On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can sign up for this free event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Gina Debogovich, Communities Manager, Best Buy
Gina Debogovich is the Communities Manager for Best Buy, the well known multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products and services with a commitment to growth and innovation. The Best Buy family of brands and partnerships collectively generates more than $45 billion in annual revenue and includes brands such as Best Buy; The Carphone Warehouse; Future Shop; Geek Squad, and Magnolia Audio Video.
In her role, she manages the hugely popular Best Buy Community, which gives existing and potential customers the ability to ask questions and to exchange ideas, information, opinions and tips with other technology users.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I have been working with online communication in a variety of forms for over a dozen years. I love using technological tools to do research, learn about new products and concepts and to connect with friends and family. The thing that has turned Best Buy into a great retailer, is the power of our people. As commerce shifts to more online transactions we are bringing the power of these people – our Blueshirt and Geek Squad Agents – to the internet to provide customers access to their knowledge, skills and expertise. In my role at Best Buy being able to facilitate those connections for others, is quite emotionally rewarding for me.
Q: What are you currently working on?
In our last year and a half of blogosphere engagement, we have gotten very good at the art of the conversation and leveraging our existing process to provide customer support. We will now spread this to other brands within our enterprise. Our current focus is with Best Buy Mobile. We have just launched our fourth Community powered by Lithium to support our Best Buy Mobile Community. The focus of this community is customer engagement and product discussion.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
Do customers want us to enable a social shopping experience, and if they do, how do we monetize the Community experience. Community platforms are primarily looked at as a means of decreasing support costs and derive their ROI from that type of model. I anticipate the next big leap in Community management will be the shift to a direct monetization model that facilitates a social shopping experience.
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The Best Buy forums can be found here. And if you’re a Twitterer, check out Twelpforce, Best Buy’s community integration with the Twittersphere…
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can still sign up for this event, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Phil Soffer, Vice President-Product Marketing, Lithium Technologies
Phil will be hosting an online chat session on how community and customer networks can dramatically improve the effectiveness of word of mouth / social marketing campaigns.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I had an Apple II computer in the early 1980s and with my modem I visited a lot of the bulletin board systems that were online at the time. Only one person could log in at once, but you could get a pretty thriving community going on. It didn’t take long to get from there to Usenet, to the Web, to enterprise portals…. and now here we are!
Q: What are you currently working on?
I am doing some thinking and writing about the future of social CRM – the merging of the traditional customer relationship discipline with the modern social tools at our disposal.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
I am thinking about how word of mouth spreads through a community and how we can help customers who want to optimize that – we just released a white paper on how customer networks can impact the effectiveness of a WOM campaign, and it really opens a whole new avenue of opportunity for marketers.
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If you want to follow Phil on Twitter, his id is @phsoffer, and on Lithosphere watch out for PhilS
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can still sign up for this event, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Patrick Riley, Senior Product Manager, Lithium Technologies
He will be hosting an online chat session on expanding your community reach using mobile devices and talking about Lithium’s newly launched mobile optimization platform.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I saw the potential of social media while a graduate student in Information Systems at Berkeley in 2004, when we were studying the potential implications of these two new sites: Friendster and Facebook. It’s interesting to think of the different fates of those two similarly designed products, both ahead of their time. Later that year, I did an MBA Internship with AOL, attempting to incorporate the AIM social graph into other media products like their photo and video sharing services, an idea that had great resistance from AOL execs at that time.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I am designing the next generation of user experiences for all of Lithium’s products for 2010, including blogs, search, forums, ideas and more. We are also planning and designing a unique social integration platform for powering innovative social business strategies that I feel will bring Lithium’s enterprise clients to an entirely new level in interactivity, brand management and consumer engagement.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
My Ph.D. dissertation on social media information overload and noise vs. signal is a salient topic that I can’t seem to get out of my mind. I’ve been thinking about a number of solutions, some algorithmic, some user interface centric, where we can provide the most relevant real-time information in an interface that a user can efficiently use.
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If you want to follow Patrick on Twitter, his id is @patrickfriley
This virtual summit comes at a time when companies are starting to see tangible financial results from deeper online engagement with customers, and will explore the current capabilities of and future for Social CRM.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can sign up for this free event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner – Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group
He will be delivering a keynote presentation with Ray Wang, a co-partner in the Altimeter Group (focusing on Enterprise software) on how companies can make their CRM social, including advice and examples of practical steps.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I launched the community program at Hitachi Data Systems during my tenure in Web Marketing in Santa Clara (in Silicon Valley) during 2005-2007. The community platform space was immature, and there were only really tech-style forums, or BBS’ available. We launched blogs, a wiki, a podcasting program shortly after.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I'm currently focused on how emerging technologies are impacting companies customers, while I'm focused on social now, I've got one ear to the ground on the mobile space – particularly location-based social networks and augmented reality.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
The intersection of how legacy enterprise systems must quickly integrate with public social networks.
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If you’d like to follow Jeremiah, you can on Twitter (@jowyang) or at his blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah. For more information on Altimeter Group visit their site.
Wow, November already? The year is speeding by, and soon it will be Guy Fawkes Night (for the Brits among us on the 5th), Thanksgiving, my birthday and then Christmas... this will be a fun two months...
I wanted to say congratulations and thanks to the top Lithosphereans (Lithophites maybe?) for October: JohnnyJigsaw, Mark_Hopkins, Mojoswift and LauraB.
Lithium's own PatrickR was also in the top 5 after a great reply to a post on SEO last month - why not check that out here...?
Thanks to everyone for their contributions as always!
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can still sign up for this event, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Todd Sierer, LabVIEW Community Manager, National Instruments
He will be hosting a chat session with other experts on how companies can use ideation/suggestion tools to drive innovation in a community.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
Since its emergence, I've always been plugged in to social media on a personal level. At the same time, NI has always nurtured the relationship with our 130,000 active online users and decided to bring me in as a product manager focusing on the user instead of the product. My focus adds a new element to our product team where I gather feedback and ideas from our users and plug that into our product cycle. It helps us avoid getting stuck in too much internal thinking.
Q: What are you currently working on?
The customer experience. There are so many fantastic tools we give users to help them support one another and network with each other, not to mention tools like Twitter and Facebook where we monitor and interact as well. This means multiple platforms and different navigation experiences depending on where you are. I'm working with a cross functional team trying to reign in the different experiences and hopefully create a set of similar content types that can be easily shared both on and off our site.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
How do we correlate online activity with real-world activity? Traffic, uploads and downloads to our support sites have exploded in the last year as we introduced new ways to collaborate. That makes us feel good, but can we equate that with buying activity? Are we driving revenue in addition to helping customers be successful? Obviously community is not about revenue, but at some point the warm glow of "new media" will fade and community managers will have to prove that what they're doing is helping the business grow.
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If you want to follow Todd, his Twitter id is @ToddSierer you can also read his An Engineering Mind blog.
Social CRM Virtual Summit Expert Profile: Laura Feeney, National Instruments
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can sign up for this free event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Laura Feeney, Web Project Engineer, National Instruments
She will be hosting a chat session with other experts on how companies can use ideation/suggestion tools to drive innovation in a community.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
Prior to 2006 I was involved directly in our forums as an applications engineer helping answer customers’ support questions. I always enjoyed interacting with users on the forum so when the opportunity arose to have a bigger impact and manage the NI communities, I jumped at it.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I am part of our Web Support & Operations group and so I work on a wide variety of projects both inside and outside of the NI Discussion Forums. On the forums front, I am working on reducing our department's overhead when we provide support on the forums. In addition I am part of a team that spans groups throughout National Instruments to define a better navigation experience between multiple content repositories, including the forums. Outside of the Forum, I am leading a project to update our customer service request management tool on the support site.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
We are updating our rank and reputation model on the forums and combining it with user statistics from the other community areas on our site. We need to provide continuity for our superusers that are very invested in our existing model, yet provide opportunities for growth within the model as we add more community activities to our site. We have been working on the best way to do this by soliciting feedback from our current users as well as the other community managers at National Instruments.
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You can connect with Laura on LinkedIn.
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can still sign up for the event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Matt Goyer, Director of Online Marketing, Redfin
Matt Goyer is the Director of Online Marketing for Redfin - the industry's first online brokerage for buying and selling homes, self described as half Century 21 and half E-Trade. The Redfin Real Estate Forums help house hunters and agents talk about the process of buying and selling property and let them get information and advice from people who are going through or have completed the process.
He will be hosting an online chat session with other experts on how you can successfully integrate community into your social activities and what it really means for their businesses.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
My first online community experience was with BBSes back in the pre-Internet days; I even ran my own for a few years. In 2000, I started blogging but recently my personal blogging has slowed as my Twitter usage has increased. However, I still actively write for a blog I started about Seattle condos, named Urbnlivn.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Thinking about how we (Redfin) can create local online communities in every market we’re in by getting Redfin agents on board with Twitter and Facebook.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
Scaling the community. Real estate discussions can be very polarizing. There are those who are convinced the market has crashed enough and those who think we haven’t yet hit bottom. As our community has grown the debates have raged more and more.
As more people join our community we’re struggling to moderate the discussion ourselves and quickly need to figure out how to involve more community members in helping us keep the discussion civil, but yet still open.
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If you want to follow Matt on Twitter, his id is @mattgoyer. You can follow Redfin too at @redfin.
Josh Bernoff, senior vice president, Idea Development at Forrester and coauthor of Groundswell, announced the winners at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago last night (27th Oct). With winners across B2B and B2C categories, the awards recognize achievement in 13 categories of customer interaction via social applications.
This year’s awards are exciting for us for a couple of reasons. Of the 140+ entries, ten Lithium customers submitted entries to the prestigious industry event. Ten customers who are blazing a trail in social and community engagement, showing how they are getting real results, growth, increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and return on investment, from the platform that we hold near and dear to our hearts. ScottD highlighted all the entries in his Enterprise on the Surface post in September if you need a refresher.
Most important for us, is that one of our great customers was awarded the highest accolade in the event! Congratulations to the team at FICO for winning the ‘Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Support category’ for the work of the myFICO online consumer community. This is great recognition for them and I know the team is thrilled to be recognized for the results that they are achieving.
If you’re not familiar with the myFICO story, they are a community where consumers can post questions, find answers and share experiences around credit scoring, usage, reporting and monitoring.
The FICO Forums were launched in 2007 as an alternative customer support channel, designed to leverage the passion, knowledge and experience of myFICO’s customer network. And the results are showing. They have interaction of around 20,000 posts and 400,000 searches each month. FICO credits the online community with a significant drop in call volume and length at its customer support center, as more and more customers seek answers and support from other customers. Since establishing the FICO Forums, the company has also experienced an increase in sales of its consumer products and services attributable to community membership.
We published a case study earlier this year in conjunction with FICO highlighting all the aspects of their approach and results. If you didn’t see it, you can get it here and FICO’s entry submission to the awards is here.
Wait.. there’s more!
At this point I have to call out congratulations to two other customers: Lenovo and Juniper Networks.
Lenovo was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Consumer (B2C) Supporting category’ for the Lenovo Forums peer-to-peer support community. The community has yielded over 3.7 million accepted solution views since the feature was enabled in April 2008 and a recent Forrester case study of the Lenovo community noted a 20% decline in US support call rates. Congratulations to Mark and the gang. Lenovo’s original entry submission is here.
Juniper was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Business (B2B) Spreading category’ for their ‘Fast Track Promotion’ activities. Juniper’s J-Net online engagement/support community played a huge role in the activities of helping 14,000 new users get certified on its JUNOS Software. This award fills me with a little more pride than normal, as I used to run the Juniper team, I know them all very well, and know the hard work that went into all the activities. Well done guys! Juniper’s original entry submission is here.
At the awards presentation, Josh said “Every year the quality of business social applications goes up, and marketers become more sophisticated. This year’s winners stood out in a very competitive field; all of them demonstrate not just creative use of social technologies, but impressive, measurable results.”
We couldn’t agree more. Congratulations again to FICO for their win, to Lenovo and Juniper for their finalist positions and to all the entrants – you’re leading the way in Social CRM and community interaction.
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can sign up for this free event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Todd Shimizu, Director of Communities, Juniper Networks
He will be hosting an online chat session with other experts on how you can successfully integrate community into your social activities and what it really means for their businesses.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I became involved with an industry consortium called IPsphere, of which Juniper was the originator. Initially I served as a Chair for the IPsphere Marketing Committee and eventually became Chairman of the Board for the entire body. I spent two years as Chairman building a "traditional" community comprised of Juniper customers, partners, and even competitors. Moving to the world of online communities seemed like a natural progression -- and an exciting evolution as it involved understanding how to apply technology to the mission of community-building.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I look after our strategy for online communities, which includes our J-Net Community, our blogs, as well as our official social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook. My charter also includes developing one of our most important constituencies, the JUNOS community.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
One of my key focuses right now is scaling the communities to meet the needs of our growing online ecosystem, for example how to expand upon our partner community to best serve the diversity of that group and how to deepen relationships with our JUNOS community.
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If you want to follow Todd on Twitter, his id is @shimmage
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