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

Greetings once again!

If you haven't seen it yet, our latest blog has launched today: The Cool: Social Ruminations about Ads, Brands, and Campaigns by Tim Hsu. Tim's debut effort is a post about the Burger King "Whopper Freakout" campaign, take a look when you can: I'm Down With the King.

Welcome Tim!

Please stop by and welcome our newest blogger to the Lithosphere, Adam Traver, and his new blog Behind the Lithium Curtain! Adam and others from our stellar Production Operations team will be stopping by from time to time to give us a peek behind the scenes at what it takes to keep the most vibrant online communities in the world up and running 24x7x365! Welcome Adam!

Also, bonus points to Adam for including references to both the Wizard of OZ and Futurama on your inaugural post!

I want to extend a warm welcome to our newest blogger here on the Lithosphere, David (pronounced "dah-veed") Gómez-Rosado! As Lithium's VP of User Experience and expert on all things design, I'm looking forward to seeing more from him on his blog: Desiging Community!

For his debut David has given us something pretty special - a sneak peak at the new Lithosphere design! Check out mockups of the new design as well as some insight into what we're trying to achieve in his first post: The New Face of the Lithosphere.

Be sure to take a look and let us know what you think!

The Lithium Customer Conference is coming up soon, and early registration (discounts!) ends this week!

Last year's conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with your peers on community, which those who attended last year can attest. I know I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. So be sure to sign up soon and save the spot on your calendar!

In other news, I plan to have some mockups to show this week on the new Lithosphere design, so keep watch in this blog for updates (of course, you can also subscribe via email or RSS if you want to be notified directly ). There are some very exciting changes planned that are sure to impress! More to come soon!

It's official! We now have two ideas that have made it all the way from someone's thought to a part of the product:

Remove Capital Requirements submitted by ScottM

Bug: Active Cast doesn't like posts with no text submitted by msavory

Maybe these aren't world-changers but it is just the start! Some changes will always be easier to do, but it's worth noting though that the latter idea was submitted less than 1 month ago. Expect this to be the first of many ideas from the community to be built and delivered!

To see the full list of Implemented ideas at any time you can use this link: http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Suggest-Your-Ideas/idb-p/Lithium_Ideas/status-key/Implemented

Or why not take a look at some of the other ideas that are still being considered and add your voice to the mix. We'd love to hear what ideas you like most, or what other ideas you may want to see!

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let everyone know that design work on the new look of the Lithosphere is proceeding apace, and I plan to have some mockups of the new design for up for review next week!

It's been pretty busy behind the scenes what with the work on the new UI and the launch of the Lithium Insights analytics offering and the Community Health Index - a really huge milestone for the way we measure health and performance on any community. Read more about CHI and what it means from recent blog posts by Joe Cothrel and Neil Beam when you can!

Also, a quick note that some of you may have noticed the addition of SSL (https) to the login and registration process. Just a little bit of added security for everyone here - don't you all feel safer now?

And last but certainly not least, I wanted to congratulate our member Roxy for becoming our newest Valued Contributor on the Lithosphere! Her posts are always useful and insightful - chances are you've already read her work (and a lot of you kudoed them!) but its worth a look if you haven't. In fact, take a look at the top kudoed posts this month when you get a chance, too. Thanks so much Roxy and congratulations again!

So I'm back from vacation, and I'm pretty fired up about the upcoming changes we have in store for the community - so time for everyone to temper my enthusiasm!

The most obvious changes to come will of course be visual, with a brand new design to showcase our new product abilities (and the skills of our designers!), but we're not quite ready yet with previews in that area. Once we have something we're ready to show, I'll post some pictures for everyone to see.

Equally as important and challenging, however, is the restructuring of content in the community. As I mentioned before my time off, what we think people are going to talk about before we launch and what people actually discuss is always somewhat different. So now that we've had a chance to see where discussions are going (and confirm that these constitute real trends), we're going to shift the structure into alignment with those topics and activity levels. To sum it up, we're planning to consolidate all public discussions into one broad board on community help and best practices.

So, I've been thinking of some names for this new board, and I was hoping you fine folks could tell me if I'm going in the right direction or not. I thought about putting up an idea exchange and voting, but I was hoping to keep it more conversational at the start - if we come up with a couple of winners, I'll see about posting the best ideas for people to vote on.

Anyway, here's some possible names for the new, consolidated board for you to ruminate on:

• Growing Successful Communities
• Community Help and Advice
• Talking Shop About Social Media

I've got more, but let me know what you think. If you like any of these or if you have questions or an idea of your own, feel free to post it in the comments!

And it's great to be back!

Photo by a4gpa

Update: I was nearly remiss in thanking the team who made my vacation possible! My heartfelt gratitude to you Tom, Aubrey and Brad for attending to everything on the Lithosphere while I was away, ensuring my relaxed and uninterrupted vacation. Thanks so much!