lithys - social customer excellence awards

Company: Webroot

Entry submitted by: Jim Murray (jmurray) Community Specialist

Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com)

Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight

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TripleHelix (Daniel) is Webroot's biggest fan. He came to Webroot via one of our acquisitions, Prevx, back in 2011. On the old Prevx forum, over the course of about nine years, TripleHelix accumulated over 9,000 posts. When Webroot acquired Prevx, we embraced their core technology and made it our own. Accordingly, TripleHelix embraced us in a big Canadian bear-hug and never let go.

In only the single year the Webroot Community has been around, he’s already got 1,300 posts – putting him at over 10,000 posts just on our official forums. And not only is he the most active member of our forums - he actively travels the internet seeking out other security-related forums at which to talk about Webroot. Wilders, NeoWin, DSLReports - you name it - TripleHelix probably has an account there.

TripleHelix doesn't miss a single day on the forum. Each and every day, like clockwork, he signs in and stays on the forum almost the entire day. When someone replies on his threads, he almost immediately chimes in with a response. He contributes more forum content than anyone else, particularly to our Security News section. 

TripleHelix is like a Security News machine who constantly churns out security-related news stories at a pace of a couple of valuable stories per day. He also keeps us up to speed on anything that is coming down the pike from Microsoft, Adobe, Java or any other companies that routinely participate in Patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is TripleHelix Tuesday at Webroot.

He isn't just a news-specific contributor though. One of the best things about Daniel is that he will help other users solves their problems. With 93 accepted solutions under his belt (3.5x more than the next closest member), he rivals even our official technical support helpers on the forum in his skill, ability, willingness, and availability to solve problems. It's no wonder he is sometimes mistaken for official Webroot tech support. Other forum members love him too, which is shown by his collection of 700+ kudos.

The real icing on the cake with TripleHelix is that he isn't just a Webroot superfan. He's also a Microsoft superfan. What a great combination! One day, Daniel even volunteered to take a bunch of free Webroot trials and branded pens to the next Microsoft convention he attended. We never would have even thought of asking him to do that on our own, but he thought of it himself and will be doing it in April. Daniel is like a magical, traveling Webroot billboard that offers free tech support with a little bit of Santa Claus thrown in for good measure.

Speaking of Santa Claus, one of my favorite TripleHelix stories involves our company Christmas party. On the day we had the party, the entire social media department was going to be off to enjoy some free dinner and beverages. As a rule, we advise it's probably not a good idea to come back to work right after the party. In advance of the party, which was held during otherwise staffed hours, I happened to notice that TripleHelix was online, as usual. I let him know the party was about to start and that the Community would be unstaffed for a couple of hours. He volunteered to hold down the fort while we were off enjoying some holiday cheer. True to his word, during that time, he made a series of useful posts. When I returned after the party was over to check in and make sure there weren't any fires to put out, I saw the posts, and TripleHelix saw that I was online. He sent me the following message: 

Flash-forward about a week, TripleHelix was posting on Christmas Day helping users who received the gift of Webroot for Christmas and had immediately installed it. There has never been a more hardcore superfan on the internet than TripleHelix, which is why he deserves this award!

Company: Ooyala

Entry submitted by: Thomas Kearsley (tkearsley) Community Manager

Community: Ooyala Community (community.ooyala.com)

Lithy category: Best New Community

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Ooyala offers leading cross-device video analytics and monetization solutions, streaming over 1 billion videos to nearly 200 million unique viewers per month. The Ooyala Community was officially launched on 10/8/12. Since the launch we have seen 4,108 unique visitors with 20K+ page views. Our community is not open to anyone, only customers who have an account (Backlot) can comment. This limits the community to a low number of participants, but the community will grow as the company scales up.

My goal is to make the community a portal to everything Ooyala. A place to find solutions to technical issues, stay up on the latest trends ,and be informed of everything happening at the company. Since my start at Ooyala, I have implemented Google analytics into the site, giving us real-time information on who is visiting, OS, location etc.

I have integrated a Twitter feed for keeping up with the latest Ooyala mentions in social, and embedded Ooyala TV (video) on our home page where users can watch helpful videos. We are using the latest Lithium search (2.0) while building out our TKB with new content every day. I am excited to see our community grow in the months and years to come.

Company: LandlordStation

Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO

Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com)

Lithy category: Best New Community

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LandlordStation is a startup company founded in 2010 which provides web-based software apps to property managers and landlords throughout the US. Although our community (and company) are new and small, both are growing at rapid clips. More importantly, we understand and value the importance of communities and other social platforms and have made a concerted effort built them into the core of our business.

The LandlordStation Community was launched in January of 2013, as a way for our uniquely independent clientele to have a convenient and open way to communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, and generally connect to their peers in a very fragmented industry. Our goal with the community is to grow awareness of our brand in the wider property management industry and improve our traffic channels with new and unique content.

We have already begun to see a return on this investment as traffic from the community and searches for the community have grown rapidly over recent months and are already causing a noticeable difference in the cost of our traffic generation as we chip away at the percentage of our traffic that is generated by PPC and other advertising channels. We already have hundreds of excellent users (and a few budding Superusers) as well as posts that continue to receive hundreds of daily views by landlords from across the country. Our number of total post views is at 100,000 within 75 days of launch. As we continue to gain traction with both our community and company, we expect to continue to see rapid growth in our user-base with the goal of being the premier community for this industry.

Community Impact since launch:

• Conversion rate for purchases on our main site for traffic referred by the Community (and referrals from Community oriented social campaigns) is more than 2X the conversion rate from PPC traffic.
• Dramatic increase in organic Google searches for LandlordStation by name (or close variation) in Q1 2013 v. Q4 2012 suggesting a higher brand awareness driven in large part by the Community.
• Increase in traffic driven by real-time keywords. For example, we recently noted revenue generation from keywords based on a popular real estate news story that was referenced and linked in our Community. SEO for real-time or newsworthy keywords is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish and we are very pleased that we are seeing this in such a young community.

As illustrated in the screenshot below, we received significant traffic during this period for the keyword "landlord whipped tenant" which was the subject of a news story referenced in the community.

As we continue to grow our company and our community, we feel strongly that social is core value, not an add-on strategy. We will shortly being moving all of our customer service forums and knowledge base inside the Community as well which will increase traffic and hopefully create an even more vibrant area for our clients and our contributors.

Company: Telstra Corp

Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager

Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au)

Lithy category: Best Community Design

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We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.

But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.

While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as:

• Customized categories and sub category pages
• User options (turn on/off elements on homepage)
• Custom banners area
• Activity feeds
• Feature videos

These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.

We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!

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Category: Best New Community

Community: Jigsaw

Launch Date: September 29, 2009

Submitted by: Jigsaw Community Marketing Manager Communitygal

As a leading provider of business information and data services that is uniquely crowd sourced by a global community of over 1 million business to business (BtoB) contacts, Jigsaw needed a community platform that provided members with better tools to interact with each other. In September 2009, Jigsaw launched the Lithium community platform and in the spirit of community sourcing--a premise on which the company is founded--allowed its members to nominate and select its own name. "The Corner" is both a reference to the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle and a double entendre for where people go to hang out and talk.

The Corner deserves to win the Best New Community category because it is Lithium's first BtoB business information community and has been enthusiastically embraced by both Jigsaw members and management.

Jigsaw's community members visit The Corner to not just discuss Jigsaw usage and find answers to their questions but also to discuss BtoB topics such as innovative sales strategies, trade prospecting information on companies, and much more. Additionally, The Corner has been an instrumental part of Jigsaw's feedback and customer support systems. Since inception of the Lithium platform, Jigsaw has already implemented 13 product ideas that were submitted by members in the Member Idea Exchange board.

The Corner has been steadily growing in popularity. Page views for the community increased by 355% after launching the Lithium platform compared to the previous message board; unique visitors have also increased by 612%.

Jigsaw also noticed that its members were eager to help each other get the most out of the site. So much so that they've recently started moving its support assets to The Corner as they feel  this would be the right first point of contact for getting help. If other members can't resolve an issue, it goes onto the support team. This shift parallels Jigsaw's philosophy toward community sourcing solutions.

The Corner has become a vital and dynamic part of the Jigsaw community and as such, Jigsaw is investing in making it better. The next month will see a new and improved homepage for The Corner that will have a more organized look with tabs and snapshots. New employee blogs are also slated to go up soon, and the next initiative is to create a top sales books board where members submit and vote for their favorite sales books.

Company: National Instruments

Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager

Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums)

Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight

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“Are two Knights in one day better than two days in one night?” <Hint, the answer is yes.>

When the NI Discussion Forum was launched in 2004, we could not have predicted how successful it would be in fostering passionate, proficient, and accomplished advocates for National Instruments. Our super users are not only incredibly engaged, but they also constantly push the envelope and drive innovation. They are an extension of the passionate company culture we have built and strive to maintain internally at NI.

Our community members chose the ranking Knight of NI based on a shared love for the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members who reach the 10,000-post milestone virtually receive the Knight of NI title and physically receive a shrubbery. This group has only seven members but is a respected and revered resource within our community. Collectively, the Knights have a vast wealth of knowledge. When we ask why they continue to engage in the NI Discussion Forums, we consistently receive the same response: They enjoy helping others, solving difficult problems, and sharing their knowledge to develop and empower future engineers. The Knights of NI participate because they truly recognize the value of our company, products, and industry.

We recently recognized two Knights of NI on consecutive days! Becoming a Knight does not happen every day; in fact, it does not even happen every year. However, in their race to Knighthood, these two loyal users have consistently been neck and neck for over eight years.

As a group, our Knights’ engagements make up 8 percent of our total community activity, and they receive more than 20 percent of the total kudos in the community. They frequently create quality content and have authored 12 percent of our total solutions. These numbers are extremely significant considering we have seven Knights in a community of over 200,000 users! The sheer volume of posts and solutions that the Knights provide significantly drive down support costs for our organization. We are thankful for their passion and strive to nurture their behavior through recognition, sneak previews before products releases, and direct channels to engage with NI engineers, just to name a few. The Knights lead by example and inspire fellow community members to engage to earn the greatest reward: knowledge.

There are many more examples and statistics we could mention to further sing the praises of this valued group, however one of the greatest outcomes of this recognition system is the bond our super users have built with one another. Their discussions are helpful, interesting, cutting edge, personal, and always entertaining. A great portion of the success of the NI Discussion Forums is absolutely due to these loyal SuperFans.

Company: SuccessFactors

Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy

Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com)

Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation

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Why should we win this award? “We want our customers to love work again!” To ensure that our customers have the best tools and resources to help them achieve success using our products, we launched the SuccessFactors Customer Community in April 2012. The primary goal of our community is to promote peer-to-peer engagement, but we also want people to use the platform for best practices knowledge, tips and tricks, discussion forums, blogs, new ideas, and much more.

The Challenge

After launch we realized that our customers still had to access multiple systems during the day to get to our training and professional services resources. We needed to enable a single sign-on solution between our community and our SharePoint sites. We have a private community with a registration process so that only customers, partners, and employees are able to join. We have an active directory that authenticates users as they register. The two other critical resources we wanted customers to be able to access through the community were our SuccessFactors Training and SuccessFactors Professional Services. Both of these teams provide extensive knowledge and resources, but they do so on separate SharePoint sites.

The Solution

Our exceptional technical implementation, which connects the Lithium community to the SharePoint sites with the click of the button, has resulted in a completely seamless community experience for our customers.  In order to achieve this technical implementation, we worked with Lithium partner Cloudsquads and a Cloudsquads partner SusQtech. This project enabled the single sign-on capabilities with a custom integration effort. The team first explored the solution, which started with the ADFS authentication issue. The technical teams then built an integration account, which provided credentials to access SharePoint. Then they developed a custom widget within Lithium that enabled easy access to the shared documents by using an iFrame housing the SharePoint sites, within which customers can download the documents. The custom-logic widget was placed on the community forums via the Lithium studio layout editor. The widget is modular and placed in the Lithium Studio Editor. A new page was created to host this service, the content is filtered by the SharePoint app, and Lithium passes whatever available fields that are specified by the integration protocol.

After clicking the button on the homepage with single sign on users are brought directly to the PS SharePoint site.

Training Page “Get Training” button

The Training SharePoint Page after you click on the “Get Training” button single sign on brings you to the Training SharePoint Page

The Outcome

Customers are extremely satisfied with this seamless integrated solution. When customers and partners need information, documents, training, or other resources, the SuccessFactors Community is their one-stop shop! Once they are in the community, if they need to access the SuccessAcademy (training) or the Empower Methodology/Welcome Kits (Professional Services), they can easily access these SharePoint systems with a click of a button without logging in again. This is a huge win for us, and it creates an exceptional community experience for our customers.

Company: HP

Categories: Best Community Business Integration

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Seven HP Consumer Support Forums were launched between November 2008 and February 2010. HP Consumer Support Forums are available in seven languages and in more than 200 countries. Collectively these forums have grown exponentially and continue to grow significantly well in to their third year of operation.

HP customers have shown that online channels are a preferred method for finding answers to questions about HP products. To date, more than 20 million customers have resolved their issues via the HP Consumer Support Forum.

The HP Consumer Support Forum is easy to navigate, and visitors now have access to more than 600,000 forum posts on a myriad of technology topics. Discussion boards are broken out by topic area, such as Notebooks, Desktops and Printers, and offer search capabilities and advanced features like bookmarks, RSS feeds and rich multimedia.

HP also actively monitors the forum to identify common support issues and gain customer feedback and insights. This customer input is then used to improve future products and support. HP’s online service and support offerings include the HP Total Care Ambassador Program and a dedicated HP support video channel.

The HP Consumer Support Forum also features dedicated Expert Days where more than 100 experts across the globe spend 24 hours answering tech questions. HP will host the next Meet the Experts event from April 26 at noon ET to April 27 at noon ET. As part of a continued initiative to provide superior customer support, HP has added seamless mobile functionality to the HP Consumer Support Forum.

The HP Mobile Consumer Support Forum may be accessed anywhere, anytime from any mobile device – no app download required. Visitors can browse content, post questions and even assist other customers all while on the go.

Finally the HP Support Forums were recognized in Nov 2010 with a prestigious Groundswell award. The HP Consumer Support Forum is a free global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another and exchange insights, tips and answers to each other’s questions.

The forum received the accolades in the award category of International Business to Consumer: Supporting. “We’re thrilled by the diversity and quality of the entries in this year’s International Forrester Groundswell Awards,” said Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester. “With consumers worldwide embracing social technologies, the Groundswell is now global. The finalists and winners we’ve recognized – including local efforts on four continents and a number of truly global programs – are among the leaders in using social tools to reach and serve their customers.”

2010 Awards for the HP Consumer Support Community

• • 2010 TSIA STAR Award for Best Online Community
• • 2010, 2009, 2008 TSIA Excellence In Service Operations
• • 2010 Forrester Groundswell Award for Social Technologies (Groundswell Award Press Release)
• • 2010 Mashable Award Finalist
• • TSIA Hall of Fame Life Time Achievement
• • 2010 Hay Group Top 20 Best Companies for Leadership

Company: HP 

Categories: Best Community Story or Anecdote

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Get to know Erico...

Retired from the US Coast Guard, Erico is a US expatriate living in the Netherlands. During his Coast Guard career, Erico participated in many rescue missions around the world...

A hardware genius, Erico personally owns 6 personal computers and 2 monitors.  As a sideline, he operates a small PC repair shop.  He notes that it’s a way of keeping his skills sharp and staying in touch...

Erico and the HP Forums...Erico is “addicted” to the forums.  Spending many hours conversing with HP users around the world, he loves helping others, and...

HP loves having Erico as an true fan and valued enthusiast.

As a treat, the HP team got to meet Erico and say thank you personally - from L-R: HP EMEA Leads Sabrina Grollier and Wendy Schippers, Erico and Global HP Lead, Dani Weinstein.

Company: Telstra Corp

Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager

Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au)

Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation

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With a constant demand from customers to interact with Telstra, CrowdSupport was developed to be an online social hub for customers to quickly help each other, help themselves. We wanted to be able to provide our community with the best possible answers from within Telstra as well as leveraging external content to provide rich and relevant support.

To bring this vision to life we knew we had to develop CrowdSupport as a platform that was not only visually appealing but allowed content to flow fluidly between sources and the community in a responsive method to maximise the benefit to our community. To do this we began with a World First! By integrating the Microsoft community support knowledge base into the Lithium platform we are able to pull content from the Microsoft community and display into CrowdSupport, providing richer results to our community when they are searching for answers.

In addition, by using the Lithium REST API we have integrated CrowdSupport content into other assets including the Telstra website (Telstra.com) & our Telstra 24x7 mobile and tablet apps. We’ve also developed our Live Services Portal using the Google search appliance integration to aggregate and surface community content into search results on Telstra.com. These types of integrations mean our customers can access the CrowdSupport community from a range of platforms and devices so that customers can use the community in any way that they desire.

To ensure that our customers could make the best use of these new features, we’ve increased the options available to our customers to engage through introducing a range of new enhancements to the presentation layer. We’ve enhanced the layout and design of our knowledge base so that accepted knowledgebase threads now present the most relevant information first so that our customers get the right answer fast. We’ve also integrated with the REST API to create a custom homepage that surfaces trending community interaction and statistics .

Use of Lithium Rest API to customize pages high traffic pages and optimize the user experience In terms of content upload, we’re enabling Ooyala video functionality to allow all Telstra customers to submit video content without requiring a You Tube account & we’ve integrated the Lithium contest component to better engage with our customers and encourage contribution which has proven to be a real success.

Later this year we will also be introducing

• Single Sign on for all Telstra customers which will significantly alleviate registration headaches for customers using CrowdSupport.
• Customer rating and reviews that will allow our customers to provide direct feedback about our products and services
• Use the Lithium REST API to develop the “Ask a mate Widget” which will allow customers to access relevant CrowdSupport content and ask question on product and service pages on telstra.com

Company: HP

Categories: Best Community ROI

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Highlights:

• Exponential growth in page views across 7 language Forums
• Averaging more that 65% year over year growth in forum visits 
• Global visits are approaching 20% of HP Customer Care Web Site 
• More than 20 million customers found solutions from 600,000+ posts
• Steady increases in problem resolution and call deflection rates

English launched Nov. 2008                              

www.hp.com/supportforum

m.hp.com/supportforum

Spanish launched March 2009

www.hp.com/foro

Simplified Chinese launched April 2009

www.hp.com.cn/get-answers

French launched June 2009

www.hp.com/assistance

Portuguese (Brazil) Sept 2009

www.hp.com.br/forum

Portuguese (Portugal)

www.hp.pt/forum

Korean Launched Nov 2009

www.hp.co.kr/hpcommunity

German Launched Feb 2010

www.hp.com/kundenforum

Company: Research in Motion

Categories: Most Innovative Social Customer Program

Entered by: Kerri Birtch (kerrib), Social Support Planning Team

Community Name: Blackberry Support Community Forums 

URL: supportforums.blackberry.com

In the three years since the launch of the BlackBerry Support Community Forums, our overall support community has grown exponentially, particularly in past year as our organization has rolled out even more avenues to assist with social support. 

Our approach to social support has a focus on empowering our customers and offering the tools they need to find a solution to their query.

This is done in a variety of ways including:

• Maintaining strong ties with our Super User members on the Forums;
• integrating our Developer Support Forums and Resource Centre into the platform;
• interacting via Twitter to provide links to Knowledge Base articles or YouTube videos,
• and continually providing connections to the BlackBerry Help blog and the BlackBerry Developer blog.  

By ensuring that all resources are easily accessible to users and directing them to the correct resources, we are able to cultivate a support community that is not limited to just the Forums, but one that is based on strong, networked ties, allowing our customers to get social support from the channel they are most comfort with.  

Our newly launched site redesign will assist in enhancing this network as we have created more prominent connections to all of our social support channels. New features of the redesign include a more clear break down of support categories to allow users to easily navigate to their area of interest, a real time blog and Twitter feed which is customized to that specific support area, (Developers Support Forums feed has the Developer Blog, Business Support has the @BlackBerry4Biz Twitter account etc.), as well as a dedicated section where users can find links to all of our other BlackBerry communities. 

With our commitment to empowering users and creating social support channels to assist them, we are able to provide our customers with timely responses, reliable support information and some friendly interactions along the way. 

Company: AT&T

Categories: Best Community ROI

Entered by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww)

Community Name: AT&T Community

URL: forums.att.com

Partnership – That’s the reason the return on investment for AT&T’s community has increased so dramatically.

In late October, 2010, AT&T and Lithium partnered to refine, polish and consolidate three different communities birthed at different times for different purposes from different AT&T business units. Our Wireless, DSL & Internet and U-verse communities operated largely independently without shared authentication, common design or similar structure.

After fixing “the outside” of AT&T forums in October, 2010, we then leveraged our Lithium partnership to address “the inside” in February, 2011.

Following Lithium’s advice on best practices, we analyzed months of customer data, board content, etc, to totally overhaul our community organization, categories and navigation.

The community likes the changes, and we like the ROI.

The ROI results to date include:

• A steady increase in Board Replies since initial 2010 consolidation – in fact, an average of 310 vs. 164 Board Replies daily 

Our members are more engaged – answering more questions – deflecting more calls.

• A 16% increase in call shed savings January 2010 – January 2011 
• A 14% increase in call shed savings February 2010 – February 2011 
• A 14% increase in call shed savings March 2010 – March 2011 

The mission of AT&T is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. We believe our community is a growing contributor in fulfilling that mission.