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: 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: MoneyGram  Entry submitted by: Lindsay Conant (LCMG) Digital Marketing Manager, Social Care LSW: www.facebook.com/moneygram and www.twitter.com/moneygramme Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   It’s a big world out there. People now move across continents, through time zones, and around the globe with staggering speed, frequency, and efficiency. And when they do move, they need a way to move their money as well. While banks usually facilitate this need, there is a surprising population of individuals and countries that are either underserved by – or unable to fully use – traditional banking services.    For those individuals, MoneyGram, offers worldwide money transfer services through a network of 336,000 agent locations – including retailers, international post offices, and financial institutions – in more than 200 countries and territories. That’s more locations than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart combined!   In the money transfer industry, sales are traditionally driven by word of mouth and methods of doing business and internal corporate structure are slow to evolve. Therefore a decision to become a more consumer-centric, socially-devoted company was a significant challenge for MoneyGram.   As MoneyGram’s Digital Marketing department began to nurture a stronger relationship with our customers via communication on preferred social media channels, and witnessed impressive growth of our online community, customers immediately started engaging with us to resolve service questions and concerns.   The ability to provide reliable money transfer services for our consumers is critically important to our business. Meeting the needs of consumers who use money transfer services is far from a simple Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 endeavor. Customers rely on MoneyGram services to enable them to complete financial transactions, quickly and securely, to send money to family members and loved ones across different time zones – often money that is intended to help with family emergencies and other important events.   And because our business consistently deals with fraud and privacy risk, we deemed it essential that our customers have a fast connection to our top-tier customer care team to address these concerns – 24/7/365. Timeliness and effectiveness are key. We also wanted to significantly decrease response time and streamline a fragmented customer support process by enabling our customer support team to directly engage with customers on their preferred social media channel.   To address these goals, we resolved to change and refocus the way we approached our customer relationships on social media by strategically combining our marketing channel customer support with our global contact center to respond to and resolve issues more efficiently. This would require a significant cross-functional collaboration and a shift in established social media procedures and customer service methodology within the organization.   Previously, Digital Marketing and Customer Care functioned in distinctively separate “silos.” The Customer Care department focused on issues received from the call center. The Digital team was dedicated to addressing communication with the online community to develop relationships and brand loyalty with customers. That’s where Lithium came in.   Lithium enabled our social care program to grow from one person to a team of eight, quickly and effectively, by providing an easy-to-use, single-engagement tool that: Met the unique needs of both marketing and customer care  Ensured one source of metrics and one message internally Provided a customer profile and conversation history that protected against duplication of conversations and requests Offered scalable workflow management and agent specific metrics which was essential for staffing, training, and performance evaluation purposes   Enabled us to share the voice of the customer back into the business to drive actionable results  Our business partnership with Lithium commenced in October when social care was still being monitored and responded to solely by the Digital team.  Both Digital Marketing and Contact Center leadership then worked together diligently to establish an alliance where both sides trusted the value of social media as a communication channel, and understood the needs of our global customers online.    With limited resources, we did not have the luxury of appointing a team solely dedicated to social care. To solve this issue, we addressed social care as a ‘rotating task’ to be carried out by current customer care representatives. Digital Marketing collaborated closely with Contact Center decision makers to agree upon an agent profile and identify the skill sets required for successful social media engagement. With this blueprint, Customer Care was able to select an effective Social Care team made up of senior representatives who fully understood our products, compliance, and legal guidelines.   Along with meeting the initial challenges, Lithium gives us the opportunity to expand our social care initiative and continue to address our customers evolving needs.   The impact on the organization was significant, highly successful, and received company-wide recognition and acknowledgement. Now, with the help of Lithium, MoneyGram enjoys the benefits of a cooperative relationship where two previously exclusive business channels can combine their respective expertise to serve the needs of our social media community, quickly & effectively, provide in-channel resolution of issues, and realize the potential to convert dissatisfaction into solid brand advocacy. Customer Care now looks at themselves as more than simply a “call center” and has repositioned the department as a “contact center” that can communicate with customers on a variety of different channels. And most importantly, they are now creating customer service roles that will be primarily focused on social media.   Our compliance, fraud, and security departments also gained more visibility into our customer’s online conversations and were, therefore, able to identify and respond to the most current and relevant customer concerns.   Additionally, our customers benefit in the ability to communicate directly with customer service representatives via our social media channels to resolve service issues and, at the same time, continue interacting with MoneyGram as a social media community member.   Here’s an example of how MoneyGram’s 24/7/365 Social Care program is directly impacting and improving the customer experience.   As well as improved customer experience, the new social care focus has enhanced our ability to protect our customers from fraud activity that involves money transfers. The interaction below shows an actual scenario wherein we were able to alert a customer to a possible scam before they became a victim.     Our Business Results: Since implementing Lithium in October 2013 MoneyGram has: Increased the number of customers assisted per month by 46% Increased social care outbound volumes per month by 95% Decreased conversations requiring off-line resolution per month by 17% Reduced response time by 93% – to just over an hour – in February   “It would be difficult to overstate how game-changing MoneyGram’s efforts to improve our customer experience has been for our organization, both globally and locally,” according to Christina Martin, Vice President of Digital Marketing.  “In an industry that is rooted in established business procedures, even minor changes require careful planning and thoughtful internal coordination.  Changing the way we looked at social media and its contribution to our customer care efforts was, in essence, a remarkable evolution. It gave birth to new business opportunities, increased service efficiencies, and unprecedented cooperation between departments.   And through this shift in thinking, Lithium was instrumental in providing us with the exact tool we needed to make the transition smooth and highly successful.”    

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: TELUS  Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (deturbulence) Sr Strategy Manager Community: TELUS Neighbourhood (forum.telus.com)  Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     In 2010, we started listening and responding to customer mentions of “telus” on Twitter. This was done using our enterprise platform (formerly Radian6) with a very small team of contact centre agents, looking at only our Mobility line of business. As we gained more and more experience, the channel became more active, and we found we could not only serve customers, but also exceed their expectations by listening to discussions and engaging.   We learned that we could have a legitimate service channel that not only displaced contacts from our live contact centre, but also deliver risk management by ensuring that negative comments from influencers or media did not go unanswered. To this end, in 2012, we added additional agents to support Home Services, and started creating more robust processes to enable communication and hand-offs between operations, public relations/corporate communications, and marketing. These processes have evolved into meaningful partnerships, with the business aligning behind common goals of putting out customers first, and having teams that historically did not inter-operate collaborate on a daily basis.     As we were getting more and more involved from a social service standpoint in delivering customer experience and support through engagement, we found that we needed tools and technologies focused on engagement to suit the needs of this growing channel. To that end, in the back half of 2012, we undertook an evaluation of a multitude of social tools to not only underpin our engagement and customer experience needs, but also to grow our social capabilities. We selected Lithium Social Web as the best tool for our needs based on routing, case management, tagging, and reporting. These capabilities not only empowered the operational teams to really own social engagement, but also gave them credibility internally.   In early 2013, LSW was implemented, enabling our operational team with clear lines of accountability and responsibility on a case by case basis, also giving us insight to volumes, times, and topics of conversation. Supported by this capability, we opened our historically closed Facebook wall to customer posts, allowing customers another communication channel with TELUS, and in to a sustainable workflow process.     To further our strategy of putting customers first and our goals of delivering strong social experiences, we began work on the TELUS Neighbourhood, a Lithium community, in March of 2013. Launching in June, our community serves as an opportunity to ensure support content does not expire/evaporate as it does on Twitter (due to Twitter’s velocity), as well as to enable the growth of superusers and brand advocates. Further, we can leverage it as a draw to bring social experiences on-domain, closer to self serve capabilities and to shopping.     What's next for us   Our efforts in the social space have taught us the need to develop people and skillsets directly related to social service. To that end, we are developing a formalized team (outside of the typical contact centre agent pool) with a distinct mandate, learning and development track, and set of success metrics to properly grow and sustain our social service efforts. This team will own all operational activity, and will continue the active collaboration with PR and marketing teams.   As we move in to 2014, we are finding new ways to leverage social insights internally. We are partnered with web teams, as our community activities demonstrate content customers are most hungry for, based on authorship and views, which inform web development and content authoring/promotion. Operational enablement teams are also receiving our feedback and insights to better tune our processes.   Additionally, we are able to springboard off of our community design and internal partnerships to launch TELUS Ideas, providing us yet another stream of insights in to the customer experience, directly from customers. This, coupled with our work to introduce a gamification strategy, continues to unite the organization internally to better hear and serve our customers.   Our business results in 2013   Twitter 56k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 25 minutes in Q4 Quality survey results say: If a colleague, friend or family member were looking for services such as home phone, Internet, TV or Wireless, what is the likelihood that you would recommend TELUS to them? 77% Top 2 Box How would you rate the performance of the TELUS social media support agent for the level of service you received? 88% Top 2 Box After your experience with TELUS’ social media support team, how likely are you to share your experience with others? 86% Top 2 Box Facebook 6.3k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 118 minutes in Q4 TELUS Neighbourhood (Lithium Community) June launch 5.6k+ forum posts 1.3k+ Accepted Solutions Estimated 28.7k+ live contacts displaced 11k+ completed registrations, 254k+ logins  

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: Telefonica  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 24 countries. As of September 2013, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 320.3 million.   Telefonica Spain’s 2014 goals focused on the following: Reduce customer support telephone calls Increase CSI in social environments Increase commercial leads to homepage Improve SEO positioning (especially for FTTH and 4G) Improve the tone of the Internet buzz towards Movistar Improve customer self-servicing  Through our Lithium-powered community in 2013, we made significant improvements in SEO, traffic, and acquisition. We also achieved big wins in support savings (see our Support Savings MVP entry), in addition to CSI and CHI.   Community has positioned us as the SEO authority versus our competitors and local tech forums. (source: Opensite.org)      We also rank highest amongst our competitors in metrics like best traffic and lowest bounce rate. (source: similarweb.com)        18% of our homepage visits are generated by the community (source: alexa rank)        Some additional quantifiable results: -       Due to our community, our SEO traffic reached over 80% (top SEO positions in key words such as FTTH and 4G) -       Community is responsible for an increase in commercial leads: 20,000 click-throughs from community to homepage (movistar.es) in 2013 -      Telefonica has added 2.2 million subscribers as of June 2013 with more than 3 million homes in Spain now equipped with Fusion, an integrated product offering that brings together broadband, mobile, landline, and television services all in 1 simple package. Not only did they see existing customers switch over to Fusion, but 56% of Fusion subscribers are newly acquired customers who took advantage of the wealth of information and peer advice on the community about the new product to help make their purchase decision. Web traffic referrals from the community to the purchase funnel increased by 20% during the 1 st month of launch.      

Company: Telefonica                   Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 24 countries. As of September 2013, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 320.3 million.   Telefonica Spain’s 2014 goals focused on the following: Reduce customer support telephone calls  Increase CSI in social environments Increase commercial leads to homepage Improve SEO positioning (especially for FTTH and 4G) Improve the tone of the Internet buzz towards Movistar Improve customer self-servicing  Through our Lithium-powered community, we were primarily able to support our call reduction goal with significant cost savings in 2013. In addition, community has increased our CSI, CHI, and NPS, as well as acquisition and traffic. Here are some of our results in those areas (also see our Digital Strategy Leader entry for additional results):   -       Customers are thrilled with engaging with the service provider and peers in a thriving engagement hub. Our community boasts a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 76% in response to the question “would you recommend us to your friends and family?” -       Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) of customers attended in the Community: 9.1 -       Community Health Index (CHI): stable over 700 during the last year (Top 5 in Telco Sector ) -       Telefonica’s landmark product, Movistar Fusion, an integrated offering that brings together broadband, mobile, landline, and television services all in 1 simple package, has achieved successful results since the launch in October 2012. Before the official commercial launch, Fusion was introduced to the community for a few weeks prior as the central communication hub, where customers generated hundreds of posts ranging from billing questions to general excitement and feedback from members who were eager to either sign up or switch their existing plan to Fusion. To this day, the Fusion FAQ on the community is still one of our most visited posts—approximately 85,000 unique visits with over 700 posts since the FAQ was posted in September 2012. This helpful FAQ has contributed to Telefonica’s increase in call deflection.   The thriving Movistar community has provided tremendous cost savings for Telefonica: -       56% of surveyed community members indicated that they were able to get a resolution through the community without needing to call customer service. -       Of those 56%, 65% of them declared that they may have called our call center if they hadn’t found the answer they were looking for through community. -       As a result, we received 15.2M visits to our community and avoided 5M calls, which amounted to €10 million in savings in 2013.   Here is an example of a hot topic that community was able to resolve: How to change the Wifi router password (385,000 visits):      Another example of a popular issue that community was able to resolve: How to switch the voice mailbox off (300,000 visits):        

Company: AppDynamics   Entry submitted by: Steve Levine (appslevine) Senior Product Manager, Community                       Community: AppDynamics Community (http://community.appdynamics.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     We are a leader in the explosive Application Intelligence space. Our users are very technical and we provide enablement to this audience through our Lithium Community. We strive to maximize customer satisfaction and adoption and see that clearly in the stats coming from Lithium Social Intelligence each week.    The community is linked from our .com site, directly through our software product and outbound e-mail marketing campaigns. We also obtain subscribers through organic search on the web. Our boards are divided into a small number of product categories. By creating hoards of new company-generated rich media content alongside user-generated, we now believe to have the algorithm for technical enablement and have measurable results coming in regularly.      In order to create a framework where product management, engineering, education, customer success and the SE orgs are able to create their own enablement content on Lithium, we devised an HTML/CSS widget scheme with some 40 different templates.  The framework allows Idea boards to be used to host completely custom page layouts implemented by widgets. This includes video embedded players, image lightboxes, styled titles and body text with standard layout rules. We stage new content right on production using a ‘curator’ role assigned to reviewers. Our own page code enforces this so it isn’t seen by the public until we unlock it.   We also moved all of our Studio components into an offline Ruby environment called ‘Middleman’ which is used in conjunction with GitHub to stage content and code outside of our Staging site before pushing it.  This way we created an optimized, development environment spanning multiple time zones and geos. We can now adjust and preview any Studio function offline in our Middleman environment before pushing to stage and then test in stage before using Studio Publish to push to prod.  Robots push the studio components back up from Github in seconds and can do it incrementally.      We provide what is represented inside the AppDynamics circle. Average users come in with questions and lacking knowledge, and the advanced/expert users and AppDynamics team help them become experts themselves. This is based around Content > Experts > Analytics as depicted in the below graphic.  We have measured increased subscriptions and higher engagement metrics in the new content areas. Our traffic in the 90 days prior, from September 2013 to December 2013 was 70k page views, 20k visits with 10k uniques.  In the 3 months since the new content went live, from Dec-20 2014 – March 20, 2014 views increased 15% to 80k, visits 18% to 24.5k and uniques by 24% to 12.9k. We have also seen heavy downloads of our product extensions which are hosted on the community. Product extension downloads went from 0 to approximately 600 in 3 months.  Extensions development grew from 0-62 in that same period. Sales have queried community engagement metrics during land and expand lifecycles in order to leverage user behavior against sales strategy.   Additional Technical Accomplishments   Front-End Development Approach In order to refresh and re-layout our community site from scratch, we needed a hi-fidelity approach to customization. Using studio with its myriad browser-based text editors was not going to provide the version control and scalability we required. We completely refreshed both the CSS and layout substantially and ran code on every page to hide most of the HTML coming down from Lithium and replace it with modified page code.  This allowed us to mash up REST calls to Lithium’s back-end with our custom layout code to get the pages to look like we needed them to, including the home page. We did this efficiently by timing DOM loads with code execution (JavaScript) so the user experience remained sub-1-second.   By using GitHub to maintain all development branches, we rarely experienced an out of sync codebase.  Teams in India and the US worked independently on separate branches with no conflicts, saving precious time during rapid deployments. (2-week agile sprints). We also maintained the ability to deprecate code and revert production in the event of regressions.  Our progress was hyper fast with an extremely low bug count and we refreshed and rebuilt the community in 6 months, faster than any other project of this magnitude in the company’s history.   Custom User-Based, Off-Site Analytics Facility Initially we did not have an API to retrieve user behavior against actual users at scale. However, we were able to implement page code that monitors button events for downloading product extensions. Each time a registered user clicks this button, we capture their user info, time/date and the extension they downloaded and store it in an offsite Django-based MySQL db.  We can then pull log files of these actions and generate dashboards of this behavior.  This is very useful to sales teams in the midst of upselling enterprise customers. In addition to our custom analytics we also instrument every page of the community with Google Analytics tag code and report it (minus user info) to GA.

Company: HP Entry submitted by: Tyna Chua (tyna_c) Social Media Manager Community: HP Support Forum (h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _______________________________________________   The award-winning HP Consumer Support Forums – the cornerstone of HP’s social support efforts – are a global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another to exchange insights, tips and answers to each other's questions.   Boasting traffic of two visits every second in 2012, the HP Consumer Support Forums have hit some remarkable milestones which demonstrate their reach, impact and growth:   With a notable 48% increase in Forum questions, the community handled this growth effectively, showing a 17% improvement in reply rate.  We are showing continued improvement in reply rates, with the last three months showing an increase of 27%. An impressive 80% increase in page views of Accepted Solutions. Accepted Solutions are viewed 1,500 times on average, enabling others to benefit from a solution provided by the community to the original post-er. (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011).   Drivers of Success   At the heart of HP’s Social Support Program are the following:   I.  Community Engagement HP’s social care community would not be as successful as it is today if it weren’t for our volunteer "HP Experts" – employees and customers who donate their time to the Forums to answer HP customer questions.These Experts are the life blood of HP’s Forums, and their active participation directly influences the vibrancy and vitality of the seven HP Forum communities.   So how do we energize and motivate our Experts to keep participating in our Forums?  We continue to develop our HP Expert Program, which includes:   Our annual Social Support Summit, bringing together hundreds of our top Forum contributors from around the world with one thing in common: a passion to help others through social tools.   In its second year, the Summit this March in Orlando, FL attracted 200 attendees speaking more than seven languages: English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.   Worldwide expert meet ups:  Meet-ups bring together global and regional HP employees and local volunteers for informal social gatherings to exchange ideas and solutions. Contests:  HP introduced a gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to threads on the least active Forum boards. Expert Days: 24-hour Expert "marathons” on specific topics designed to accelerate solutions to customer issues. Improving Expert efficiency with an Unanswered Questions Widget: A widget displaying unanswered Forum posts allows HP Experts fast and easy access to neglected posts, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers. Product Loan Program: Provides Experts the opportunity to have the most popular HP products in their homes so they can better help customers asking product-specific questions.  Product Briefing Series:  Provide training on new HP products and technologies, giving Experts up-to-date knowledge to help customers in the Forums.  We conducted seven Product Briefings in 2012, with more planned in 2013.  These initiatives helped contribute to the following results (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011):                                 II. Customer Experience Because the great majority of our Forum visitors are “observers,” we have placed due emphasis on improving the user interface by making it easier for visitors to ask a question or search the Forums.  In partnership with Lithium, we have launched several customer experience improvements that increase visibility to the “ask” feature and improve search results layout.   Preliminary data shows that the changes yield positive results, increasing Forum search by 66% globally (week after release average vs. week prior to release average).  In the pipeline are changes to simplify registration and encourage customer feedback.   III.  Monitoring and Harvesting We currently harvest our Forum conversations and provide frequent, regular feedback to the business units for product improvement or service/support quality. Funneling customer feedback from Forums to business units results in improvements such as creation of patches by our software development team or updates to content on our website.Additionally, every month, we provide the business units with a list of top viewed threads that have not been solved by the community so they can further investigate and provide guidance.   IV. Investments Our Forums are a key component of our overall support strategy, and this is evident in our investment priorities, including: improving our tools and making enhancements to the Forums experience recruiting top talent to add to our army of Experts and advocates investing in our volunteer base and dedicated agents that help assist our customers Social media as a channel for customer support continues to grow in importance to HP and its customers.  Our Forum activity remains far-reaching, providing support throughout several regions and languages.   Quick Timeline HP's Consumer Support Forums available since 2009 Quarterly Expert Days across seven languages commenced 2009 Expert meet ups commenced 2010 Inaugural Social Support Summit occurred March 2012 One billion Page Views milestone in November 2012        

Company: National Instruments Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight __________________________________________________   “Are two Knights in one day better than two days in one night?” <Hint, the answer is yes.>   When the NI Discussion Forum was launched in 2004, we could not have predicted how successful it would be in fostering passionate, proficient, and accomplished advocates for National Instruments. Our super users are not only incredibly engaged, but they also constantly push the envelope and drive innovation. They are an extension of the passionate company culture we have built and strive to maintain internally at NI.   Our community members chose the ranking Knight of NI based on a shared love for the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members who reach the 10,000-post milestone virtually receive the Knight of NI title and physically receive a shrubbery. This group has only seven members but is a respected and revered resource within our community. Collectively, the Knights have a vast wealth of knowledge. When we ask why they continue to engage in the NI Discussion Forums, we consistently receive the same response: They enjoy helping others, solving difficult problems, and sharing their knowledge to develop and empower future engineers. The Knights of NI participate because they truly recognize the value of our company, products, and industry.   We recently recognized two Knights of NI on consecutive days! Becoming a Knight does not happen every day; in fact, it does not even happen every year. However, in their race to Knighthood, these two loyal users have consistently been neck and neck for over eight years.               As a group, our Knights’ engagements make up 8 percent of our total community activity, and they receive more than 20 percent of the total kudos in the community. They frequently create quality content and have authored 12 percent of our total solutions. These numbers are extremely significant considering we have seven Knights in a community of over 200,000 users! The sheer volume of posts and solutions that the Knights provide significantly drive down support costs for our organization. We are thankful for their passion and strive to nurture their behavior through recognition, sneak previews before products releases, and direct channels to engage with NI engineers, just to name a few. The Knights lead by example and inspire fellow community members to engage to earn the greatest reward: knowledge.   There are many more examples and statistics we could mention to further sing the praises of this valued group, however one of the greatest outcomes of this recognition system is the bond our super users have built with one another. Their discussions are helpful, interesting, cutting edge, personal, and always entertaining. A great portion of the success of the NI Discussion Forums is absolutely due to these loyal SuperFans.    

Company: SuccessFactors Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Why should we win this award? “We want our customers to love work again!” To ensure that our customers have the best tools and resources to help them achieve success using our products, we launched the SuccessFactors Customer Community in April 2012. The primary goal of our community is to promote peer-to-peer engagement, but we also want people to use the platform for best practices knowledge, tips and tricks, discussion forums, blogs, new ideas, and much more.     The Challenge After launch we realized that our customers still had to access multiple systems during the day to get to our training and professional services resources. We needed to enable a single sign-on solution between our community and our SharePoint sites. We have a private community with a registration process so that only customers, partners, and employees are able to join. We have an active directory that authenticates users as they register. The two other critical resources we wanted customers to be able to access through the community were our SuccessFactors Training and SuccessFactors Professional Services. Both of these teams provide extensive knowledge and resources, but they do so on separate SharePoint sites.   The Solution Our exceptional technical implementation, which connects the Lithium community to the SharePoint sites with the click of the button, has resulted in a completely seamless community experience for our customers.  In order to achieve this technical implementation, we worked with Lithium partner Cloudsquads and a Cloudsquads partner SusQtech. This project enabled the single sign-on capabilities with a custom integration effort. The team first explored the solution, which started with the ADFS authentication issue. The technical teams then built an integration account, which provided credentials to access SharePoint. Then they developed a custom widget within Lithium that enabled easy access to the shared documents by using an iFrame housing the SharePoint sites, within which customers can download the documents. The custom-logic widget was placed on the community forums via the Lithium studio layout editor. The widget is modular and placed in the Lithium Studio Editor. A new page was created to host this service, the content is filtered by the SharePoint app, and Lithium passes whatever available fields that are specified by the integration protocol.     After clicking the button on the homepage with single sign on users are brought directly to the PS SharePoint site.     Training Page “Get Training” button     The Training SharePoint Page after you click on the “Get Training” button single sign on brings you to the Training SharePoint Page   The Outcome Customers are extremely satisfied with this seamless integrated solution. When customers and partners need information, documents, training, or other resources, the SuccessFactors Community is their one-stop shop! Once they are in the community, if they need to access the SuccessAcademy (training) or the Empower Methodology/Welcome Kits (Professional Services), they can easily access these SharePoint systems with a click of a button without logging in again. This is a huge win for us, and it creates an exceptional community experience for our customers.  

Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________     Best Superfan Story/Insight BSkyB 2013   In July 2012 we introduced our innovative Super User Program on the Sky Help Forum Community, recognising the super contributions from some of our forum members. Our Sky Help Community Super Users are individuals from within our Community who are the ultimate Sky boffins. Their technical prowess, detailed knowledge and broad range of expertise mean that they are the most valuable commodity in sourcing answers to our Customers questions. Whether they are technical aficionados looking to get the optimum performance of advanced applications or a technophile looking to simply decipher the jargon our Super Users can offer insight and support across our Customer base. All of our Super Users are independent of Sky and offer a true Customer insight in how to get the best from our products and services.   We wanted to implement a Super User program which truly recognised those active members within our Community who were advocates of sharing knowledge and best practice and wholeheartedly encompassed our methodology of peer to peer support and inclusion.   In being an advocate of our Customers and understanding their viewpoint our Super Users can offer a definitive insight into the sentiment of our audience and work with us to envisage a cohesive community built upon our core values. Our current base of 12 Super Users, have been recognised not only by Sky but by their peers as frequent, knowledgeable contributors with the Kudos and Accepted solutions to prove they are ‘worthy’ 🙂   To recognise the contribution of our band of expert Superfans we provide them with enhanced access to encapsulate them as part of the Sky team. “The Boardroom” our Private Community boiler room allows us to engage with our Super Users at a unique level understanding their views, ideas and feedback on new product trials, services and general discussions about almost everything. Not only that, but their contributions to our dedicated Knowledge Base and Monthly Blog articles truly gives a unique view of what it means to be a Super User and a true Sky Superfan.   One of our original community members on the Sky Help Forum was Annie+UK who registered on 27th October 2010 and has become a mainstay Sky boffin across our Help Forum offering insightful help and support to our Customers.     As a respected senior member within our community Annie+UK is our ultimate Superfan and was a first choice to join our Super User Program when launched.   However, it wasn’t always that way. During the early days, Annie+UK felt frustrations with regard to issues she was having related to her service provision and how this was handled from a customer support point of view, all of her frustrations were evident in her posts. A lot of this had to do with transparency, product development and honest communication. In case managing the issues experienced by Annie+UK we began to develop a foundation of open communication and feedback which offered us key insights into the sentiment of our wider community. Her insight was invaluable as a true testament of the value of our Customer’s knowledge and experience. Cultivating a strong relationship based on a mutual support and shared knowledge has integrated Annie+UK and our wider Super Users into the Sky team.   Being part of the Super User program and having the opportunity to build relationships with the Sky team allowed us to be more open and honest and along with having the opportunity to be involved in beta trials has helped change Annie+Uk’s opinion and rather than leaving the community she has become an advocate, this is evident in her having read 90%of all posts across our Community Forum and in supporting her peer customer group has responded to in excess of 2,750 Customer queries.                                             Her continued support of our Community members in sharing her knowledge and advice has assured her respected status as one of our key Super Users. She is not afraid to ask difficult questions and pose feedback directly to us based on Customer experiences which, assures that we can continually improve our service for our Customers. Her inspirational and engaging manner has assured she is an advocate of both our Customers and Sky which, has been key in the continued development of our Community and indeed our service provision.     In essence, Annie+UK has spent over 1 ½ years logged into the community, for a community that is less than 3 years old…making Annie+UK our ultimate Super Fan.      

Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________       Best Social Support Program BSkyB 2013   BskyB has become an integral part of our modern entertainment society with in excess of 10 million subscribers across the UK and Ireland.   As part of our core vision of “Believe in Better” we have implemented a multi-platform Customer interaction and engagement model to create a culture of entertaining, exciting and inspiring our Customers. As a pioneer of modern entertainment and Customer service we developed a fully integrated Social support Customer program encapsulating Sky Help Forums, Facebook and Twitter delivering service excellence whenever and wherever our Customers need us.   Our Vision   “To ensure our existing Community and Social Media channels are kept relevant, informative and engaging. To develop emergent channels to engage our current subscribers, enhance our brand/recognition with our Online Customer base.”   Our core goal in implementing a cohesive Customer Service structure is centered upon the integration of our Social Channels and Customer support services, whilst promoting a culture of peer to peer support and online self-help.   Empowering our Customers to utilise the wealth of self-service options online supports the fast paced lifestyles of our Customer base allowing them to access the information they need at the click of a button at a time that suits them. In increasing community traffic and engagement, we have identified a core improvement in Customer first time resolution, Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.   Our Strategy   Our core methodology within Sky is “Believe in Better” from investing in our Customers, our product and our people we have created a culture of continuous improvement and development. Our social support streams are unique in their integration as a cohesive Social Customer Support program combining an end to end Customer experience.   The Sky Help Forum launched in October 2010 since then our community has grown to nearly 250,000 registered users, which is 250% up on last year.   We have seen our engagement on the community increase in the last year and we now have 9,708 marked accepted solutions. Over the last six months our thread views have reached in excess of 1.5 million each week.   We have also introduced Ask a Question and a Knowledge Base to help support our Customers in getting an answer to their query or issue quickly.   Our Knowledge Base is proving a great success to both our Community and Sky as a whole. We currently have 65 articles within the Knowledge Base with in excess of 127,813 article views in one month alone (February – March 2013) Our Knowledge Base is fast becoming a “One Stop Shop” for troubleshooting guides, hints & tips and ‘How To’ guides for our Community members and visitors.   To enrich support for our Customers we have expanded our Communities & Social Media team at Sky to incorporate a Community & Engagement team and a Designated Case Handling team. In optimising our Customer Service strategy in terms of social support we have utilised both the traditional Customer insight frameworks based upon KPIs of Customer sentiment, traffic and SEO analysis but also we have implemented a core Customer insight strategy to ensure that we continue to improve the service we offer our audience.   Our Customer insight strategy includes the implementation of Customer direct feedback sessions based both in an online WebEx environment and Customer closeness events to understand the experiences of our Customers. This insight has proved invaluable in the continued improvement of Customer support with the future implementation of gamification and supportive resources. The insight provided in terms of the continued optimisation of our social platforms, use of KPI metrics in terms of sentiment, SEO analytics and Customer satisfaction also support continued improvement across our Contact Centre operations providing key insight into service provision, product insight and Customer engagement thus influencing improvement programs across the organisation.   As part of our Customer improvement initiatives we have launched the One Service Programme offering an individualised Customer support stream within our Contact Centres and our dedicated One Service online Community.   The core ethos of One Service is to provide our Customers with continued Service Excellence in their end to end Customer journey from joining Sky to help and support. The initial One Service programme has launched to a pilot group customer base of 400,000 Customers in a key geographical location.   The measures of success in terms of individualised support have been resoundingly successful in terms of core operational metrics of Customer First Time resolution, Customer satisfaction and NPS. We have introduced brand new online features exclusively for One Service Customers including “My Help Request” that allows our Customers to manage their account and get in touch with us should they have any questions or experience any issues.   The My Help Request Portal is a central hub to raise help requests and manage any existing enquiries related to Sky products and services. All My Help Requests are case managed by our team of specialist trained Sky staff who resolve queries and answer any questions within 24 hours providing updates via text alerts or email.   In offering our Customers multi-platform help it was key that our internal structure in terms of processes and insight was robust and inclusive in terms of shared knowledge and best practice. Developing a core network of Specialists across our varying products and services assures that our audience demographic receives simply great service regardless of their chosen channel. Historically, our internal operational structure and process was designed to support Customer interaction in a standardised contact centre format however, with the inception of help and support across social channels outlining Customer journeys based upon each individual social channel was imperative in offering tailored solutions based on the method of contact.   Our core Customer Response Management system is now reflective of each individual Customer’s journey across all products and contact channels. Individual case management of each Customer’s enquiries across both our Lithium Social Monitoring/Social interaction platform and our internal Customer Response Management system provides a holistic view of each Customer’s activity and interactions allowing our people to provide an individualised service in understanding our Customers.   “Just knowing this has been achieved with the customer only needing their use of their smartphone/tablet/laptop opens up a world of possibilities. No more waiting on hold, no more call flows or robotic responses, just 100% satisfaction! And the best part of it all? The system is still in its infancy and will get even better with future updates!” - Dave Charleston, Community Co-Ordinator   Outcome/Results   As a pioneer of multi-platform entertainment and Customer interaction we continue to develop new and innovative ways to engage and offer support to our Customers. From Social Media to Interactive help via their Remote Control we have assured that our Customers are at the heart of our business.   The introduction of social interaction across multiple platforms has shown not only seen an increase in interactivity– over 82,000 interactions per month - but an increase in Customer satisfaction to 87%. Similarly, NPS for both Twitter and Chat Services has also increased substantially to 61% and 64% respectively.   In addition to increased usage and satisfaction, BSkyB has seen significant savings through call deflection with circa 11% Customers saying their visit to the forum partially resolved their query; and a further 29% of customers surveyed within the forum stating their query had been fully resolved to their satisfaction negating the requirement to contact us via telephone.   “I think that our use of social media along with our own in-house help forum is second to none due to the interaction we are enabled to have with our customers. Actually dealing with their inquiries through this form of communication allows us to deal with a customer at a time which is convenient for them, but it also allows us to deal with a customer from their initial query all the way through to a resolution for the most part.” - Fraser Hughes, Community Co-Ordinator      

Company: CommSec Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (benshute) Social Media Manager Community: CommSec Community (commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Best New Community, Best Community Technical Implementation, Best Community Design ________________________________________________   The CommSec Community is a unique proposition within the Australian online broking space. CommSec, as Australia’s largest online broker, has created a place for customers to connect with each other and discuss the share market, trading strategies, charting and other aspects of online trading. Regardless of how long they have been trading, or what their trading style is, this is a place where all customers can feel comfortable and learn from each other.   We launched in early February with a migrated client base from our previous chat room functionality. Over the last 6 weeks, they have populated with content - insights into sectors and stocks, charts on the price of gold, silver, oil and currencies, and offered up many ideas for enhancements to make the community a better place for all.     From a design and technical perspective, we have a number of custom enhancements to the platform which we believe are firsts in their field: We have the latest market indices and traded stocks constantly updating within the Community.                                                                     2. We have integrated ASX stock codes within the posting functionality, which allows us to: Generate sector and company specific views of the community Pull in and display the latest price information as it relates to the particular stock Display any company announcements that are made Members can buy and sell stocks directly from within the Community, add a stock to their watch list, or get a more detailed quote 3.  We have also included a sentiment indicator as part of the post creation page, where members discussing a stock can tell us if they think it’s a buy, hold, sell, reduce or accumulate. This allows us to: Measure market, sector and stock sentiment Compare that sentiment to the most traded stock data from the ASX While we are in our infancy, we are looking at a number of future enhancements that will take the aggregated data we are capturing and use it to foster the vision of our customers learning from each other.

Company: LandlordStation Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   LandlordStation is a startup company founded in 2010 which provides web-based software apps to property managers and landlords throughout the US. Although our community (and company) are new and small, both are growing at rapid clips. More importantly, we understand and value the importance of communities and other social platforms and have made a concerted effort built them into the core of our business.   The LandlordStation Community was launched in January of 2013, as a way for our uniquely independent clientele to have a convenient and open way to communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, and generally connect to their peers in a very fragmented industry. Our goal with the community is to grow awareness of our brand in the wider property management industry and improve our traffic channels with new and unique content.     We have already begun to see a return on this investment as traffic from the community and searches for the community have grown rapidly over recent months and are already causing a noticeable difference in the cost of our traffic generation as we chip away at the percentage of our traffic that is generated by PPC and other advertising channels. We already have hundreds of excellent users (and a few budding Superusers) as well as posts that continue to receive hundreds of daily views by landlords from across the country. Our number of total post views is at 100,000 within 75 days of launch. As we continue to gain traction with both our community and company, we expect to continue to see rapid growth in our user-base with the goal of being the premier community for this industry.   Community Impact since launch: Conversion rate for purchases on our main site for traffic referred by the Community (and referrals from Community oriented social campaigns) is more than 2X the conversion rate from PPC traffic. Dramatic increase in organic Google searches for LandlordStation by name (or close variation) in Q1 2013 v. Q4 2012 suggesting a higher brand awareness driven in large part by the Community. Increase in traffic driven by real-time keywords. For example, we recently noted revenue generation from keywords based on a popular real estate news story that was referenced and linked in our Community. SEO for real-time or newsworthy keywords is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish and we are very pleased that we are seeing this in such a young community. As illustrated in the screenshot below, we received significant traffic during this period for the keyword "landlord whipped tenant" which was the subject of a news story referenced in the community.   As we continue to grow our company and our community, we feel strongly that social is core value, not an add-on strategy. We will shortly being moving all of our customer service forums and knowledge base inside the Community as well which will increase traffic and hopefully create an even more vibrant area for our clients and our contributors.

Company: SFR Entry submitted by: Sandie Hodiesne (SH) Social Media Manager Community: Le Forum SFR (forum.sfr.fr) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   SFR Forum, an online Adventure, a great Human Adventure!   SFR Forum exists since 2008. It’s a place where web advisors used to respond automatically to customer requests either in a public or private mode.   During spring 2012, we faced a big challenge: Moving from an online customer services model to a 100% peer-to-peer Support Community model. A new way of thinking and managing information - a complete break and a real step forward into the world of online peer-to-peer Communities.   We decided to give to our future community as much space and autonomy as we could provide them with. We decided to take drastic decision. We kept the name but started from a white sheet without capitalizing on the old threads and existing content which could remind us of our previous operating processes.   We identified about thirty Super-users on our various social media properties (“Atelier SFR”, old “SFR Forum”, “HUB”). With the active help of our community managers, we gathered contact details for all of the super-users. A first contact was made through email. Afterward we contacted them all by phone and explained them this huge new project. Out of the 30 contacts, 29 were very enthusiastic and immediately ready to engage in this Adventure. Sandie (SFR’s Social Media Manager) set up 2 video conference meetings to discuss with the super-users in order to decrease the growing fear regarding the new community, to answer to remarks such as “it was better before with the old forum”, and to create the first relationships between participants. Fabien and Manuella, two community managers from the beginning, were collaborating with Sandie during these meetings and suggested a Beta test phase of one month. We explained to our super-users what would be their role and why it would be beneficial for them to be part of the New Forum beta phase. During this month, they would be able contribute to the community editorial content, create their own content, find new ways to communicate with the community management team in a public mode and embrace a heads-on the philosophy of the new Forum.   The day before the D-Day, the enthusiasm and the engagement of our “Founders” was very big. Dartagnan, Michel2, DocMac, RafCorDel, Rebel, Kendokanne and all the others were very excited to be launched in the open and exposed to a new audience and a new community.   January 15 th at 5pm, great emotion and vibes: first discussions, first ranks reached, first Private Message conversations… The SFR peer-to-peer Community where users could share their customer experiences and help each other was born!   Our “Founders” were recognizable with their specific “Founders” badges created for them and quickly took care of the new users. The SFR community is their community and they are deciding everything about the choice of discussion to highlight, what to post on the blog or the Wikisphere … These super fans defend strongly this new philosophy. We could witness comments like « But where are the SFR advisors?” or “Here, there is only us, the community, satisfied customers happy to help and support others. If you need to access your confidential customer data, the community won’t be able to answer.” When the community is unable to answer you, we guide you to the right contact points after the diagnostic is made. In this community, we always try to find a solution!   Our super-users have a dedicated space, a “private room”, invisible from the other members. Through this private room, we inform them about cases that members face regularly and the answers we have and that they can be spread out across the community. They can also give us their feedback on what is working or not with the platform and further needed developments… It’s also in this private room that we discuss about our next video conference, meetings, special events such as call for topics for the blog.                                                                                                   To transmit these values across the community, members must have taken the ownership of this online space. For this magic to operate, the online community needs to resonate with the members. Each members needs to feel comfortable navigating this online community. The customer experience must be positive.   The video launch takes the advantage of this simplicity: the ability to create something great together.   The ranking starts in a reference universe known from all but gradually draws references from the gaming world, while relying on the values of the Forum:                 - The “Builders” who by their contributions and exchanges secure and solidify the base of collective knowledge:                 - The “Enchanters” are recognized both for the quality of information they provide and the benevolence that radiates around them:                 After only 1 month and a half, our community has now 40 super-users with a high level of posts - Vindedious (1600), Kendokanne (1700), Boriswap (1300), Dartagnan (1400)…  They are some of our heroes you can visit in the “Forum SFR” community.   Discussions between all the community members and the super-users give us the opportunity to detect very quickly any malfunction and to inform the community when a problem is solved. For example, Kendonkanne initiative helped to qualify a problem with sms billing, to solve it very quickly and to relay the information in a public mode. This enabled to reassure our customers that have send us a lot of sweet words.                             40 Super-users provide 50% of the Community content   In addition of this efficiency, pleasure of sharing and conviviality moved in : Almost 2,100 posts shared within our Community on the “Discussion du Comptoir” pages. In a month and half, discussions are as well about music and cinema as Art in general.   The strength brought by our Community Management team are: Sincerity and authenticity, the wish to humanize the online relationships, the genuine desire to develop and reward anonymous expert by making them shine under the limelight. We will meet for real and for the first time our super-users on March 22 nd . It’s our way to celebrate Spring!   Goal : The official launch of our super-users program and share its content – Virtual Workshop and meeting with SFR experts, SFR site visits, game to participate to events such as new mobile launch, celebration and more.   Their first mission, find a name to the program. And to close the day, a great surprise is waiting for them. One of the founders of the Manau Group will be there to explain the story of “La tribu de Dana”, a very well known song in the 90’s, before we capture a great picture of all our superusers with our Polaroid.   The relationship between and with our super-users is essential and strong. The idea for this year is to offer them a customized T-Shirt with their username, a way for us to build a story together… See you soon with more input about this great Adventure.   Sandie & the community management team : Cindy, Manuela, Fabien, Fanja & Emmanuelle   http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-est-la-Social-Media-Manager/ba-p/18598 http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-sont-vos-Community-Managers/ba-p/9936  

Company: Google Inc. Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (http://www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Google AdWords has been working closely with Lithium Engineering on seamless migration of our users from OpenId to OAuth2. We wanted to make sure that users who are coming to our Community are offered with a Single sign-on experience that they are used to when using other Google products.                                                       The OAuth2 implementation allows our users to use the same login and avatar for the Community as the one they are already using for other Google products and switch between various Google accounts. It also removed the need for Lithium to create, maintain and secure a login email and password store. All together it makes the sign-in process fast and secure for our users.