changing the team structure to support our dealers by Regional Teams accessible via multiple channels instead of reaching departments and silos.   What does this mean to you, to us, to our customers?    We want to make sure our customer’s vehicles are fixed right the first time and that our customers never lose a ride!   Where does the MVP come into play?     The BRP Community powered by Lithium is a critical asset in our transformation.   “We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are!”   At this point, we are no longer a call center but rather a complete hands-on contact center.    The dealer can go to Community and use the search tool for the network to provide support.   Our dealers can now follow BRP in this live environment and be informed on a daily basis on all parts, technical, and warranty related questions or any other after-sales service topics within this one stop shop. It’s also allowing them to access other techs around the globe. It’s given the chance for dealers to leverage the thousands of years of experience with BRP vehicles where before they were limited to their facility.   Again, this is not a typical community with customers coming in for their own personal interests. These are technicians and service managers that are taking time from their typical day to day activities to go in an environment that isn’t truly natural to them. Considering these users are not computer enthusiast, they could have felt that an online community was a waste of time and money but this was not the case as we see them coming back over and over again. This demonstrates our true success.      BRP is very proud to have technicians that were awarded the title of MVP (Most Valuable Player) of the BRP Community within a year.    Their technical knowledge and ability to easily share technical advice is renowned among their peers and BRP staff. Their expertise reflects positively on their whole dealership and comes with some benefits.   Recognizing that the Community is a living entity that needs to be fed quality and timely information onan on-going basis to remain useful, impactful and the go-to place for all technical information, BRP, through the Community MVP Program, is able to maintain that momentum 7 days a week.   What is the program?   The Community MVP (or Most Valuable Player) program recognizes members whose significantcontributions designates leadership and commitment to their peers within the BRP Community. Theprogram is designed to recognize and thank individuals who help make our Community a useful toolwith very high quality standards and aims to bring to the forefront the most influential users in the BRPCommunity.   In addition to being recognized by the Community, the MVP enjoys certain privileges. They have privileged access to BRP staff, access to the latest information to support the customers, their status allows them certification points, the MVPs can use the @mention feature to bring a BRP staff into a discussion, and they have a dedicated MVP private room. Also, boththe dealer and MVP have received an award to showcase in their dealership. This helps a customer coming for service to know what one of the technician is recognized by the manufacturer as one of the best in his job.   As of April 14th, the Community has generated          2,345,140 Logins,                                                                          75,568 Posts,          36 262 Kudos          5,774 Accepted solutions For the same period of time, the MVPs has generated:          22,213 Logins          5,510 Posts          5,307 Kudos          596 Accepted solutions   These metrics are outstanding considering theses MVP are first and foremost working technicians or service managers that are busy all day long. They are investing a tremendous amount of personal time to share their knowledge and help others - Over 9 000 hours of total minutes online and read 630 00 posts since they have registered to our community.   It’s also very beneficial for BRP since the MVPs are located across North American in different states, provinces and time zones. Since they spend most of their time online after their own working hours, it means they are active in the community when BRP staff is not working hence allowing longer support hours for a technician looking for answers in theses other time zones.   BRP considers very highly theses MVP. The contribution from theses 5 individual is direct call deflection and pressure off our BRP technical staff. They are key players to help us in our Dealer service transformation.   We are the only manufacturer in the entire power sport industry with a dealer community (B2B) in place.  This is a tremendous achievement for our organization to have such innovation and success while being able to have our dealer network support this change.   The dealers, mostly multi-brands, are recognizing the power and benefits of our approach. It was a very big challenge for BRP to have them change their habits of going from phone to using our online community. We`ve heard so many times at the beginning of this transformation: “I don’t want my tech to lose time on the internet.” Or “I’m paying him to wrench, not to push keys on a keyboard” and the typical “Why would I spend time using your tool if I can just call you?”   Today we are no longer getting these comments, we are simply getting accolades and dealers will tell you that they cannot imagine working without these tools. When they log in and they see the MVP names, they can trust the advices provided by them and they are confident what was said can actually fix their problems. They recognized they are technicians like the guys in their own shops sweating bullets, turning wrenches, hitting knuckles and working hard for a living.     In order to show our gratitude, BRP showcases the MVPs at the After-Sales Service booth at the Ski-doo Club in Quebec City in front of multiples hundreds of dealers and thousands of individuals.   The MVP colleagues have received either a laptop or a trip to visit BRP’s installations, production line and museum in Valcourt, Quebec at all expenses paid.   They are part of the BRP family and they have the same yellow blood we have in our veins!         

Company: Spotify  Entry submitted by: Meredith Humphrey (Meredith) Community Manager Community: The Spotify Community (Community.spotify.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Spotify is a music streaming service based in Stockholm, Sweden that is currently available in over 55 markets. With over 24 million active users and over 6 million paying subscribers, our customers use Spotify to discover, share, listen, and organize their music.   This growing customer base has also meant a need for various customer support channels since Spotify’s launch in 2008. In February 2012 we launched our Spotify Community with Lithium and now have over  200,000 registered users. Our Community is now top source for customers with queries on everything from their account to device troubleshooting, maintenance, product feedback, and music discussion.   Since the launch of the Community in 2012 up until mid-2013 we also had a core group of around 20 Super Users. These included users that were newly, currently and formerly active across the boards.   Our main focus for the past year was encouraging the growth of our Super Users across the Community so that self-help was promoted across the forums as we continue to look toward Spotify’s future growth.      We’ve always taken great effort to reward the Super Users that make their way to the Spotify Community.   Using Lithium’s metrics, we determine the Top 10 Super Users each month and recognize them in our Community Blog. These Top Contributors are rewarded with anything from Spotify merchandise, a month of free Premium, a blog post on our official news site, and branded playlists.    Those Super Users are also invited for other perks including Skype calls with team leaders for Q&A sessions, access to early version of updates, and direct emails to some Spotify.   However, we knew in 2013 that there was still a large untapped group of users that would make great additions to our Spotify’s Super User team. With close to over 200,000 registered users there was clearly room for improvement and retention with interested users.   We also knew that our Lithium Community was the place to find these brand advocates and Super Users that are vital the future of Spotify’s support channels.     In an effort to not only encourage new Super Users to become active, but also to raise awareness of Spotify’s Community and praise the efforts of our current Super Users in 2014, we established the Rock Stars Program in November 2013.      "The Rock Stars Program is really an extension of what we were already doing organically over the years. Since we've made it something more concrete, we've seen a massive increase in the funnel of new Super Users in our community. We're grateful to have so many new fans who are passionate about our brand and helping people." – Rorey Jones, Spotify Global Community Manager   Previously, when Moderators reached out to welcome users that stood out in their accepted solutions, kudos and post count it became clear the benefits of being of a Super User were intangible and difficult to grasp.    Thanks to the Rock Stars Program (RSP), all the benefits of being a Super User are now visible to everyone—not just the Super Users already getting perks.   The Rock Stars Program is a three-tier system: Registered Users, Rising Stars, and Rock Stars.   The first step in the program invites all registered users to simply start posting. They can then rank up 26 different music-themed positions as they start participating in the Community. Our ranks were adjusted to go from “Newbie” and “Casual Listener” up another 26 musical ranks, including “Gig Goer”, “Festival VIP”, “Garage Band”, Radio Producer”, “Singer” and at the top “Senior Producer”.   Users that are gaining kudos, writing accepted solutions, getting to know staff and bringing a great disposition to the forums are then invited to be Rising Stars. For three months these users are given access to a few private boards, meet the staff, and start learning more about Spotify.   At the end of three-month period they can be invited to be Rock Stars—the rank given to top group of Super Users.   Rock Stars are defined as users that are actively helping other customers, gaining kudos, posting accepted solutions, and establishing relationships with Moderators. In the RSP, Rock Stars have a rank structure as well—they can rank from “Label Star” up another 14 ranks to “Musical Legend”. Finally, Rock Stars that slowed in participation and left the community are retired as “Veterans”.   Once a Rock Star, there are different roles users can take as a member of “the band”: The Fun Master, The Protector of Newbs, Community Yoda, The Ideas Guardian, The Blog Maverick.   When we launched the RSP we invited our established Super Users to join as Rock Stars right away. We then invited some new users to join as Rising Stars so they could learn a bit more before gaining all the Rock Star perks.   The public, tiered structure the RSP provides has given users an incentive to start participating, getting to know staff and increasing their overall presence in the forums.    When comparing the month after the launch (November) and the second month after the launch (December), our Accepted Solutions were up by 19% to 611 while Completed Registrations were up 18% to 12,264 from Dec 7, 2013 to Jan 7, 2014.   Our Overall Topics also increased by 11% while Logins and Overall Posts increased by 5% and 6% respectively.   Since the launch of the RSP not only have we seen not only a jump in the User Sessions per month by 4% to 3,869,869 and Searches by Users up 27% to 60,303--but we’ve seen an increase in the post frequency and quality from best top Rock Stars.   At the end of the first three months we nominated four of our Rising Stars to become Rock Stars. We then initiated another six Rising Stars to the program.   Our top Rock Star Peter has increased his post count by 20%--now averaging 85 posts a day. Marco has been a consistent top 10 Super User for years and has increased his post count by 169%.    With these results just four months after the launch, our team is eager to see what a full year of the program will bring.  Our ever-expanding Spotify user base means the need for knowledgeable, supportive Super Users is become more vital to our Customer Service future and we want the Rock Star Program to be at the center of the Community.   To give you a proper tour of our Rock Star Program, let us introduce the Spotify Community Moderator Greg.  He’ll take you through the register user’s journey through our Community and into the Rock Star Program. See you backstage.    Watch video here:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/4cwsu93abq3by8i/LithyProgramLaunchSpotify.mp4      

Company: McDonald's  Entry submitted by: Julie Fuerst (juliefuerst) Social Media Supervisor LSW: McDonald's LSW (https://mcdonalds.response.lithium.com/console/agent) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   On a daily basis, McDonald’s has thousands of customers that contact the company via phone, email or letters; or through social media channels. Through innovative processes and systems, McDonald’s Customer Experience & Insights (CEI) team strives to engage with customers in the channel that they prefer, and provide insights that help protect the brand and customer loyalty. More specifically, the goals of the CEI Social Media team are to protect the brand by helping our customers in social media with issues or questions. The CEI Social Media team works to respond to as many customer service opportunities as possible in hopes that the customer will be “recovered.”   The CEI Social Media Team at McDonald’s has partnered with Lithium to help drive customer recovery on Twitter. McDonald’s began using the LSW platform in January 2014 after a successful demo of LSW at the end of 2013 showed that the platform could help drastically increase the number of customer service Tweets the team was responding to on Twitter.   Prior to Lithium, McDonald’s CEI Social Team was only able to have one “queue” where all of McDonald’s customer service related Tweets would filter into. Having only one queue caused the Social Team to spend a large amount of time filtering through the Tweets, and assigning Tweets to the appropriate teams within McDonald’s. Additionally, the Social Team was fairly limited with searching, filtering, and routing capabilities, which ultimately affected the number of Tweets the Team could respond to.   Lithium has drastically helped the CEI Social Team bring in AND respond to more customer service related Tweets while maintaining reasonable response times. The CEI Social Team’s ability to respond to more customers on Twitter has led to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, as displayed in customer Tweets below.              The CEI Social Team has been able to use Lithium’s functionality to automatically route Tweets to the appropriate team/queue (for example, international Tweets automatically get routed to Global Team, etc.). The CEI Social Team has also been able to use Lithium’s functionality to setup a “Proactive” queue where we’re capturing Tweets outside of @mcdonalds and @reachout_mcd. For example, if a customer Tweets a customer service issue without using one of our Twitter handles, we’re now bringing in and responding to these Tweets when we previously hadn’t- hence increasing the number of customers recovered.   Lithium has allowed the McDonald’s team to bring in 60 times more incoming messages than what the team was bringing in with the previous engagement tool.   The team has also been able to reply to around 135% more customer service related Tweets with Lithium compared to the previous engagement tool and increase customer recovery by about 4%.     Screenshot from previous engagement reporting tool:   Screenshot from LSW Export during comparable time period for queues CEI Social Team monitors:      

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: BRP  Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     BRP: Who we are, what we do and what’s our story!   BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.   What makes your heart race? How often to you take the time to smile ear to ear and share good time with your family   We push ourselves for it. We come together to earn it. We try and try and try again to reach that prize. It's our motivation, our inspiration to move forward. It's the reason why we stand back up every time we fall. What are we talking about?   We are the company that invented the snowmobile and we`ve built 3,000,000 sleds to date!!!!!     We are not bringing you to the water; we are the company that brings the water to YOU.     We believe in a world where everyone can experience the exhilaration of the open road.     The riders. The ultimate rush. The Can-AM off-road thrills are never-ending.     LIVING THE LIFESTYLE. SHARING THE PASSION.   Take a deeper look at our culture in this short but powerful video: BRP - The history is made of stories   Now that you have a better understanding of who we are and what we do, you will better understand why we did our transformation and the pressure was high. We will also show you all of the reasons that explain why we deserve this award.   The Organization Game Changer   The BRP Community links all of the BRP dealerships and BRP together across the world to share advice, technical expertise and to connect in a completely different way. This community is the ONLY one in the power sports industry.   Our Community is a private Business to Business community and has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young but have shown a tremendous growth and success since our go-live.   For years our North America after-sales support department have supported our dealer network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Considering our large dealer network, our continual growth of business, the complexity of vehicles and the large call volumes, we needed to change our methods of supporting our dealers.   Combined with the complexity of questions, the increasing volume of requests, the dealer survey results and the on-going frustration of not being able to provide more added–value in our customer lives, we decided it was time to change. We needed to look at the service experience and the structure of our after-sales department to address the challenges our network was facing in their day to day and meet their expectations of our company.   We decided to change our call center to a contact center by using new technologies to move towards a Dealer service transformation (DST).   2013 was the year of transformation for our BRP North-American after-sales service team and we changed the way we interacted with our dealers.   The changes took place with 4 key pillars 1)    Leveraging our Knowledge center 2)    Increasing the community usage and integrating it in our dealer`s day to day operations 3)    Introduction of webcases to receive questions from our dealers 4)    Changing the team structure to support our dealers by Regional Teams accessible via multiple channels instead of reaching departments and silos.   What does this mean to you, to us, to our customers?    We want to make sure our customer’s vehicles are fixed right the first time and that our customers never lose a ride!   Where Lithium does comes into play against our business goals?     The BRP Community powered by Lithium is a critical asset in our transformation.   “We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are!”   At this point, we are no longer a call center but rather a complete hands-on contact center.   Whenever a Dealer in service is looking for BRP information the 4 steps we ask them to take are the following: 1- First look on the Knowledge Center.   Dealers can now type a VIN (vehicle identification number or serial number) or use the keyword box to search hundreds of articles and technical information related to the unit in their service bay. They now have access to a VIN centric tool simplifying the amount of time and effort to have the information right away. They now have access to the best knowledge information from our top technicians 24/7 without calling in.   Our networking is consulting over 43 000 technical articles per year. 2. Go to Community and use the search tool for the network to provide support.   Our dealers can now follow BRP in this live environment and be informed on a daily basis on all parts, technical, and warranty related questions or any other after-sales service topics within this one stop shop. It’s also allowing them to access other techs around the globe. It’s given the chance for dealers to leverage the thousands of years of experience with BRP vehicles where before they were limited to their facility.   In the last 3 months, during our biggest Ski-doo season, we saw amazing numbers on our Community. Over 865 000 pages were viewed by 41 000 visitors. Remember, we are in a B2B environment so we are limited in the amount of users we can have and we need to keep them coming.   Again, this is not a typical community with customers coming in for their own personal interests. These are technicians and service managers that are taking time from their typical day to day activities to go in an environment that isn’t truly natural to them. Considering these users are not computer enthusiast, they could have felt that an online community was a waste of time and money but this was not the case as we see them coming back over and over again. This demonstrates our true success.      In the event they didn't find they were looking for, the step 3 comes into play. 3. Dealers can also submit a Webcase to get support from our Regional Teams.   We now have an online webcase system that allows for dealers to reach us whenever they feel the need to send inquires. We can prioritize their requests and within the same dedicated amount of time we will answer them. No more wait times on the phone, nor do they need to adjust their needs with our schedule.   We can provide a direct answer through the webcase and point them in the direction of the Knowledge Center or Community when necessary.   4. The Contact Center: For more complex or pressing issues, the BRP phone service also supported by our Regional Team is also available for our dealers. We receive hundreds and hundreds phone calls from our network.   Because of our Knowledge Center, Community and Webcase tool dealers can now use the time to phone us in order to discuss more complex issues without being rushed or having to wait on hold for long periods of time. Why is BRP the ideal candidate for this award?   We are the only manufacturer in the entire power sport industry with a dealer community (B2B) in place.  This is a tremendous achievement for our organization to have such innovation and success while being able to have our dealer network support this change.   The dealers, mostly multi-brands, are recognizing the power and benefits of our approach. It was a very big challenge for BRP to have them change their habits of going from phone to using our online community. We`ve heard so many times at the beginning of this transformation: “I don’t want my tech to lose time on the internet.” Or “I’m paying him to wrench, not to push keys on a keyboard” and the typical “Why would I spend time using your tool if I can just call you?”   Today we are no longer getting these comments, we are simply getting accolades and dealers will tell you that they cannot imagine working without these tools.   We are a Canadian company using technologies to outperform larger American or international competitors. It’s not an unfair battle; it’s a question of innovation, creativity and passion.   One of the ways to define our culture and company comes from this short video: The ultimate power sport experience - BRP the power to the go!   The partnership, a similar culture and passion and the will to change   The partnership between Lithium and BRP becomes a natural fit for our transformation but also falls within our culture of passion and willingness to do more for our customers and to strive in being the best at what we do.   The BRP community helps in so many ways:   Increasing shop efficiency and faster turnaround time: It’s much easier for our dealers to get answers to fix units of customers: The service is never closed at BRP since the community connects the planet together.   Securing vehicles that are fixed right the first time It’s allowing dealers to find the right information in minimal time and preventing customers to have to bring back the vehicle due to an improper fix.   Better CSI scores and greater chances of not losing a week-end of fun:  It’s helping dealers increasing the customer satisfaction by increasing technician’s knowledge and skills.   Service experience and greater connection between BRP and the dealer network: It’s allowing BRP to secure strategic initiatives to help secure MOTs (Moment of truth). The service MOT is one of the key pillars for our customer satisfaction.   Access to our partners in ways we never seen before: It’s allowing BRP to receive instant feed-back from our network in a real time environment and benefit from a continuous communication stream.   Remove pressure on our Contact center: The users and the MVPs in the community are allowing us to focus on more complex cases and offer added-value where it counts while the rest of the network is supporting each other by deflecting request to us and allowing dealers to have answers outside our business hours.   The question you have: Yes, that's all nice but what does it mean in numbers?   Within our closed environment where we operate with a limited amount of dealers and distributors, our metrics are not the same as the typical B2C ou P2P. For others, our metrics may look marginal but for us, and based on Lithium internal benchmark, we know we have outstanding results and a fantastic story to share.  History is made of stories; our story can also be understood with numbers.   We have seen incredible growth in 2013.  In the last 12 months Overall posts: 41 000 and 80% growth Logins: 1 344 000 and 134% growth User sessions: 1 200 000 and 252% growth Accepted solutions: 3 100 and 77% growth Searches: 100 000 and 51% growth Combining theses metrics to some of the previous numbers on the community we`ve shared at the beginning of this submission, you can see our dealer support transformation unfolding right before your eyes.   We truly believe that The Organization Game Changer award is meant for us. We have changed the communication method used by a thousand dealers after decades of habits; We were able to completely remodel and reshape our internal departments to remove silos; We leveraged new technologies to everyone’s benefit; We now have put the customer at the center of the operations.   More importantly, all of this transformation wasn’t possible if we didn’t have a strong community, powered by Lithium, supporting our goal and vision.    What are our next challenges? We will find new creative ways to push these innovations and support mechanism to uncharted territories and show our competition, within our industry, that we are true leaders. Everywhere & every time we put our mind, passion and efforts in our service and in our products is one more step closer towards providing our customers the ultimate experience.   You don’t believe it? If we did this, nothing can stop us. Just  Watch us!   --------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the following deck to better understand the overall transformation that took place in 2013 in our NA after-sales department:                                

Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company and one of the most honored companies in the world. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and internationally.   The AT&T Community was founded in 2002 as a place for AT&T wireless customers to engage in online peer-to-peer support. Initially, the community continued to grow with minimal investment from AT&T. However, in 2010, two main factors stagnated community growth:   1.         Fragmented engagement that resulted from additional product lines being added to the community.  (A U-verse community was added in July, 2007, and a DSL/Internet community in August, 2009.) 2.         Consumers were turning to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and other unbranded communities.   At the same time, the proliferation of connected consumers led to a drastic increase in customers which expected to get support from and engage directly with brands on digital channels.   From 2002 until 2012, the AT&T Community was home to a group of grassroots community leaders, a combination of citizen and advocate influencers participating in the forum and providing support. The community leaders engaged in discussions and answered questions in their areas of expertise with little interaction with each other. The solutions provided on the forums - a key metric for a support community - stalled with no signs of growth, despite community leader participation.   In 2011, AT&T leadership made the strategic decision to increase investment in the community to help customers get support 24/7 on social channels. We knew an appealing program would drive success by spurring our influencers to engage in more dialogs, create more solutions, and give us feedback. We needed their participation to improve the quality of our content and get valuable feedback on multiple initiatives.   We created an influencer program – the “Award for Community Excellence” (ACE)” - to formally identify and engage both citizen and advocate influencers. In preparation for a late 2012 launch, we engaged experienced outside vendors – including Lithium - to ensure we created a scalable, sustainable program. They analyzed the opportunity, performed a competitive analysis and aligned our team on influencer business objectives.  We concluded that we needed to improve the reach and connectivity of the influencer network, the ability of individuals to influence both content and their own presence, and the degree of enthusiasm towards the AT&T Community.   AT&T delivered the ACE program which identified and nominated outstanding community achievement. Selection methodology has two steps: First, a quantitative analysis determines users who demonstrate top participation in the community based on key metrics, and second, we perform a qualitative analysis to evaluate whether or not those top users embody the influencer attributes we wish to recognize. The quantitative analysis is performed by pulling the metrics for the community members and applying an algorithm that ranks them based on the number of posts they made, solutions they provided and kudos they received. (Kudos are a feature that allows one community member to say “thanks!” to another community member.) We then narrow the list of members under consideration to those who scored above the standard deviation of the dataset. Our community managers then use a qualitative scorecard to grade each member’s performance against key influencer attributes. We use a three-point scale to grade each member on:   •           Exhibiting a neutral to positive degree of enthusiasm towards AT&T •           Having visited the community recently •           Frequency of posts •           Quality of their replies •           Two-way engagement with community members and AT&T •           Authority, credibility and expertise   We established a cutoff score from the resulting scorecard to identify potential recipients (nominees) of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE.)    Program components include:   a. “ACE of the Month” recognition in the public community and “with photo” in the private ACE category  On our home and on our category pages:      In the private ACE blog:     b. Monthly newsletter (in our first-ever use of the blog style) c. Custom signature green-ribbon badge d. Unique ACE role (ranks include Professor, Guru, Expert, etc.) e. Occasional, infrequent AT&T-branded small gifts f. Personal assistance with any AT&T-related service issue g. Additional moderation privileges   In 2013, we improved the program with: a. Selection and induction of new ACEs b. Creation of a video promoting the ACES linked to from our ACE Page   c. Development of an AT&T Philanthropy program specific to ACEs.  ACEs nominated dozens and ultimately selected five local 501C3 charities to each receive $5,000 gifts from AT&T.   ACEs accompanied AT&T External Affairs managers in delivering checks. ACE dcookie (second from right) and her son with AT&T External Affairs presenting a $5,000 check to the local 501C3 charity she nominated – The Arc of Luzerne County   d. Offering ACEs the opportunity to attend a quarterly conference with AT&T SME’s to cover topics of mutual interest – including community enhancements e. Opportunities for ACEs to trial AT&T online tools   Today the AT&T Community Forums boasts 59 ACEs representing 23 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.  The ACEs represent a cross-section of our Community and our customer base with professions including a chemist, NASA engineer, butter co-op manager, orthodontic assistant, film producer, seamstress, retiree, etc.     Lithium – as our long-time platform partner – worked with us to create:   a. A rotating carrousel of ACE avatars and stats on our home page  b. A dedicated ACE information page to which every ACE signature links c. A private ACE category in which AT&T and the ACEs can communicate freely and within that private space – our first-ever blog usage d. Right-rail recognition of “ACE of the Month” e. A trial of @mentions in the private ACE category In addition, we consult with our Lithium Success Manager frequently to share ideas and Lithium moderators routinely advise of threads of interest involving ACEs.   One of the greatest outcomes of the program is the change in perception of AT&T and the community that has occurred since the program began. Our survey showed that 30 percent of ACEs said that the program improved their opinion of AT&T.  The kudos use has increased by 36 percent since the program launch. This tells us that our members are more engaged and that they find the AT&T Community to be a helpful and supportive environment.    The last and perhaps greatest outcome of the program has been the increase in customer solutions provided on the community. The monthly average solutions have increased by 58 percent since the launch. This increase provides huge benefit back to AT&T by allowing us to focus on assisting customers with other important service needs, since many questions are answered on the AT&T Community. The solutions are high-quality content that can be reused throughout att.com and found in search results.    The ACE program has greatly benefitted AT&T by building stronger relationships with top influencers, who in turn increase their participation on the community and assist customers with answers to support questions.   The program is popular with the ACEs themselves. The ACEs rated their satisfaction with the program as 8.8 out of 10 on our inaugural survey designed to measure ACE experience and gather feedback. ACE achiever Dcookie expressed her appreciation of the program in the ACE Community in February, writing: “… maybe some of us would have never met or chatted if it hadn’t been for us becoming ACEs. I found that there are really good people here that I’m happy to have met. So I thought I’d say, THANKS, to whoever thought of this idea, it was a good decision…”     We are building strong relationships with the ACEs. Before the launch of the ACE program and its improvements, we did not feel that we could engage the top influencers for feedback because we lacked a connection with them. They were on our community helping our customers, but we had no way to formally and consistently thank them. Now we continually learn about them through the ACE of the month posts, collect their feedback and ideas in conference calls and the private ACE Community, connect with them about support issues and keep up an ongoing conversation. In fact, 90 percent of the ACEs cited the connection with AT&T staff (specifically, our full-time ACE program manager) as being a favorite program component in the survey.   Before the launch of the ACE program, top users did not communicate with each other across product lines (e.g. a Wireless top user never crossed paths with a U-verse ® top user). Now the ACEs have great relationships with one another, sharing information and ideas amongst themselves in the private ACE Community. Our survey found that 74 percent of ACEs cited the connection with other ACEs as being another favorite component of the program.  The ACEs regularly congratulate one another for being named ACE of the month or for having one of their solutions highlighted within a support article on att.com.  Recently, a U-verse ACE and a Wireless ACE shared knowledge in the ACE Lounge to solve a product problem. A third ACE chimed in and authored an easily-understood history of telephony that we subsequently published in the larger, public community.  Another ACE has authored his own technical guide.   We are grateful to Lithium for helping build our ACE program.  We’re proud of our ACEs and delighted with the success we’ve seen with the program. We’ve designed the program to be sustainable and enduring and we will continue to recognize and thank exceptional community contributions in the years to come.    

Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTravel.com Should Win The Lithy Award for Best Community Design   The Barclaycard Travel Community is a one-of-a-kind design with an emphasis on travel photos that creates an aesthetically beautiful website. Community Members are encouraged to explore the site for travel inspiration and share their travel experiences to earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates.   A few key areas that differentiate the Barclaycard Travel Community design:   Real time home page updates display Community Members posted Travel Stories. Community Members enjoy an immediate gratification of seeing their Travel Story and photos directly on the Home Page. Rotating photo slide area of home page highlights the visual nature of the design and enables the Community Manager to highlight Blog and User Generated Travel Story content. Design includes an easy-to-post Travel Story process that includes a drag and drop options for uploading multiple photos seamlessly. Customized Blog Content area highlights the visual assets of each blog post as well as the Expert Travel blogger profiles. Enhanced Discussion area includes a real time Twitter feed. Revolutionary capability for both Barclaycard Arrival™ cardmembers and non-cardmembers the ability to earn miles for sharing their travel stories redeemable for travel rewards or Amazon e-certificates. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Travel Community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page features a rotating image area with emphasis on visually engaging photo content.      Cascading Travel Story tiles feature Community Member generated travel stories that emphasize the visual allure of exploring travel adventures.     Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page also contains an interactive map that encourages visitors to explore Travel Stories via location.     Barclaycard Travel  - Home Page & Search       Barclaycard Travel  - Easy Travel Storytelling     Barclaycard Travel  - Designed Blog Content     Blog format provides a highly stylized design that focuses on photos and expert travel blogger bios for easy consumption.     Each blog contains photos, kudos and comment capability as well as the ability to share out easily to social networks.     Barclaycard Travel  - Customized Discussion         Barclaycard Travel  - Unique User Profile     Barclaycard Travel  - Email Designs   Community members also receive Daily Alert emails when they have earned miles in the community. This follow-up email communication has increased engagement.     A monthly Travel Community Newsletter helps to drive increased registrations and provides an update on trending topics and blogs within the community. User generated content is also prominently featured.        

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: Advent Software  Entry submitted by: Al Castillo (Al) Solutions Manager, Advent Direct Community Community: Advent Direct® Community (https://community.advent.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     Advent Software has a 30 year history of technology leadership in the investment management industry. Our client base spans over 4,400 firms, from established global institutions to small start-up practices, in nearly 60 countries. We view our clients as collaborators, and are constantly seeking to improve our solutions to break down boundaries between systems, people, and information.   Technology as an industry, whether consumer-facing or in the enterprise, is becoming increasingly personalized for the individual user, and as a technology company, Advent strives to be at the forefront of that trend. In November 2013, Advent Software unveiled Advent Direct® Community, a new, interactive way for Advent clients and partners – from disparate parts of the investment management industry – to connect, share information, and learn best practices. In what is so frequently an adversarial and information-hoarding environment, Advent Direct Community provides a unique opportunity for financial industry practitioners and firms to engage with each other and with Advent in an open, personalized, collaborative, and transparent forum.   With Advent Direct Community, we set out to design a website that mirrored our goals of building a personal, transparent community while also providing a simple and familiar experience that would be true to the overall Advent brand. The community design thus is consistent with the look and feel of other Advent properties – simple but bold, sophisticated colors and graphics that reflect our business and client base. From the beginning, we included members of our Marketing and Product teams to ensure that everything from menu navigation and other user interactions to font and color was on par with the high standard we set for other Advent applications.   From the very first click on the landing page, the user experience is all about personalization and ease of use. Instead of sifting through cluttered information that may or may not be relevant, new users answer a few brief questions at the onset and are then presented with customized content personal to their particular interests, minimizing the number of clicks to get to that relevant, recent content.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY PERSONAL LANDING PAGE     For example, when a user decides to “follow” a product on Advent Direct Community, they are auto-subscribed to the Lithium discussion board for that product, their menu is customized to include a direct link to the discussion board, and a product tile is added to their home page. The tile uses a “counter” approach to highlight contributions from the last seven days on the Lithium platform – Discussions, Answers, and Ideas – and it also provides a count for new and recently updated knowledge base articles. With a single click on any product tile line item, the user can see a list of the three most recent items and by clicking an item link they can view the conversation.  Alternatively, they can start a new discussion or view all discussions. Three distinct actions, one click. ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD     The Lithium platform has proven immensely valuable in serving as a conduit between Advent and our clients. Through the discussion area and “Idea Exchange” areas of the site, it has enabled us to deliver on our promise of transparent communication and acting on client feedback. We are particularly excited about the “Idea Exchange”, a relatively new feature of Advent Direct Community, where users can suggest, share, and vote on new ideas for Advent products. This has generated a number of constructive ideas that we are incorporating into new releases for our products. The Idea Exchange is, in effect, co-creation between Advent and our clients in action.  In addition, the Lithium platform enables users to give peers a visual “kudos” for post contributions, something which users have particularly glommed onto and helps build a network between Advent product users. Posts that are the most active or receive the most kudos are the most prominently displayed.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY IDEA EXCHANGE       “I love how Advent has gamified Advent Direct Community. I really thrive off getting kudos from other users and rising to the top of the leadership board. I’ve also enjoyed the clean design, which allows me to navigate the site very easily. There aren’t a lot of things that distract me from finding what I need.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   “The design isn’t simple, but it makes things simple. I can see all the information I want to see right when I login and decide if I want to go further or go back to it later. It’s far from basic, but the design of the site makes it easy and basic for me to easily navigate to all the information that’s relevant to me with a scroll of the mouse.” – Tom Harmke, Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Reaves Asset Management   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY BOARD ANNOUNCEMENTS     We attribute the professional, vibrant, and friendly design of the site to the remarkable success Advent Direct Community has seen almost immediately after launching. Within just three months Advent Direct Community surpassed Advent’s previous client portal in registration numbers, with 8,500 registered users. Ninety percent of registered users visit monthly and about 1/3 visit on a weekly basis. The number of unique visitors to our core products boards is consistently strong and growing – double-digit growth for our Axys, APX and Moxy products.  And users aren’t just visiting more often; they’re starting more conversations, getting more replies, and the number of answers being generated by the community is increasing.   “The enhancements to Advent Direct Community make me feel like Advent is interested in my success and my development personally because they are creating ways and avenues for me to quickly become a subject expert in my field. I didn’t really have a great connection with other Advent product users before and now I am easily able to find users who are in the same position as I am. I can reach out to these users and get the information that I need while at the same time create a strong network of professionals that allows me to excel at my job.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD      

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: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Agata Krzysztofik (Agata) Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   AdWords is one of Google’s main products, used by millions of businesses worldwide, from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses.   With such a vast group of users, we wanted to create an online space where we could address any product related questions and provide strategic guidance to users in a scalable way.   We launched our AdWords Community on Lithium (in 6 languages) in 2011. The initial design was pretty “simple” reflecting the UI of broadly-known Google products such as Gmail.     Towards the end of 2012 we decide to redesign our Communities (in 8 languages at the time).     Our vision for the new design was “to provide members with a beautiful, engaging and wow! experience, and to make information easy to find”, while focusing on the following business goals:   Users are able to resolve their issues faster Users are more engaged with the Community Our Top Contributors are more satisfied with the Community Users have an improved perception of experts presence on the Community Users have increased satisfaction with ease of navigation The redesign wasn’t purely limited to a refreshed look, but also incorporated a launch of several brand new Community features that we defined and implemented together with Lithium developers.    The new Community features launched as part of the redesign spanned across 3 main themes:   1) Cleaner interface and easier, more intuitive navigation for user to get engaged   Custom Promo Carousel (With a banner builder incorporated into the admin)     More visibility into accepted solutions Stream of the most recent discussions and articles Recommended reading Quick access to follow discussions Ability to reply within thread At a glance view of discussions by categories Quick view of discussion stats   2) Better integration with social   Users able to add social networks to profile Easier social sharing of content across platforms   3) More recognition for engagement   Achievement badges Progress bar of your membership level Articles’ author box with integrated Google authorship tag The redesign has resulted in a 23% increase in the average daily accepted solutions, +28% in daily average kudos clicks and 19% increase in the overall satisfaction with the website (English Community results). The survey conducted among our Top Contributors also indicated overall positive feedback about the new UI combined with the newly added features. The main satisfaction driver among our top-engaged members were the achievement badges (86%).    

Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Courtney Pannell (cocopannell) EN Community & Social Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop in Austin asking an AdWords question via Twitter or you’re a global corporation in Dublin landing on an AdWords Community thread via a Google search, we want to be involved in that moment of connection. The AdWords team aims to form connections with our advertisers, advocates, and influencers, to improve both product functionality and brand perception.   To forge those connections, our digital strategy has been to create a social ecosystem for AdWords, one of Google’s main products. Our social channels — Community, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook — are not silos; we think about how each can drive traffic to all our social properties, assist in content creation, and amplify our brand message.   DRIVING TRAFFIC   Over the past year, traffic to our Community grew by nearly 3x, our Twitter follower count increased by 350% to 175K, our Google+ subscribers surpassed 1.1M, our Facebook fans grew to 75K, and our YouTube viewership grew by 80%. Put simply, we’ve used this social ecosystem to bolster traffic to all our channels and grow our brand’s reach.   Specifically looking at the Community, our growth strategy has focused on increasing traffic via organic search and social referrals. Our organic search traffic now constitutes nearly 60% of our overall traffic globally, as we’ve worked to refine our content to more closely align with what users search for help with.   Not only has our social promotion helped to increase direct awareness of our content, it may also have increased the visibility of community content in search results. We also see that visitors from social channels have nearly twice as high a pages/visit count as a regular user, so we have a great opportunity to interact with an engaged audience.   CREATING CONTENT   In the past year, AdWords underwent a significant launch called Enhanced Campaigns. Our Top Contributors were prebriefed on the update and helped us create nearly 100 unique content pieces to support the launch. In promoting this content, we utilized our multi-channel approach and saw a boost on all our properties.     As you can see above, we put a premium on rich media content, and we identify potential topics for videos and Hangouts on Air from our social media and Community interactions. An example of this strategy in action is our weekly #askadwords video series. For each episode, we solicit user questions on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ using the hashtag #askadwords. After uploading the video to YouTube, we promote it in the Community and on social channels to encourage engagement. The video series just passed its 20th week running and now regularly has 1K viewers per week.   BUILDING AN ARMY OF ADVOCATES   Instead of being a megaphone in our social ecosystem, we really want to empower influencers to share our content and amplify our message. Obviously, our Top Contributors have been a huge part of this for many years, but in the past year, we’ve also tried to identify social influencers that extend beyond the Community.   In identifying these social influencers, we do outreach to try to get them involved in the Community in a meaningful way. We are hosting several global influencer events this year to assist with this, and below is an example of a Community highlight we did with David Szetela, arguably one of the most influential people in the PPC space. He’s now writing articles for us in the Community.     Obviously, the fact that we use Lithium for our Community platform and LSW for our social responding/publishing makes it quite easy for us to grow and maintain this multi-channel social ecosystem. We’re able to see how beneficial our social traffic is to our Community growth, we’re able to identify budding influencers in the Community, and we’re able to easily promote all our content seamlessly to social channels via LSW.   This multi-channel social ecosystem has also made us re-evaluate the appropriate channel to communicate product and support launches for the first time. Although our product blog is typically the venue for such announcements, we’ve seen great success first posting updates to Google+ or the Community. Below is an example of a launch that we promoted solely on the Community at first, where it garnered the attention of online industry publications.             In addition to pure reach, we’re also interested in engagement: pages/visit on the Community, RTs/clickthroughs on Twitter, +1s/clickthroughs on Google+, Likes/clickthroughs on Facebook, and watch time on YouTube. Visitors to the Community from social referrals are twice as engaged as regular visitors, and in many markets, Community content shared on social networks is the content with highest levels of engagement. Our creation of this social ecosystem enabled us to build brand loyalty as well as educate and support our advertisers in new and creative ways.  

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Best Community Design   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.   After the initial launch of our community with Lithium, we continuously added new functionalities to the platform based on the feedback we received from our volunteer super users. In this context, we initiated a complete redesign of the community to have a cleaner & well-designed look.   The homepage serves as a vitrine to give an initial idea on what type of content can be found. The new design allows visitors to see the whole community structure directly from the homepage in the cleanest way, so that users can directly access their areas of interest.   New homepage design:   This also allowed us to remove “sub-category” pages to reduce the number of steps to access the target destination. Photo gallery preview brings photo gallery submissions based on most recent, while the recent posts module is adapted to bring topics uniquely and display the most basic information in a neat design.   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.   New navigation structure on homepage:   We re-purposed 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. The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily manage on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated.     Lithium platform has been seamlessly integrated into our web presence and has been skinned accordingly to match our global look and feel to offer our customers the best social experience. Most elements have been simplified to provide an excellent customer journey without hassle. In addition big graphics, modern large fonts as well as the light layout give a fresh and innovative look and feel – even if you watch our community on a smartphone or tablet. Thanks to the clear design, customers can easily share their content and discuss products with each other.   The new community design 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 design elements from our community   New board design:     New thread design:     New blog design:      

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast, a Fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service through all channels – traditional and atypical.  An early adopter in using social media in the Care space, Comcast spends considerable energy and resources developing and implementing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer Operations.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and expanding product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. Being able to effectively measure our efforts and to tell our story to the broader organization is key to determining our impact on our business goals.    Comcast recognized the value of engaging with customers through social media early on and became an industry leader in the social environment. However, Comcast had no scalable, efficient solution that enabled employees to connect with customers.  It was difficult to understand how many resources were needed to support customer demand for social engagement.  Lithium’s solution has provided the scalable and seamless agent to agent and agent to customer workflow we required.  Comcast has been using Lithium for all social care engagement for a year and, through our robust social care scorecard, are now using social data to drive change in the organization. Among our core social care metrics are In Channel Resolution rate – resolving the customer’s issue immediately in the initial social channel – and Escalation Rate – forwarding the customer to another team for resolution.  Effective management of these business objectives requires clean, easily accessible data. With this specific, reliable data we made effective changes in our team management to consistently meet those objectives and have begun to develop scaled forecasting models. This means more in-channel solutions for richer content and increased peer-peer and self-service opportunities.  Comcast also utilizes the voice of the customer feature within LSW, achieving 100% customer satisfaction month after month. While a relatively small portion of overall Comcast customer contacts, the DMO team has also contributed to year over year increases in overall self-service, Voice of the Customer and JD Power & Associates scores. Specifically:   Since 2010, Comcast has improved J.D. Powers Overall Satisfaction +92pts (Video) and +77pts (HSD) This improvement is more than any other provider in the industry during the same period Comcast’s recent improvements (’12 v ’13) in High Speed Data have improved our ranking by +3 places Phone: All-time high rating with largest gains in Communications & Cost of Service HSD: All-time high rating with significant gains in Cost of Service & Communication TV: All-time high rating  with largest gains in Cost of Service, Communications & Billing Since 2010, we have reduced our performance gap to Top Provider by: 80pts (Video), 77pts (HSD), 58pts (Voice) Gained more than any other provider during the same period in HSD & Video The Digital Media Outreach team has been recognized for being at the forefront of social care by numerous high profile blogs, public news articles, published in numerous books and known as an industry leader within the social environment.   The Lithium tool enabled us to quickly identify opportunities to create a better customer experience.  Within three months the changes were made and scores increased significantly.  The top two KPI’s are in-channel resolution and tickets being escalated as you see color coded below. As you can see, our in channel resolution rates doubled since we began using LSW while our escalation rates have continued to decline:     SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.       Below are some examples of DMO recognition in customer satisfaction.   1) http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/exceptional-customer-service-on-twitter/?utm_content=buffereee2f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer       2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/the-top-100-most-social-c_b_3652508.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4617c&utm_medium=twitter      

Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Organization Game Changer    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.    In launching a Community with Lithium, we have become the first major broker affiliated Community in Australia, giving us a key point of differentiation for our customers.   Recognizing the breadth of assets we have to draw on, we have built the Community experience around the ability to connect and learn from other traders, our expert analysts and our customer support teams.     We have realigned our business in a number of key areas to make it a success: -       The existing social team has been expanded to encompass Community management -       We’ve created specific environment for daily analyst commentary and encourage debate around this content -       In seeking to increase the ability for customers to make information easy to find and self serve, we have taken our FAQ library and expanded this into TKB content, adding a new level of depth and opportunity to cross promote where applicable in the forums. -       We have established a specific area for our new traders to tap into the collective knowledge of our other customers and support teams, with a dedicated team created to manage our customer support through this, and other social channels.   For us as a business, it helps create a better educated investor and at the same time facilitate greater customer experience and self service.   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.   Our new to trading board remains the 4 th most popular board within the Community, and has ~ 50% response rate on questions asked being answered by other Community members.