Company: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Entry Submitted by: Gareth Worsnup (gworsnup) Community Manager Community: Playstation Community  (community.eu.playstation.com) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   SCEE Lithium Implementation   1. Playstation Network Account Integration. We have implemented integrated login/authentication on our Lithium platform with our global Playstation Network accounts. This means users can login to our Lithium forums with their Playstation Network ID’s.   2. Custom Ad Serving Technology Integration with Custom Analytics We have implemented bespoke, hierarchical, ad-serving technology across category, board and thread level views. This includes a hero image and video at the top of each board, category and thread page, a standard MPU ad placement on the right hand column on each page and custom background images. Adverts in these areas can be targeted at every level right down to specific threads.   Adverts are also cached to save load and can handle custom translations across the different language boards. In part with this, we have also implemented custom WebTrends tagging tracking the number of impressions, click-throughs and even the number of video plays right down to the percentage of the video watched. Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP (Zend), JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON, Flash, XML   3. Website Integrated Forum Skins. We have integrated many Lithium boards with 1st party game websites. Example: http://community.singstar.com/t5/SingStar/bd-p/717. In these instances, iframes are used to pull in an external website’s navigation and footer elements, while the boards are custom skinned to fit with the theme of the overarching website.   The result is a seamless experience for the user whilst traveling from the main website through to the forums. Single Sign on (cookie based) is also implemented on website integrated forums, where authentication can happens outside of Lithium, yet users are seamlessly logged in when reaching the forums.   4. Featured Boards custom component. A ‘Featured Boards’ component has been implemented across the top of all category pages. Content for the featured board’s panel is created and managed by using feeds from hidden threads managed by our central community team. This means no development is needed, and updates to the featured items can be completely managed by the SCEE community team. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Featured Boards). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   5. Accepted Solutions component. In order to best utilise the Playstation’s support community, a custom component has been developed that surfaces recent and popular discussions (based on Kudos), in part with solved questions or accepted solutions. This content is promoted at the top of the category pages giving new and existing users a quick route to valuable community content. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Recent Discussions & Solved Questions). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   6. User Profile Panel & Post Info - hover-over. In order to simplify the forum design, certain information has been hidden from the main display by using hover-overs or tool-tips. User profile information can be accessed by hovering the mouse over a users profile name or avatar. This reveals user profile information, recent posts, number of posts and registered date. If a users also has a Playstation portable ID, this will be pulled and displayed automatically. Similarly, if users hover their mouse over a thread link, the views, number of posts, kudos and a small preview are also displayed. All of these hover information is cached, meaning its only loaded one time on demand then stored meaning API calls are limited. Technologies Used: Lithium API, JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON.   7. Custom Post styles - targeting admins/MPU's etc. In order to highlight posts made by Administrators, Moderators and MPU’s, we have implemented user targeting, and can target posts by specified user roles and inject specific CSS into their posts. This means that Moderator posts can for example be highlighted in blue to give a clearer indication of their status within the community. Technologies Used: JavaScript, JQuery, CSS.

Company: Autodesk Entry Submitted by: Brian Kling  Program Manager, Community & Social Media (bkling) Community: Autodesk Discussion Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implementation   Autodesk has actually had online “discussion groups” for more than 15 years – remember Compuserve?!  In June of 2010 we migrated to the Lithium platform.  Because we already have a well-established community, our focus has been on optimizing our Support and Service participation, getting our organization participate in a sustained manner and to evangelize to our internal business groups how much value this thriving community provides.   The Technology Integration Angle One of our major efforts achieved last year was to answer the question “how do you keep a community open to all customers, but yet provide an enhanced level of customer service to those customers that have paid for an annual Subscription Contract?”    Our solution was to integrate the Lithium platform with our CRM platform (Salesforce).    The key components are:   Identify Subscription Customers – this was achieved when we migrated, but using our own SSO and authenticating against our CRM for Subscription Entitlement.  Internally we can see who has an entitlement, and even what level they are on, and a proper role is auto-assigned.  This authentication occurs every time at login.   Offer enhanced service – this boiled down to four escalation methods:   Automated “No Reply” - A question authored by a Subscription Customer is monitored; if no first Reply is received after 24 hours, a linked case is created in Salesforce and routed to the appropriate support queue. Automated “No Solution” – A question authored by a Subscription Customer that has no further Replies for 48 hours and no Accepted Solutions marked will be escalated into Salesforce to determine if help is needed.  An email is sent to customer asking if they need our help, if yes, then case is routed to appropriate support queue. Manual by Author – Premium level Subscription customers have a “Need an Answer” button on any new question they author.  They can escalate prior to the automated options above. Manual by Autodesk - Autodesk staff can escalate any forum thread into Salesforce, for either internal collaboration, large file transfer, sensitive information, product defect tracking, Content Creation flagging, etc.   The ROI angle Proving some ROI to your executive staff is an important part of a Community Strategy.  Not all ROI’s are easy to measure, and every community really has multiple ROI’s, not just on cost, but also brand awareness, advocacy, etc.  This example is just one of the many possible facets.   Our communities are mostly based on technical support questions related to our many design products.  Customers paying for Subscription Contracts are welcome to come and participate in our online community, but they also have the right to come directly to our Support staff through Salesforce.  As you can imagine, the cost of a technical, 1:1 interaction is vastly higher than that of a peer-to-peer interaction in an online community.  For us, the calculated cost difference is 1000x – yes, one that’s one thousand!   Through SSO we can easily identify which customers posting in our online community have Subscription contracts.  We also regularly survey our customers and ask if their issue was resolved in the community.   For Subscription Customers, if they had a resolution, we then ask them if they would have turned to us for 1:1 support if they hadn’t found their answer in the community.  Here is a perfect opportunity to measure how many of these customers achieve a resolution to their issues without needing to come to us on a 1:1 interaction, which is a direct cost savings calculation.    For our community, in 2011 our calculated cost savings was $6.8M dollars.     This is not all about saving costs, because for lower severity issues that are common to many users, these questions are best served in a public forum where all can then find and benefit from the answers provided.  Further, typically answers come faster from this vast group of community experts, who also know our products better than we do; they use them in the trenches each and every day, in many ways we can’t anticipate or model!   For both angles At Autodesk we use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a common indicator of customer perceived value in our interactions with them.  In Product Support, we measure this in our 1:1 transactions, online communities as well as customer interactions through our partners worldwide.    Our NPS score for online communities has reached or even at times surpassed the NPS for our Silver Subscription 1:1 transactions and our partner transactions, which proves that customers do assess a high value to their online experience.

Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Integration Cisco’s internal engineer community 'Tech Zone' was built from the ground up by engineers… for engineers. The community developers are also a part of our target audience.   From the beginning we wanted an agile space where we could incorporate constant feedback and enhancements.   When our community opened for business, it came with an Idea Exchange to solicit any and all feedback from our users. Our users did not disappoint.   We started out by identifying where we want to reuse knowledge. We link open cases to posts and articles to track which content is helpful in solving a case.   We wanted search to be front and center in our workflow, so we implemented a search-before-post feature that surfaces related content – and displays the number of kudos and case links right there in the results. And we’ve used REST APIs to deeply integrate our community into our systems, such as our trouble ticketing portal, our knowledge creation strategy, and our corporate instant messaging system.   Our community is also an application development platform. In order to accelerate wide adoption we have ensured that our community is not a stand-alone tool, rather it is seamlessly tied to the engineers' workflow and seamlessly integrated with (and on an equal footing with) the other service delivery tools.  To this end we’ve made 100+ enhancements to the basic Lithium community, based on our business needs. This is where our business drives the tool instead of the tool driving the business. No limited capabilities here!   We’ve taken Lithium’s reputation system and not only incorporated it into our community, but we’ve added custom elements and added our own variables to Lithium’s already strong use of formulas for ranking.   We've built a customized leaderboard to highlight the accomplishments of our users based on our enriched reputation formulas. The result is a reputation system that effectively implements weighting factors to allow us to emphasize our organizational priorities and provides a checkpoint for our engineers.   As we see important behaviors that we want to encourage, we can build additional custom components right into the reputation. This reputation model also feeds into a rich custom metrics portal so engineers can self-evaluate their technical growth as well as arming them with tangible data for performance reviews and career development discussions.   Engineers need a quick way to preview information to see if it’s relevant to the case they are working. So we integrated a locally-grown case preview tool that allows our engineers to preview a portion of a case or bug. This has been hugely helpful in being able to find a quick answer within our community.   And we have even more awesome integrations in the works. Our engineers wanted a way to bump a thread without bumping the reply count, so we’re currently implementing a "raise hand" feature that allows a user to draw attention to a thread in progress in order to ask for additional help.     “The ability to quickly get help from experts and the ease which knowledge can be captured and re-used by others makes Tech Zone the perfect tool for us. I think we should also recognize the [Cisco] and Lithium teams for being so receptive to TAC's feedback and their willingness to tweak/ implement new features, as this is a huge part of what makes Tech Zone successful in my eyes.” – Cisco TAC engineer, Mike Robertson.