In the last couple of weeks we have talked a lot about the event, on our site, on Lithosphere, on Twitter and through EDMs, and a lot of people listened, with just under 60% of people who registered came through the event, and stayed for an incredible average of two hours each.
The only barrier to attending is time. There’s no travel or expense, you don’t have to leave the office, you could even attend from home in your pajamas if you happen to be struck with the flu (like so many people right now).
If you get to take away a couple of good connections, some sound advice or even get some insight from industry leaders, then it’s definitely worth the investment in your day.
Not only that, you could chat with those experts like Bill, Joe, and Kevin, or the Queen of Social CRM-Dr Natalie Petouhoff (Forrester), as well as practitioners living all aspects of Social CRM from Lenovo, Best Buy, Redfin, Juniper Networks, National Instruments, T-Mobile and our own Lithium experts and executives in the networking lounge or in one of the 18 scheduled chats through the day.
Events like this don’t happen overnight, and the list of hardworking people from our company, our partners, sponsors and customers is very long and distinguished – and then there
were those who sat in the command center at Lithium for 12 
hours directing the event like something from the Apollo missions (well maybe not, but you get my drift).
If you missed it, the material will be available ‘on demand’ from later this week (and we’ll let you know when it is) and it’ll be available for about 6 months, so you have every opportunity to get listen to the webcasts and get the collateral.
Thanks to everyone for making this such an incredible event, I can’t wait for the 2nd Annual Social CRM Virtual Summit….
--------
In the Pictures:
Top - (clockwise from top) Haresh Kumar, Dan
Ziman, Paul Gilliham, Manjeera Patnaikuni, Phil Soffer, Patrick Riley's leg, Ingrid Stabb, Ei-Lun Tsai.
Middle - Apollo Mission Control Center (Apollo 11, July 20, 1969 - About.com/NASA)
Bottom - (clockwise from top) Dan Ziman, Paul Gilliham, Matt Thomson, Phil Soffer, Patrick Riley, Ingrid Stabb, Marlene Verdile, Ei-Lun Tsai, Haresh Kumar.
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: Wesley Reynolds, Group Manager - LabVIEW R&D, National Instruments
He is co-hosting an expert chat session with Laura Feeney, also of NI, talking about how crowd sourced innovation can be harnessed in a community.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
We were looking for more innovative, reliable ways to allow customers to provide input on what further changes we should make to our already very mature and feature-rich LabVIEW development application. We currently had many different channels for an individual user to provide a feature request, but we couldn't reliably gauge whether this was a one-off request, or if lots of other users would rally behind certain ideas more than others.
NI launched the Idea Exchange where users could propose and vote-up ideas they liked, and I was tasked to help manage R&D resources to select top-user-voted ideas and go about actually putting those into the application. It gave us and our customers a lot of confidence that we were spending our R&D resources on the right things.
Q: What are you currently working on?
As always, I'm working to further innovate and improve our LabVIEW software product, and that means a lot of input from the community.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
Crowdsourcing and "asking the cloud" for advice. Both on a personal level and a corporate, user-involvement setting.
-----
Watch out for Wesley on the NI Forums, his user id is WesReynolds.
Social CRM Virtual Summit Expert Profile: Kevin Ryan, Barnes & Noble
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: Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Social Media, Barnes & Noble
He is presenting a keynote presentation together with Mike Fauscette on ‘Amplifying your Message through Social Channels’ and will also be hosting an expert chat session later that day where you can tap into his knowledge directly.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I was managing proprietary content programs at bn.com when we added direct author interaction on top of our existing video and profile features. Our first author discussion with the writer Mitch Albom (Tuesdays With Morrie) launched what we now call the B&N Book Clubs, and set us on a path that now includes a number of social -- and social commerce -- programs.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Growing the community, reaching customers where they are, and making the most of the significant contributions of our users and influencers.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
The biggest opportunities these days lie in connecting with customers where they are rather than dragging them to where you want them to be. To me, that means making your site and your message more easily social, allowing your customers to share their experience with their larger networks -- the people they are most apt to influence.
-----
Be sure to check out Barnes & Noble and their new B&N Review site.
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 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: Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
She will be co-hosting an online chat session with Lithium Technologies CEO and co-founder, Lyle Fong on the trends and direction they are seeing in the Social CRM industry.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
The exploding amount of customer complaints about products, services and companies in the 'cloud' – twitter, blogsphere, communities, etc… The emergence of social networks now gives you an avenue to complain about poor service (or great service), be engaged and listen—which is a must for the customer service industry to evolve.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Right now I am particularly interested in research on the value of superusers, integrating social media initiatives with multichannel contact centers, and adding advance knowledge management capabilities to communities to increase the value of searching for answers created by communities and crowd sourcing.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
How to get executives to understand they must deploy social media immediately, as well as fix the issues with customer service (which are largely the majority of the customer issues in the cloud) and spend double the money they do today to make sure the customer experience is excellent. Telling customer service directors to do more with less is fiscally irresponsible. No customers, no business. And poor service has shown to be the major reason customers defect.
-----
If you want to follow Dr Natalie on Twitter, her id is @drnatalie. You can also read her blog
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
If you want to follow Matt on Twitter, his id is @mattgoyer. You can follow Redfin too at @redfin.
Mark_Hopkins
on:
A View from the Social CRM Virtual Summit Control ...
Dieds
on:
Come see us at the next SV Tweetup
