It's that time again - another great webcast and some follow-up Q&A on the Lithosphere! This time it was Kevin Ryan of Barnes & Noble and Jeff Zabin of the Aberdeen Group headlining on how to leverage the power of social customer networks to build stronger relationships, amplify word-of-mouth marketing, improve customer service, and accelerate innovation. A huge thanks to them both for participating and sharing their experience and best practices on mobilizing customers through engagement communities and across the social web!

Once you've see the webcast or the video (when the recording is available, I'll update this post with a link), you can continue the discussion and ask additional questions here on the community !

The discussion board will be read-only after August 15th, so be sure to stop by before then to join in!

Greetings once again!

Just a quick announcement to let everyone know that anonymous blog comments have been enabled on the Lithosphere community - visitors can now drop by a post a comment to a blog without needing to register first.

Anonymous comments will need to go through a pre-moderation process, however, so they will not immediately appear to others until approved. But registered members will skip that pre-moderation workflow entirely - one of the perks of membership!

Let us know if you have any questions!

Greetings everyone!

Here's a special announcement from Doug Nugent, Lithium's Director of Customer Advocacy regarding the launch of Lithium Cases on the Lithosphere:

In an on-going effort to practice what we preach, we've been updating our own customers' user experience (actually, experiences) in getting online support for their application, and community in general. The first iteration of our online support solution was a designated support site where customers could submit and manage "cases."

And shortly thereafter, we introduced our own community, the Lithosphere (the not dog food bit). But the experiences these two solutions provided were completely disjointed -- specifically the kind of experiences we're helping many of our customers eliminate.

So, we've taken the next step and merged these offerings into a single experience -- by incorporating traditional case management into the Lithosphere. Customers, with the appropriate access level, can now login to the Lithosphere, and when they can't find an answer to their question in the community, or want to ask a question they may not want to share, they can navigate to the new "Cases" tab and submit a new case.

By providing a single destination for both customers (for all things Lithium) and for community-minded enthusiasts in general, we hope to create a highly valuable, unique destination. It's certainly not Nirvana, but I think this is a significant step in offering our customers a user experience that begins to fit the new world of Social CRM.

And lastly, if you're an existing customer, and haven't been asked to register on the Lithosphere, or can't see the Cases tab when you login to the Lithosphere, please connect with your CSM, or connect with me directly (please register on the Lithosphere and send me a private message: DougN).

We've had some very positive feedback so far, and want to help all of our customers take advantage of the updated Lithosphere.

-Doug

For those of you not living in the USA, traditionally July 4^th is not a season for giving gifts. But we at Lithium thought we'd give our customers a little something extra in their Independence Day stockings this year, with the delivery of a new Community Health Report containing their community's Community Health Index (CHI) score.

The report is brand new, and I expect we will continue to evolve both the report and the CHI formula over time as we find ways to increase their accuracy, relevance and overall usefulness. But we wanted to extend the conversation about CHI that we started a while back, and what better way to do that than by giving you your own CHI scores to talk about.

And of course, there's no better place to discuss CHI than here on the Lithosphere - so I've started a thread for us to use to talk about our scores, what they mean, and how you can use them to improve your community. So be sure to stop by and let us know your first impressions!

Have a safe and spectacular 4^th of July, wherever you may be!

Photo by srqpix