lithys - social customer excellence awards

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: BSkyB

Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager

Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com)

Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight

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Best Superfan Story/Insight

BSkyB

2013

In July 2012 we introduced our innovative Super User Program on the Sky Help Forum Community, recognising the super contributions from some of our forum members. Our Sky Help Community Super Users are individuals from within our Community who are the ultimate Sky boffins. Their technical prowess, detailed knowledge and broad range of expertise mean that they are the most valuable commodity in sourcing answers to our Customers questions. Whether they are technical aficionados looking to get the optimum performance of advanced applications or a technophile looking to simply decipher the jargon our Super Users can offer insight and support across our Customer base. All of our Super Users are independent of Sky and offer a true Customer insight in how to get the best from our products and services.

We wanted to implement a Super User program which truly recognised those active members within our Community who were advocates of sharing knowledge and best practice and wholeheartedly encompassed our methodology of peer to peer support and inclusion.

In being an advocate of our Customers and understanding their viewpoint our Super Users can offer a definitive insight into the sentiment of our audience and work with us to envisage a cohesive community built upon our core values. Our current base of 12 Super Users, have been recognised not only by Sky but by their peers as frequent, knowledgeable contributors with the Kudos and Accepted solutions to prove they are ‘worthy’

To recognise the contribution of our band of expert Superfans we provide them with enhanced access to encapsulate them as part of the Sky team. “The Boardroom” our Private Community boiler room allows us to engage with our Super Users at a unique level understanding their views, ideas and feedback on new product trials, services and general discussions about almost everything. Not only that, but their contributions to our dedicated Knowledge Base and Monthly Blog articles truly gives a unique view of what it means to be a Super User and a true Sky Superfan.

One of our original community members on the Sky Help Forum was Annie+UK who registered on 27th October 2010 and has become a mainstay Sky boffin across our Help Forum offering insightful help and support to our Customers.

As a respected senior member within our community Annie+UK is our ultimate Superfan and was a first choice to join our Super User Program when launched.

However, it wasn’t always that way. During the early days, Annie+UK felt frustrations with regard to issues she was having related to her service provision and how this was handled from a customer support point of view, all of her frustrations were evident in her posts. A lot of this had to do with transparency, product development and honest communication. In case managing the issues experienced by Annie+UK we began to develop a foundation of open communication and feedback which offered us key insights into the sentiment of our wider community. Her insight was invaluable as a true testament of the value of our Customer’s knowledge and experience. Cultivating a strong relationship based on a mutual support and shared knowledge has integrated Annie+UK and our wider Super Users into the Sky team.

Being part of the Super User program and having the opportunity to build relationships with the Sky team allowed us to be more open and honest and along with having the opportunity to be involved in beta trials has helped change Annie+Uk’s opinion and rather than leaving the community she has become an advocate, this is evident in her having read 90%of all posts across our Community Forum and in supporting her peer customer group has responded to in excess of 2,750 Customer queries.

Her continued support of our Community members in sharing her knowledge and advice has assured her respected status as one of our key Super Users. She is not afraid to ask difficult questions and pose feedback directly to us based on Customer experiences which, assures that we can continually improve our service for our Customers. Her inspirational and engaging manner has assured she is an advocate of both our Customers and Sky which, has been key in the continued development of our Community and indeed our service provision.

In essence, Annie+UK has spent over 1 ½ years logged into the community, for a community that is less than 3 years old…making Annie+UK our ultimate Super Fan.

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: SFR

Entry submitted by: Sandie Hodiesne (SH) Social Media Manager

Community: Le Forum SFR (forum.sfr.fr)

Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight

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SFR Forum, an online Adventure, a great Human Adventure!

SFR Forum exists since 2008. It’s a place where web advisors used to respond automatically to customer requests either in a public or private mode.

During spring 2012, we faced a big challenge: Moving from an online customer services model to a 100% peer-to-peer Support Community model. A new way of thinking and managing information - a complete break and a real step forward into the world of online peer-to-peer Communities.

We decided to give to our future community as much space and autonomy as we could provide them with. We decided to take drastic decision. We kept the name but started from a white sheet without capitalizing on the old threads and existing content which could remind us of our previous operating processes.

We identified about thirty Super-users on our various social media properties (“Atelier SFR”, old “SFR Forum”, “HUB”). With the active help of our community managers, we gathered contact details for all of the super-users. A first contact was made through email. Afterward we contacted them all by phone and explained them this huge new project. Out of the 30 contacts, 29 were very enthusiastic and immediately ready to engage in this Adventure. Sandie (SFR’s Social Media Manager) set up 2 video conference meetings to discuss with the super-users in order to decrease the growing fear regarding the new community, to answer to remarks such as “it was better before with the old forum”, and to create the first relationships between participants. Fabien and Manuella, two community managers from the beginning, were collaborating with Sandie during these meetings and suggested a Beta test phase of one month. We explained to our super-users what would be their role and why it would be beneficial for them to be part of the New Forum beta phase. During this month, they would be able contribute to the community editorial content, create their own content, find new ways to communicate with the community management team in a public mode and embrace a heads-on the philosophy of the new Forum.

The day before the D-Day, the enthusiasm and the engagement of our “Founders” was very big. Dartagnan, Michel2, DocMac, RafCorDel, Rebel, Kendokanne and all the others were very excited to be launched in the open and exposed to a new audience and a new community.

January 15^th at 5pm, great emotion and vibes: first discussions, first ranks reached, first Private Message conversations… The SFR peer-to-peer Community where users could share their customer experiences and help each other was born!

Our “Founders” were recognizable with their specific “Founders” badges created for them and quickly took care of the new users. The SFR community is their community and they are deciding everything about the choice of discussion to highlight, what to post on the blog or the Wikisphere … These super fans defend strongly this new philosophy. We could witness comments like « But where are the SFR advisors?” or “Here, there is only us, the community, satisfied customers happy to help and support others. If you need to access your confidential customer data, the community won’t be able to answer.” When the community is unable to answer you, we guide you to the right contact points after the diagnostic is made. In this community, we always try to find a solution!

Our super-users have a dedicated space, a “private room”, invisible from the other members. Through this private room, we inform them about cases that members face regularly and the answers we have and that they can be spread out across the community. They can also give us their feedback on what is working or not with the platform and further needed developments… It’s also in this private room that we discuss about our next video conference, meetings, special events such as call for topics for the blog.

To transmit these values across the community, members must have taken the ownership of this online space. For this magic to operate, the online community needs to resonate with the members. Each members needs to feel comfortable navigating this online community. The customer experience must be positive.

The video launch takes the advantage of this simplicity: the ability to create something great together.

The ranking starts in a reference universe known from all but gradually draws references from the gaming world, while relying on the values of the Forum:

- The “Builders” who by their contributions and exchanges secure and solidify the base of collective knowledge:

- The “Enchanters” are recognized both for the quality of information they provide and the benevolence that radiates around them:

After only 1 month and a half, our community has now 40 super-users with a high level of posts - Vindedious (1600), Kendokanne (1700), Boriswap (1300), Dartagnan (1400)…  They are some of our heroes you can visit in the “Forum SFR” community.

Discussions between all the community members and the super-users give us the opportunity to detect very quickly any malfunction and to inform the community when a problem is solved. For example, Kendonkanne initiative helped to qualify a problem with sms billing, to solve it very quickly and to relay the information in a public mode. This enabled to reassure our customers that have send us a lot of sweet words.

40 Super-users provide 50% of the Community content

In addition of this efficiency, pleasure of sharing and conviviality moved in : Almost 2,100 posts shared within our Community on the “Discussion du Comptoir” pages. In a month and half, discussions are as well about music and cinema as Art in general.

The strength brought by our Community Management team are:

1. Sincerity and authenticity,
2. the wish to humanize the online relationships,
3. the genuine desire to develop and reward anonymous expert by making them shine under the limelight.

We will meet for real and for the first time our super-users on March 22^nd. It’s our way to celebrate Spring!

Goal : The official launch of our super-users program and share its content – Virtual Workshop and meeting with SFR experts, SFR site visits, game to participate to events such as new mobile launch, celebration and more.

Their first mission, find a name to the program. And to close the day, a great surprise is waiting for them. One of the founders of the Manau Group will be there to explain the story of “La tribu de Dana”, a very well known song in the 90’s, before we capture a great picture of all our superusers with our Polaroid.

The relationship between and with our super-users is essential and strong. The idea for this year is to offer them a customized T-Shirt with their username, a way for us to build a story together… See you soon with more input about this great Adventure.

Sandie & the community management team : Cindy, Manuela, Fabien, Fanja & Emmanuelle

http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-est-la-Social-Media-Manager/ba-p/18598

http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-sont-vos-Community-Managers/ba-p/9936

Company: Google Inc.

Entry submitted by: Agata Kryzsztofik (Agata) Community Program Manager

Community: AdWords Community (http://www.en.adwords-community.com)

Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation

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Google AdWords has been working closely with Lithium Engineering on seamless migration of our users from OpenId to OAuth2. We wanted to make sure that users who are coming to our Community are offered with a Single sign-on experience that they are used to when using other Google products.

The OAuth2 implementation allows our users to use the same login and avatar for the Community as the one they are already using for other Google products and switch between various Google accounts. It also removed the need for Lithium to create, maintain and secure a login email and password store. All together it makes the sign-in process fast and secure for our users.

Company: Rogers

Entry submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Manager, Social Media Support

Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com)

Lithy category: Best Social Marketing Program

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Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert - connecting Rogers product teams with customers in an open conversation about their most challenging technology questions. Our new consumer website, Tech Essentials, was designed to provide Canadians with a deeper understanding of how today’s technology works.

To increase awareness for the site, corporate communications looked to the Rogers Community Forums for support. Over the last year the forums have become a platform for our product teams to engage directly with customers. In 2012, we covered mobile payment security and new product launches by hosting expert events.

Why use the Rogers Community Forums as a platform?

• We know that over 90% of registered users are Rogers customers based on SSO ID sign-in
• Events such as this give us a chance to present our point of view in an open and transparent way
• The event creates link love for programs like Tech Essentials and promotes SEO.

The “Tech Essentials: Ask an Expert” forum series will run throughout 2013, providing our forum users with insider access to our product teams. Our first event covered roaming, a topic that can generate confusion and frustration for customers. We held an open Q&A over a two-hour period and generated a dozen questions and three Accepted Solutions. We received great feedback from customers as we clarified some misconceptions they had.

Marketing integration – the event was promoted through these owned channels:

• On our corporate blog Redboard
• On our online consumer magazine Connected Rogers
• Using direct channels, we invited 90,000 customers via email to the event
• Via Twitter - @RogersHelps, @RogersBuzz and using the #techessentials hashtag
• We also asked employees to invite family, friends and customers with an intranet story

How does an event like this improve the customer experience?

Product owners get to hear directly from customers. It generates immediate feedback that can be used to improve product offers.

How does an event like this drive revenue?

The event was hosted just a few days before March Break, one of the most popular travel times for Canadians. By targeting customers we believe likely to roam, and providing instructions for roaming without worry, we expect more customers will purchase travel packs.

How does an event like this build advocacy?

The Rogers Community Forums are peer-to-peer. By posting validated answers, we’re empowering members of the community to answer future questions. We’re looking forward to hosting future events, coordinating with the Tech Essentials Monthly Spotlight, some possible topics include data usage and how parents can keep their kids safe online.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG

Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager

Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net)

Lithy category: Best Social Support Program

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In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.

Since launch in November 2011, our A1 Support Community grew significantly: our real substitution ranks around 25 percent (= percentage of users which perceive the A1 Support Community as primary service channel) and the crowd ratio is located around 80 percent. When looking at the charts, we managed to create a vitally and steady growing Community – but what are the qualitative actions we set to engage with our users and to motivate them to participate in the way they do?

On the one hand, it is all about motivation factors, gaming mechanics and gratification approaches:

• Transferring online into offline events: within 2012 we started the initiative “Community events”. We organized a guided tour at the A1 Technical Department. The Super Users were accompanied by A1 Device managers and the A1 Social Media management team for a meet & greets and to gain exclusive background-infos.
• “Community photo tour” – we exclusively invited users to a phototour to the Viennese zoo and equipped them with Hero-device smartphones to review the quality of the photo-cameras.

• Hero of the month Award: Super Users – the most active users in our Community – are rewarded monthly for their outstanding contributions within the Community.
• Super Users as moderators: to show the most active Super Users our respect and trust, we gave them moderator roles within the Community. Now they are able to contribute even more to the content and quality of the A1 Support Community.

• Exclusive boards, badges, ratings and rankings for Super Users are a matter of course as they were part of the concept when creating our new Community.

On the other hand, we deeply link our A1 Social Media channels and provide target-group oriented content:

It all started by integrating the A1 Support Community in our Facebook fanpage. By doing so, we opened the Community to our established fan base on Facebook.

When comparing to our competitors in the Austrian telecommunications market , we keep a facebook fan-share of 59% and are therefore at the pole position with around 238,000 Facebook fans. On Facebook, three A1 Social Support agents provide fast and exclusive support. Additionally, we spread offers, lotteries and product information for our Facebook target group. Twitter is our channel for distributing company news as well as servicing support requests.

The A1 Blog provides product information, device and App reviews, etc. and is deeply linked with the A1 Support Community. The A1 Community actively creates content for our A1 Blog, eg. device reviews from users. The recruiting of our authors takes place via A1 Support Community and Facebook.

We take Customer experience one step further:

Initiatives like the Ideas concept take the customer experience to another level, where users can participate in the development and beta testing of products and solutions.

For that reason, we integrated our A1 Community in the development of the new “My A1” customer self-service area. Firstly, we asked them for ideas which functions they would like to see in the new Customer Self-Service area. After reviewing them, we gave them feedback concerning their ideas and invited them to join a workshop with the “My A1”-project managers. In one last step, the A1 Community had the chance to evaluate the scribbles made for “My A1” and give their feedback to be incorporated into the self-service area.

Not only the facts and figures proof that we are one the right path – in 2012, our A1 Support Community and Social Media commitment stood out at national and international Social Media and Community Awards.

In Hamburg, Germany, we were rewarded for the “Best Social Media Strategy” in the DACH region at the Social Media Economy Days 2012. At the Digital Communication Award 2012 the A1 Support Community was honored as the Best Online Community within the European online PR and communications branch as well as with the German Award for Online Communications 2012 in Berlin, Germany. In Austria, one of our integrated Social Media campaigns was rewarded with the Award for the Best Online- and Social Media communication granted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth.

Company: LEGO Systems Inc.

Entry submitted by: Mark Fothergill (MarkF) Head of Children's Community & Moderation

Community: LEGO Community (community.lego.com)

Lithy category: Best Social Support Program

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Since its inception in 1932, the LEGO Group has come a long way - from a small carpenter’s workshop, to a leading global enterprise, always looking for ways to reinvent the brand experience to maintain its world class service. With the growth of social, it was a natural impetus to build a social online experience which encouraged users to interact, engage and share with each other in a safe and secure way, while maintaining the fun, learning and imaginative elements that were aligned to the brand values.

The business aim was to create an interactive social online experience (via an infused dot com presence) that was buzzing in engagement whilst maintaining its simplicity and ease of use, in a safe and secure environment that provided users with quicker “get to times”.  We have a high affinity with users in the 7-14 years age bracket, so online safety and security was paramount.  We were also migrating our users from our old forums to the Lithium platform, so our first step was to understand the issues our existing user community was facing and leverage their feedback to ensure our new launch met their needs.  The responses we received included:

• Faster moderation
• Increased engagement with LEGO staff
• Better structure to the forums
• More guidance on rules
• Less “spam”

We launched the new community on 9 November 2012 with great success – migrated 2.4 million users and 4+ million posts. There was 0% data and user loss and 1000 users joined the community within the first hour.

“Get to Times” had reduced by more than 7hrs from 8hrs in January 2012 to 56 mins when measured in December 2012. At the same time, user interaction went up by 62% when compared to interaction in the previous forums the year prior.

With a more interactive and structured community reflecting features available on other social platforms such as “Likes” introduced, and additional features such as a new ranking structure, user interviews, story and role play forums as well as online polling, paved the way to a significant increase in user activity.

New Polling & Ranking Features:

Some of the new ranks:

There was also a large reduction in spam based on changing the ranking structure from the old posting only system to a new more varied criteria including user defined opinion on quality and rating of content. The new ranks have instilled a culture of support and encouragement between the users and we now have a very healthy community feel.

We changed our moderation and engagement coverage set up to ensure 24/7 coverage, with 8 team members located in different time zones and geographical locations around the world. With the backing of help from vendor moderators, the core LEGO team now has more freedom to actively engage with users, spending hours engaging per week now in comparison to minutes previously.

We set up a comprehensive help/FAQ section where users can check out the rules, how to change signatures and generally tailor their own settings. For new users, after reading the FAQs, in every single forum we have “Welcome to newbie” or “Adopt a newbie” topics where new users can come in and introduce themselves and existing users will take them under their wings and help bring them into the community.

As an example of how engaged some of our kids are, in January 2013, the stats tell us that our 27 highest ranked users (all Forestmen, Ninjas, Aztec Warriors or Conquistadors) each spent 74 hours in the community per week! They’re very dedicated!

The new LEGO.com community embodies the LEGO brand values of fun, creativity, quality and originality. Visit community.lego.com to view for yourself.

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.

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