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: 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.

Company: Rogers Entry submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Manager, Social Media Support Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy category: Best Social Marketing Program ________________________________________________   Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert - connecting Rogers product teams with customers in an open conversation about their most challenging technology questions. Our new consumer website, Tech Essentials, was designed to provide Canadians with a deeper understanding of how today’s technology works.   To increase awareness for the site, corporate communications looked to the Rogers Community Forums for support. Over the last year the forums have become a platform for our product teams to engage directly with customers. In 2012, we covered mobile payment security and new product launches by hosting expert events.   Why use the Rogers Community Forums as a platform? We know that over 90% of registered users are Rogers customers based on SSO ID sign-in Events such as this give us a chance to present our point of view in an open and transparent way The event creates link love for programs like Tech Essentials and promotes SEO. The “Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert” forum series will run throughout 2013, providing our forum users with insider access to our product teams. Our first event covered roaming, a topic that can generate confusion and frustration for customers. We held an open Q&A over a two-hour period and generated a dozen questions and three Accepted Solutions. We received great feedback from customers as we clarified some misconceptions they had.   Marketing integration – the event was promoted through these owned channels: On our corporate blog Redboard On our online consumer magazine Connected Rogers Using direct channels, we invited 90,000 customers via email to the event Via Twitter - @RogersHelps, @RogersBuzz and using the #techessentials hashtag We also asked employees to invite family, friends and customers with an intranet story How does an event like this improve the customer experience? Product owners get to hear directly from customers. It generates immediate feedback that can be used to improve product offers.   How does an event like this drive revenue? The event was hosted just a few days before March Break, one of the most popular travel times for Canadians. By targeting customers we believe likely to roam, and providing instructions for roaming without worry, we expect more customers will purchase travel packs.   How does an event like this build advocacy? The Rogers Community Forums are peer-to-peer. By posting validated answers, we’re empowering members of the community to answer future questions. We’re looking forward to hosting future events, coordinating with the Tech Essentials Monthly Spotlight, some possible topics include data usage and how parents can keep their kids safe online.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.   Since launch in November 2011, our A1 Support Community grew significantly: our real substitution ranks around 25 percent (= percentage of users which perceive the A1 Support Community as primary service channel) and the crowd ratio is located around 80 percent. When looking at the charts, we managed to create a vitally and steady growing Community – but what are the qualitative actions we set to engage with our users and to motivate them to participate in the way they do?   On the one hand, it is all about motivation factors, gaming mechanics and gratification approaches: Transferring online into offline events: within 2012 we started the initiative “Community events”. We organized a guided tour at the A1 Technical Department. The Super Users were accompanied by A1 Device managers and the A1 Social Media management team for a meet & greets and to gain exclusive background-infos. “Community photo tour” – we exclusively invited users to a phototour to the Viennese zoo and equipped them with Hero-device smartphones to review the quality of the photo-cameras.   Hero of the month Award: Super Users – the most active users in our Community – are rewarded monthly for their outstanding contributions within the Community. Super Users as moderators: to show the most active Super Users our respect and trust, we gave them moderator roles within the Community. Now they are able to contribute even more to the content and quality of the A1 Support Community.                                               Exclusive boards, badges, ratings and rankings for Super Users are a matter of course as they were part of the concept when creating our new Community. On the other hand, we deeply link our A1 Social Media channels and provide target-group oriented content:   It all started by integrating the A1 Support Community in our Facebook fanpage. By doing so, we opened the Community to our established fan base on Facebook.   When comparing to our competitors in the Austrian telecommunications market , we keep a facebook fan-share of 59% and are therefore at the pole position with around 238,000 Facebook fans. On Facebook, three A1 Social Support agents provide fast and exclusive support. Additionally, we spread offers, lotteries and product information for our Facebook target group. Twitter is our channel for distributing company news as well as servicing support requests.   The A1 Blog provides product information, device and App reviews, etc. and is deeply linked with the A1 Support Community. The A1 Community actively creates content for our A1 Blog, eg. device reviews from users. The recruiting of our authors takes place via A1 Support Community and Facebook.   We take Customer experience one step further:   Initiatives like the Ideas concept take the customer experience to another level, where users can participate in the development and beta testing of products and solutions.   For that reason, we integrated our A1 Community in the development of the new “My A1” customer self-service area. Firstly, we asked them for ideas which functions they would like to see in the new Customer Self-Service area. After reviewing them, we gave them feedback concerning their ideas and invited them to join a workshop with the “My A1”-project managers. In one last step, the A1 Community had the chance to evaluate the scribbles made for “My A1” and give their feedback to be incorporated into the self-service area.                                         Not only the facts and figures proof that we are one the right path – in 2012, our A1 Support Community and Social Media commitment stood out at national and international Social Media and Community Awards.   In Hamburg, Germany, we were rewarded for the “Best Social Media Strategy” in the DACH region at the Social Media Economy Days 2012. At the Digital Communication Award 2012 the A1 Support Community was honored as the Best Online Community within the European online PR and communications branch as well as with the German Award for Online Communications 2012 in Berlin, Germany. In Austria, one of our integrated Social Media campaigns was rewarded with the Award for the Best Online- and Social Media communication granted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth.  

Company: LEGO Systems Inc. Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   Since its inception in 1932, the LEGO Group has come a long way - from a small carpenter’s workshop, to a leading global enterprise, always looking for ways to reinvent the brand experience to maintain its world class service. With the growth of social, it was a natural impetus to build a social online experience which encouraged users to interact, engage and share with each other in a safe and secure way, while maintaining the fun, learning and imaginative elements that were aligned to the brand values.   The business aim was to create an interactive social online experience (via an infused dot com presence) that was buzzing in engagement whilst maintaining its simplicity and ease of use, in a safe and secure environment that provided users with quicker “get to times”.  We have a high affinity with users in the 7-14 years age bracket, so online safety and security was paramount.  We were also migrating our users from our old forums to the Lithium platform, so our first step was to understand the issues our existing user community was facing and leverage their feedback to ensure our new launch met their needs.  The responses we received included:   Faster moderation Increased engagement with LEGO staff Better structure to the forums More guidance on rules Less “spam” We launched the new community on 9 November 2012 with great success – migrated 2.4 million users and 4+ million posts. There was 0% data and user loss and 1000 users joined the community within the first hour.       “Get to Times” had reduced by more than 7hrs from 8hrs in January 2012 to 56 mins when measured in December 2012. At the same time, user interaction went up by 62% when compared to interaction in the previous forums the year prior.   With a more interactive and structured community reflecting features available on other social platforms such as “Likes” introduced, and additional features such as a new ranking structure, user interviews, story and role play forums as well as online polling, paved the way to a significant increase in user activity.   New Polling & Ranking Features:   Some of the new ranks:   There was also a large reduction in spam based on changing the ranking structure from the old posting only system to a new more varied criteria including user defined opinion on quality and rating of content. The new ranks have instilled a culture of support and encouragement between the users and we now have a very healthy community feel.   We changed our moderation and engagement coverage set up to ensure 24/7 coverage, with 8 team members located in different time zones and geographical locations around the world. With the backing of help from vendor moderators, the core LEGO team now has more freedom to actively engage with users, spending hours engaging per week now in comparison to minutes previously.   We set up a comprehensive help/FAQ section where users can check out the rules, how to change signatures and generally tailor their own settings. For new users, after reading the FAQs, in every single forum we have “Welcome to newbie” or “Adopt a newbie” topics where new users can come in and introduce themselves and existing users will take them under their wings and help bring them into the community.   As an example of how engaged some of our kids are, in January 2013, the stats tell us that our 27 highest ranked users (all Forestmen, Ninjas, Aztec Warriors or Conquistadors) each spent 74 hours in the community per week! They’re very dedicated!   The new LEGO.com community embodies the LEGO brand values of fun, creativity, quality and originality. Visit community.lego.com to view for yourself.  

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design ________________________________________________   We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.       But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.     While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as: Customized categories and sub category pages User options (turn on/off elements on homepage) Custom banners area Activity feeds Feature videos   These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.     We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.    

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   With a constant demand from customers to interact with Telstra, CrowdSupport was developed to be an online social hub for customers to quickly help each other, help themselves. We wanted to be able to provide our community with the best possible answers from within Telstra as well as leveraging external content to provide rich and relevant support.     To bring this vision to life we knew we had to develop CrowdSupport as a platform that was not only visually appealing but allowed content to flow fluidly between sources and the community in a responsive method to maximise the benefit to our community. To do this we began with a World First! By integrating the Microsoft community support knowledge base into the Lithium platform we are able to pull content from the Microsoft community and display into CrowdSupport, providing richer results to our community when they are searching for answers.     In addition, by using the Lithium REST API we have integrated CrowdSupport content into other assets including the Telstra website (Telstra.com) & our Telstra 24x7 mobile and tablet apps. We’ve also developed our Live Services Portal using the Google search appliance integration to aggregate and surface community content into search results on Telstra.com. These types of integrations mean our customers can access the CrowdSupport community from a range of platforms and devices so that customers can use the community in any way that they desire.       To ensure that our customers could make the best use of these new features, we’ve increased the options available to our customers to engage through introducing a range of new enhancements to the presentation layer. We’ve enhanced the layout and design of our knowledge base so that accepted knowledgebase threads now present the most relevant information first so that our customers get the right answer fast. We’ve also integrated with the REST API to create a custom homepage that surfaces trending community interaction and statistics .         Use of Lithium Rest API to customize pages high traffic pages and optimize the user experience In terms of content upload, we’re enabling Ooyala video functionality to allow all Telstra customers to submit video content without requiring a You Tube account & we’ve integrated the Lithium contest component to better engage with our customers and encourage contribution which has proven to be a real success.                                             Later this year we will also be introducing Single Sign on for all Telstra customers which will significantly alleviate registration headaches for customers using CrowdSupport. Customer rating and reviews that will allow our customers to provide direct feedback about our products and services Use the Lithium REST API to develop the “Ask a mate Widget” which will allow customers to access relevant CrowdSupport content and ask question on product and service pages on telstra.com  

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, we really wanted a strong customer experience.  And given our many types of customers, customization was definitely necessary.  We customized the community in three unique ways:   1) Our Contact Us form.  We have multiple ways the customer can contact us (email, live chat, call, search knowledge base, open discussion thread).  This is all based on permissions (free, paid, enterprise).  It was important to serve up the right options based on the type of customer asking for support.  We needed to make the page smart to manage these permissions - which required customization.                              Customized contact us forms based on customer type   2)  Integrated search and chat integration.  We believe we’ve provided a revolutionary and elegant support contact form.  When a user clicks contact support they are presented with a page tailored for them depending upon what kind of customer they are (consumer, enterprise, other), and as they type into the subject line we instantly serve up answers based on articles in our knowledgebase and community.   We recently switched to Zendesk as our ticketing system and rolled out chat-based support. As part of the rollout - we incorporated chat features directly into the contact form.  The integration built by cloudsquads seamlessly transfers the user name and email Id along with the post content and creates a chat session.  From the customers’ perspective, once they’ve completed the form, they can opt to email or live chat without reentering information.  From our agents’ perspective, they’re able to get the customer information along with the context of the issue right from the Lithium form, and directly into our backend chat tool.                                           3) Site Status Page. Our customers rely on us to share large amounts of information quickly, securely, and reliably, thus service availability is critical to their business.  We tied our service availability status indicator to the community experience - thus enabling real-time status push to our millions of subscribers.    Our Site Status Page is housed on Lithium as a custom blog.  There are several key features that CloudSquads customized to make this very unique.  The main page shows the most current “blog entry” which is our latest status, and a user can look at the history of blog posts to see our site status history.  Additionally, we’ve provided a subscription widget so that users can subscribe and be notified whenever new site information is posted.  Finally, we then have multiple other locations in our community, such as the “quick help” section on the main support page, that check the most current blog post and dynamically display the appropriate site status depending on a tag.  These features allow us to very quickly update multiple locations on our site during maintenance or an event, and simultaneously notify our customers which helps us proactively avoid deluge of support queries.                                    

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, our #1 goal as an organization is customer satisfaction.  Prior to deploying Lithium, we did not offer any support to our free users.  With Lithium, we now have various ways to provide support to free users.  This results in customer retention and increased brand equity because their positive experience propels them to recommend us to other users or pitch us in enterprise conversations.                                         The rate of support calls that come to our team should be lower than the rate of our company’s growth - basically call deflection is very important.  In 2011, case volume growth was 4% per month.  Lithium was implemented by Lithium partner, Cloudsquads, in December 2011, and in 2012, the case growth rate was decreased to 2.5% a month.  Customers want to get their answer quickly and efficiently.  Call deflection is good for the customer too as it gets them the answer they want quickly and the way they want it. When we rolled out, we saw a immediate 20% drop in call volume simply due to the much improved self-help options.  Phone calls are the most expensive support ticket to take, and we were able to take what could have been a 20% cost savings and reinvest into delivering an even better support experience, which translates to more product virality and higher lifetime value of our customers.   Since our deployment of Lithium and some of the customizations that CloudSquads has made, we’ve been able to significantly slow the incoming rate of new cases, and in turn manage the many costs associated with scaling our call center, while at the same time meeting our #1 objective of delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, we’re very focused on finding the best and most cost effective way to manage all of our customers through social.  We have over 40 million customers, many of whom are free users, so we’re unable to provide the same services for them as we do our paid customers. Our support program uses social media to stay connected, but not incur high support costs.  We worked with Lithium partner, Cloudsquads to have a more integrated unified approach to engaging with customers.  Below are two examples of that integrated approach.    With our Lithium community we were able to put our blog and forum in one place.  Because of this, we get more visitors/readers to the blog. We leverage our knowledge base more and directly link the support questions coming through our community to the right answers and information.                                               Also, we offer multiple ways in which our customers can contact us (email, live chat, call, search knowledge base, open discussion thread).  This is all based on permissions (free, paid, enterprise).  It was important to serve up the right options based on the type of customer asking for support, so we needed to make the form smart - which required customization.  We now take the subject line as the user types up their support request and instantly serve up the right answers based on articles in our knowledgebase.                                     Customized contact us forms based on customer type                                             Dynamic search

Company: Elisa Entry submitted by: Noora Halme (Noora) Community Manager Community: Elisa Palsta (palsta.elisa.fi) Community: Saunalahti Palsta (palsta.saunalahti.fi) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Saunalahti and Elisa had separate discussion/help forums for several years, original launches dating back to 2005 and 2009. That makes a total of ten years of conversations and community bonding! When we decided to bring our community to the next level and moved the old forums over to the Lithium platform, we had few things to consider design-wise:   We wanted to keep our community clear and simple, easy to navigate, visually new but similar to what our users were used to. With a decade of history with little or none design changes, we couldn’t risk losing our members due to a radical change from classic and simple design to something very cutting edge. Our current Scandinavian design reflects the minimal taste of our Finnish users. The whole web presence of Elisa and Saunalahti is being renewed during 2013, and we wanted to be the first ones to take the changes into account. Elisa is a pioneer of support communities among Finnish telecom companies, and as a community, we wanted to be pioneers also internally. We were excited about the great new features that could guide our users to the most relevant and helpful content. We wanted to present kudos, solutions, subscriptions and bookmarks on our forum pages in a way that would make it possible for all of our users to find relevant content easily. Our goal is to be easy to approach and intuitive. Two brands, one community. We have one community, but two separate brands. Elisa provides IPTV-services, e-books and home security systems and Saunalahti focuses on mobile and broadband services and our customers are interested in different things depending on their products and services. We want to be there to help and to listen on both brands, forum pages have to be similar, but still provide relevant content for all types of customers. This was no easy task, but we managed to do it!   Our main focus is to provide a safe and friendly environment to our customers to ask questions about our products and services - we're essentially a support forum, a challenger to traditional customer support via telephone and e-mail. The community is a natural part of our customer care for us and - more importantly - to our customers.   We have had loads of good feedback from our clear colors, simple navigation, simplicity and the visual similarity of our two forums that form one community. The usability of our forums has been much praised: even though the radical decrease of different boards, from 30 to 11 on Saunalahti and 23 to nine on Elisa, was frowned upon at first, our members soon begun to appreciate the simplicity. Bringing the kudoed posts and solutions to the forum pages has also been a much-appreciated feature. We have had an amazing growth on our community members, and what is most important, the amount of visits and the average time spent online!   Our much praised avatar collection is one of my favorite parts as well. We use clear coloring to separate our staff and even super users from other community members, we see this as an important factor that helps our new users to find the most trustworthy content. After all we have a whopping community of 50 000 members! Our basic set of avatars consists of 20 characters including these ladies and gentlemen:                           We added a bunch of new at the end of 2012, including few moustached-up versions for movember (they were a hit!):                           And don't tell anyone, but we still have few more in store:   Maybe we'll add few special ones for nose day and pink ribbon?   We have a long lasting tradition of choosing a member of the year, they are rewarded with a crowned version of the avatars and our superusers have their own avatar collection with a small starred banner:                           Finally, here are our staff members. Orange is for admin (that would be me), green for moderators and blue for other staff. Our moderators also requested a special avatar for movember and we have a grey one for the moderators, who have already moved on:               Now that the first year of the new community has passed, we want to keep on rolling! Some of our users are very active on other communities around the web and they're constantly driving us towards better usability. Our plans for 2013 include, but are surely not limited to: Ideas exchange! We’re implementing Ideas in few weeks. Our users have been wishing for “Ideas-smithy” (that would be Ideapaja in Finnish) for a long time and now we’re ready for it! The design will be even more simple than the one on our forum pages’ and we’re ready to listen the voice of our users on what they want to see and how they want to use the “smithy”.                                                 Banner rotation! New banner pictures for spring, 1st of may, autumn and perhaps also gay pride? User designed banners? Sky's the limit! Speech bubble -logo and branding aren't going anywhere, but now that we have a good grounding, we can let loose a bit. Product-specific designs, new backgrounds for new product launches. Even better visual integration to product pages of Elisa and Saunalahti. We'll be incorporating a new navigation bar (currently marked with a grey bar on top of the community pages) that will allow our customers to easily navigate between our product pages, help pages, forums and self services.

Company: Future Shop Entry submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Manager Community: Future Shop Tech Yeah Steelbook Community (community.futureshop.ca/) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ___________________________________________________________________   This is the story of a group of superusers who came sort of out of nowhere to become influential in not only the community, but in the Future Shop movie business.     When we launched the Future Shop Community almost 6 years ago, it was always with the vision that it would be a place where our customers, employees and vendor partners would connect and engage directly. What’s happened in our Movies & TV Show forum over the past year has been a beautiful example of a niche group of passionate customers, an engaged merchant team & vendor partners who recognized the opportunity that this group of people represented.   Steelbooks are a special release of movies (new and old) that come in a metal packaging with different artwork than the regular DVD or Blu-ray releases. They are highly coveted among the collector community and Future Shop is in the unique position of being the sole distributor in Canada. Steelbooks are so sought after and produced in such limited quantities that you can find them re-selling for over $100!   The buyer team here at head office decided to start “leaking” Steelbook artwork and release information in the forum because it was easy to access and they could turn the “leaks” around quickly. When TheJord asked “What 2012 releases you would like to see in a steelbook?”, he got 24 replies and over 50,000 views on that single thread. Because of the engagement of all of the buyers & superfans, the Movies & TV Show board saw a 56% growth in board posts, a 59% growth in board views & a 75% growth in post views (YoY).                                               As the group of superusers continued to grow, so did their roles in the community – several rose quickly in the ranks and joined larger superuser programs in place for the entire community, our invite-only Community Ambassador program. They started posting Steelbook links for everyone to go place their pre-orders as soon as they were online.   Our vendor partners saw the passion that this group had for steelbooks and decided to tap into this by conducting polls in the forum to help them decide on what titles they would produce steelbooks for next. Future Shop produced approximately 80,000 steelbook last year and saw 60% comp growth online for last year – large in part due to the popularity of our Steelbook program.                                             The Steelbook superfans have also helped Future Shop to perfect the art of shipping Steelbooks without overpackaging them. Future Shop received lots of feedback on how to better package and ship Steelbooks so that they didn’t get dented or scratched, which was surfaced up to the teams who could directly impact this.   Shout-out to all of our Steelbook superfans! Atomic, kaw, Drum18, jceperley, debaser17, TheJord, ZeroX39, pioupiou, saybinator & many more.      

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan.   Joe is also community-based. It means that the community is at the heart of its business model and allows for very lean operation when it comes to customer support.   Obviously it is easier to achieve this result when it's in your DNA right from the start rather than switching from a regular business model to a cooperative one.   That being said, it might have failed and we could have been flooded with support requests from angry users dying to find an answer to their legitimate questions. Fortunately this has not happened, in fact it's quite the opposite since with a satisfaction rate of 92% and an NPS score of 44 just two months after the start of our operations, our customers seems to be quite happy with their customer experience.   Let's dive into some numbers. There are 3 ways to find an answer with Joe :   1) Search the community. Chances are your question has already been asked, but also already answered. With 80K searches since the community started, this seems to be the preferred and most effective way to find your answer.   2) Open a topic : 3K new topics have been opened in the Help sections of the community (I voluntarily left out the "Café" section dedicated to off- topic discussions).   3) Fill out a support form : 2.5K have been opened so far. These are treated by our support agents via a dedicated channel and depending on the difficulty, are escalated to Level 3 support.                                           So how much have we saved ?   Again this is hard to tell since we have no prior comparison point. What we can say however is this :   We have to first make an assumption on the efficiency of the search tool. Let's say, that only 10% of searches guides the customer to the answer he is looking for (we think it is a conservative number when we look at the search terms that are most used). If we assume this hypothesis to be true, that's 8K support "cases" (10% of 80,000 searches) that would get solved without any further interaction with either the community or our support staff.                                                     All in all, this would mean that, out of the 13.5K support cases that you get if you add up 10% of the search to new topics and support forms, only 18.5% of those cases incur a direct cost for Joe (the support staff). That would be quite a compelling result in our opinion and truth is that we have not been forced to hire more support agents so those figure seems to be spot on.      Of course you should take into considerations all the efforts and staff needed to make sure that the community is indeed active and effective but in the long run, it will be more effective to have a few community managers rather than line up support agents that solve cases one by one.   One last takeaway. The community can handle the first level of support effectively because our system is simple and transparent. We don't have the burden of legacy IT or aging tariff plans. That allows the community, in most cases, to know the answers. We have worked a lot to have a simple process and make most information available directly to the customer via self-service. The best way to cut costs on support costs is to take away the root cause of calls.  

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   How long does it take to build a new community?   Some weeks at least, a few months probably. Joe's community was born in a day. We remember it very clearly - it was last Oct 23 at 1PM.   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan.   We launched that day of October after a month-long teaser period consisting of a single video on our website with very few information inside. At 10pm, we broadcasted a live Google Hangout from our offices that was watched live by 12,000 people and opened the service early in the afternoon.     It took only minutes for the first curious person to register for an account and order a SIM. The first questions started to pour into the forum and while the team took on the role to try and answer them we soon found this effort was futile. Indeed, in less than one hour, a few good men had already visited every corner of our website, read every information that they could land their hands on and started posting and answering questions way faster than we were able to.   By 4 PM we just sat there and read, amazed by what was happening.   Three months later the community is going strong. With 50,000 posts over 3,900 topics it is very active. Each new subject gets 14 answers on average but what we pride ourselves with is that 49% of questions are tagged as Solved. This helps a lot the new users to quickly find the answer to their questions.   There is still a lot of work to do for the community to keep growing. We need to build engagement and give everyone a good reason to come back every day.    Joe is a pure community-based model. Each and every Joe customer is a community member thanks to a one-step subscription process that allows us to have a single ID for both the community and our self-care.   We also provide an invitation system inspired by Dropbox where a member can invite his friends and relatives to join the community and earn a few euros for each new member that actually activate a SIM.   This allows for funny initiatives such as the member map : a google mashup where members can pin their location on the map and insert their invitation link.                                              

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan thanks to a web app called the cockpit that is accessible on any smartphone.   The community is at the heart of Joe Mobile's website because it is very much the key to its success and its low-cost business model.   It was clear from the beginning that Joe's community should take center stage in our otherwise very lean website. Hence on Joe's homepage the community link sits in the header's navigation bar, a search field module appears in the middle just above the latest conversations module, and the blog finally rests on the lower right side, just above the fold.   The customer is welcomed via its pseudo and a ticker that notifies him of any unread messages.   You just can't miss that Joe is serious about being a community-based service. But that's not enough. Joe's business model lies on the fact that the community should be in charge of the first-level consumer support. We don't have any call centers, just a limited number of agents that use a form-based tool to deal with the most complicated requests.   For this to work, you need to organize the community space so that the customer, who often comes here for the first time, knows instantly what he is supposed to do to find the answer he is looking for. We have worked hard on the design to ensure that a newbie would find his way. This is how it's done :   First, a mega huge search bar People are very used to searching the google way, it's just the same with Joe. Chances are your question has already been asked…and answered already so Search should be your first stop.   A  horizontal community nav bar This design moves away from the commonly accepted best practices for new communities. However, knowing that it could be risky, we decided to go along with this horizontal design that clearly separate the section for prospective customers, who mostly have questions about our services and how to join, from the section for current customers who need help when activating their number or a more technical issue related to phone or the network.   A cozy place to chat Joe's community is about support, about people helping each other out. But rather than using the Q&A style module that could have been well suited for this purpose, we went along with a regular board design. This choice allows for longer discussions between members sometimes long after the correct answer has been given and validated since we never close subjects. We also dedicated a space, the Café Joe, for pure off-topic discussions and where new users can introduce themselves to the community.   This design is a success! With 30,000 searches per month and 17,000 posts for 1400 new topics, the community is thriving.   All section are very well balanced and we mad sure that "approved solutions" would be very visible both in the live search bar and the posts to be as precise as possible for anyone having a question about Joe.                           We just added The Facebook integration for the community again using the Facebook studio tools provided by lithium. This allows to open the community to a broader audience whilst retaining the same design principles that have worked for us so far.   Good design is key to a successful website. It is even more important when you service depends on the efficiency of the community. Forums can be messy and overloaded, a well-thought design is critical to give customers both a feeling of liveliness that brings a more emotional touch to your operation but also a efficient tool to very rapidly answer any question.