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….
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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: Gina Debogovich, Communities Manager, Best Buy
Gina Debogovich is the Communities Manager for Best Buy, the well known multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products and services with a commitment to growth and innovation. The Best Buy family of brands and partnerships collectively generates more than $45 billion in annual revenue and includes brands such as Best Buy; The Carphone Warehouse; Future Shop; Geek Squad, and Magnolia Audio Video.
In her role, she manages the hugely popular Best Buy Community, which gives existing and potential customers the ability to ask questions and to exchange ideas, information, opinions and tips with other technology users.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I have been working with online communication in a variety of forms for over a dozen years. I love using technological tools to do research, learn about new products and concepts and to connect with friends and family. The thing that has turned Best Buy into a great retailer, is the power of our people. As commerce shifts to more online transactions we are bringing the power of these people – our Blueshirt and Geek Squad Agents – to the internet to provide customers access to their knowledge, skills and expertise. In my role at Best Buy being able to facilitate those connections for others, is quite emotionally rewarding for me.
Q: What are you currently working on?
In our last year and a half of blogosphere engagement, we have gotten very good at the art of the conversation and leveraging our existing process to provide customer support. We will now spread this to other brands within our enterprise. Our current focus is with Best Buy Mobile. We have just launched our fourth Community powered by Lithium to support our Best Buy Mobile Community. The focus of this community is customer engagement and product discussion.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
Do customers want us to enable a social shopping experience, and if they do, how do we monetize the Community experience. Community platforms are primarily looked at as a means of decreasing support costs and derive their ROI from that type of model. I anticipate the next big leap in Community management will be the shift to a direct monetization model that facilitates a social shopping experience.
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The Best Buy forums can be found here. And if you’re a Twitterer, check out Twelpforce, Best Buy’s community integration with the Twittersphere…
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.
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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.
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If you want to follow Patrick on Twitter, his id is @patrickfriley
Mark_Hopkins
on:
A View from the Social CRM Virtual Summit Control ...
Dieds
on:
Come see us at the next SV Tweetup
