Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (Social Media Sr. Strategy Mgr)
Community: AT&T Community Forums
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) helps millions around the globe connect with leading entertainment, mobile, high-speed Internet and voice services. We’re the world’s largest provider of pay TV. We have TV customers in the U.S. and 11 Latin American countries. We offer the best global coverage of any U.S. wireless provider*. And we help businesses worldwide serve their customers better with our mobility and highly secure cloud solutions.
*Global coverage claim based on offering discounted voice and data roaming; LTE roaming; voice roaming; and world-capable smartphone and tablets in more countries than any other U.S. based carrier.
Tune into the AT&T/DIRECTV Merger!
Our unique promotion and goal
Following AT&T’s 2015 acquisition of DIRECTV, we began plans to merge our two communities. We collaborated with our skilled Lithium success team to outline the migration mechanics potentially affecting 1.65M users (AT&T – 1.5M members with Lithium; DIRECTV – 150k members with Jive.) We wanted not only to incorporate 200k DIRECTV posts and 150k users into the AT&T Community, but also to establish trust in, and build enthusiasm for, the combined community experience.
Our strategy for community promotion
After the merger, we began with a soft launch of a new DIRECTV community within the AT&T community, seeding content and creating a one-stop community experience for our customers. We also reached out to DIRECTV community super-users at this time, months before the content migration, to introduce ourselves, let them know we valued their participation and to invite them to check out the DIRECTV forum on the AT&T Community.
When the time came to migrate the legacy DIRECTV community’s membership and content, we knew we had to create an effortless customer experience for DIRECTV and AT&T customers, and just as importantly, we wanted to present the migration in a way that would help the migrated community members feel at home.
To this end, we invited DIRECTV’s most well-known super user – Litzdog911 – to be the “voice of the merger” within the DIRECTV community. Rather than having our team of AT&T employees try to communicate the benefits of the migration to DIRECTV customers, we encouraged Litzdog911 to share what he thought was important to fellow DIRECTV community members. On the DIRECTV home page – and in his own voice - Litzdog911 bubbled over with excitement and explained why he felt the change was so positive, i.e., the advantage of the AT&T/Lithium user experience.
With an eye toward an effortless customer experience, every communication (including Litzdog911’s personal message) pointed to “one source of truth” – an AT&T Community Blog outlining the timetable, sharing illustrative “how to” examples, covering FAQ’s, etc.
To increase awareness, we used our #1 featured home page tile to point users to the blog.
Additional communication elements included Private Messages to AT&T super users as well as an announcement in their lounge; a system notification to DIRECTV users and regularly-updated home page messaging in both communities.
Post-migration in January, 2016: Communication continued with home page recognition for LItzdog911, our January ACE (super user) of the Month…..
….plus we contextually-placed authentication reminders:
Our results
Partnering with our Lithium success team – and with only 12 hours of “read only” down time -
We migrated 200k DIRECTV posts 100% successfully into their assigned boards and categories.
We migrated 150k DIRECTV users – including their user stats and avatars - with only three users experiencing minor, easily corrected issues.
In the first 30 days post-migration, 309k unique visitors benefited from DIRECTV content – a 27% increase as compared to prior months on its previous platform.
From January 1, 2016 to March 23, 2016 in DIRECTV, we have enjoyed:
1.36M page views
766k visits
588k unique visitors
12k posts
800 Accepted Solutions created
We will continue to adjust the volume, and we might even give the remote control a shake – but we are sure not changing the channel on our great DIRECTV forum community. It’s where it needs to be – on our Lithium platform, with our combined 1.65M members fully understanding what we did, and why we did it. Like Litzdog911 said, “It’s more fun over here!”
