Super Users and Success

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We talk a lot here about the importance of finding and engaging your super users to drive community success. But it's always nice to see it in action on one of customer's communities - like our friends at Verizon, who just today issued a press release about the success of their Lithium powered online Verizon Community Forum in enhancing their overall customer experience, as well as providing an excellent resource to help Verizon improve their product offerings. From the release:

"According to Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

'The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online,' said Studness. 'The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users.'”

Aside from Mr. Studness' super cool name, 10 million pageviews for a new community in 8 months and growing is an excellent metric. And if you read the full release (also up on the Lithium site), there was an excellent profile of one of their community's super users, Justin and what keeps him coming back. But I thought I'd take it a one step further on this blog to see what kind of content people are getting with all those pageviews:

• 19127 posts in the community since it's launch. That's about 80 posts a day for 8 months of consistent posting - in fact, today's rates of content generation are probably much higher as the community has grown.
• 1309 posts were from the top two members on the Kudos leaderboard for the community, Justin (522 posts, named in the press release) and TimSykes (787 posts) combined for an amazing 7% of the total posts in the community. It's even more amazing when you realize that TimSykes didn't even register until October.
• 318 posts marked as accepted solutions. This is one of my favorite numbers, a clear indication of value of the content being created on the community, and also a conservative metric because accepted solution rates are typically an order of magnitude lower than the number of answered questions in the community.

By finding and engaging those all-important super-users, Verizon's community is flourishing. Which helps to explain why Verizon is seeing significant operational efficiency and cost savings as a result of deflected calls and a growing knowledge base of peer content.

Do you have a super user story you'd like to share? Let me know!

photo by inju