Displaying articles for: October 2009
On November 11th, Lithium is hosting the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals at the Social CRM Virtual Summit. The change brought about by the social media revolution has impacted every area of industry, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, particularly where they turn for trusted information.
With webcasts by Social CRM thought leaders and live chats with industry experts and practitioners, the Virtual Summit will be a ground breaking event. Remember you can still sign up for the event here, and jump into the conversation on Twitter using #vscrm.
To introduce you to the experts presenting at the event, we’ll be running a series of mini profiles here in the Lithosphere.
Expert: Matt Goyer, Director of Online Marketing, Redfin
Matt Goyer is the Director of Online Marketing for Redfin - the industry's first online brokerage for buying and selling homes, self described as half Century 21 and half E-Trade. The Redfin Real Estate Forums help house hunters and agents talk about the process of buying and selling property and let them get information and advice from people who are going through or have completed the process.
He will be hosting an online chat session with other experts on how you can successfully integrate community into your social activities and what it really means for their businesses.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
My first online community experience was with BBSes back in the pre-Internet days; I even ran my own for a few years. In 2000, I started blogging but recently my personal blogging has slowed as my Twitter usage has increased. However, I still actively write for a blog I started about Seattle condos, named Urbnlivn.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Thinking about how we (Redfin) can create local online communities in every market we’re in by getting Redfin agents on board with Twitter and Facebook.
Q: What is a big community topic on your mind at the moment?
Scaling the community. Real estate discussions can be very polarizing. There are those who are convinced the market has crashed enough and those who think we haven’t yet hit bottom. As our community has grown the debates have raged more and more.
As more people join our community we’re struggling to moderate the discussion ourselves and quickly need to figure out how to involve more community members in helping us keep the discussion civil, but yet still open.
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If you want to follow Matt on Twitter, his id is @mattgoyer. You can follow Redfin too at @redfin.
Josh Bernoff, senior vice president, Idea Development at Forrester and coauthor of Groundswell, announced the winners at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago last night (27th Oct). With winners across B2B and B2C categories, the awards recognize achievement in 13 categories of customer interaction via social applications.
This year’s awards are exciting for us for a couple of reasons. Of the 140+ entries, ten Lithium customers submitted entries to the prestigious industry event. Ten customers who are blazing a trail in social and community engagement, showing how they are getting real results, growth, increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and return on investment, from the platform that we hold near and dear to our hearts. ScottD highlighted all the entries in his Enterprise on the Surface post in September if you need a refresher.
Most important for us, is that one of our great customers was awarded the highest accolade in the event! Congratulations to the team at FICO for winning the ‘Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Support category’ for the work of the myFICO online consumer community. This is great recognition for them and I know the team is thrilled to be recognized for the results that they are achieving.
If you’re not familiar with the myFICO story, they are a community where consumers can post questions, find answers and share experiences around credit scoring, usage, reporting and monitoring.
The FICO Forums were launched in 2007 as an alternative customer support channel, designed to leverage the passion, knowledge and experience of myFICO’s customer network. And the results are showing. They have interaction of around 20,000 posts and 400,000 searches each month. FICO credits the online community with a significant drop in call volume and length at its customer support center, as more and more customers seek answers and support from other customers. Since establishing the FICO Forums, the company has also experienced an increase in sales of its consumer products and services attributable to community membership.
We published a case study earlier this year in conjunction with FICO highlighting all the aspects of their approach and results. If you didn’t see it, you can get it here and FICO’s entry submission to the awards is here.
Wait.. there’s more!
At this point I have to call out congratulations to two other customers: Lenovo and Juniper Networks.
Lenovo was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Consumer (B2C) Supporting category’ for the Lenovo Forums peer-to-peer support community. The community has yielded over 3.7 million accepted solution views since the feature was enabled in April 2008 and a recent Forrester case study of the Lenovo community noted a 20% decline in US support call rates. Congratulations to Mark and the gang. Lenovo’s original entry submission is here.
Juniper was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Business (B2B) Spreading category’ for their ‘Fast Track Promotion’ activities. Juniper’s J-Net online engagement/support community played a huge role in the activities of helping 14,000 new users get certified on its JUNOS Software. This award fills me with a little more pride than normal, as I used to run the Juniper team, I know them all very well, and know the hard work that went into all the activities. Well done guys! Juniper’s original entry submission is here.
At the awards presentation, Josh said “Every year the quality of business social applications goes up, and marketers become more sophisticated. This year’s winners stood out in a very competitive field; all of them demonstrate not just creative use of social technologies, but impressive, measurable results.”
We couldn’t agree more. Congratulations again to FICO for their win, to Lenovo and Juniper for their finalist positions and to all the entrants – you’re leading the way in Social CRM and community interaction.
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: Todd Shimizu, Director of Communities, Juniper Networks
He will be hosting an online chat session with other experts on how you can successfully integrate community into your social activities and what it really means for their businesses.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I became involved with an industry consortium called IPsphere, of which Juniper was the originator. Initially I served as a Chair for the IPsphere Marketing Committee and eventually became Chairman of the Board for the entire body. I spent two years as Chairman building a "traditional" community comprised of Juniper customers, partners, and even competitors. Moving to the world of online communities seemed like a natural progression -- and an exciting evolution as it involved understanding how to apply technology to the mission of community-building.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I look after our strategy for online communities, which includes our J-Net Community, our blogs, as well as our official social media channels, including Twitter and Facebook. My charter also includes developing one of our most important constituencies, the JUNOS community.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
One of my key focuses right now is scaling the communities to meet the needs of our growing online ecosystem, for example how to expand upon our partner community to best serve the diversity of that group and how to deepen relationships with our JUNOS community.
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If you want to follow Todd on Twitter, his id is @shimmage
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: Mark Hopkins, Social Media Manager, Lenovo
He will be hosting an online chat session with other experts on how you can successfully nurture your most valued players, the Superusers.
Q: What got you involved in community to begin with?
My career has been focused on trying to improve the customer experience in one form or fashion. It’s certainly been varied - I've worked in technical support answering direct phone calls; leading, training and supporting teams, analyzing call center data and working with product development to improve quality, functionality, and ease of use. I spent a number of years working with various forms of solicited and unsolicited customer feedback, often in the forum of transactional and relationship surveys. Surveys are great, but they only capture information that you thought to ask and in the case of transactional surveys, they collect information triggered by a particular experience point. This kind of information is useful for measuring change in a repeatable manner, but lacks the broader context and interactive nature.
In 2005, I began monitoring discussions on the web and quickly realized the potential of social media to do what traditional market research and surveys did not. Almost immediately, communities distinguished themselves as being high value centers of influence - rich in content and user activity.
Q: What are you currently working on?
I'm working to build our community in two hemispheres - a customer side that we typically think about in terms of achieving critical user mass, activity, and value, and also the internal side that we don't always think about - the internal network within an enterprise. Long term, these two halves need to become wired together though a combination of facilitating technologies, and shared objectives. The wiring of the community can be complex and spans multiple social platforms with shared membership and content. Adding new features and content are the most visible aspects of these efforts.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
In a word, ‘analytics’. Traditional forums haven't changed that much in the last decade in terms of the analytical data available from them. Most of the platform-generated metrics are event-based; number of views, posts, threads, registered users, etc. I would say that most of the metrics of today are very ‘Web 1.0’. What are your customers talking about? Is the tone of the overall discussion more positive overall than last month? These are the metrics we are realizing we need.
Today, it really requires a lot of reading to understand what is being said - what the issues are, how many are concerned / involved, and what the temperature of the room is. Sure, there are a number of companies that offer a mix of human and technological capabilities to help answer these questions, but I think there is a huge opportunity in communities for the next generation ‘2.0’ measurements to be generated out of a community. I’m definitely interested in discussion topic discovery, sentiment analysis, and identification of top influencers.
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If you’re in the LenovoForums, watch out for Mark, you’ll spot him as Mark_Lenovo
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: Will Rose, Senior Analyst, Web & Self-Help, Integrated Customer Experience, T-Mobile
He will be hosting an expert chat session with other experts on Extending the Customer Network using mobile devices, giving practitioners the opportunity to talk about what community and mobile really means for their business.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
I’ve been a member of a number of communities over the years. I got involved the same way most people do – I was seeking help with questions/problems/even homework from other people in the community. At T-Mobile, community started as a means of lowering overall support costs, deflecting calls from our support call centers and giving our customers an additional channel for support and answering their questions.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Right now we’re expanding our current community to include Lithium’s new Tribal Knowledge Base letting us use community content as official KB material, as well as integrating our Twitter presence directly into the forums. From a strategic standpoint, like many companies we’re working to establish guidelines for employee Social Media interaction/use, and continuing to align and integrate our corporate and social strategies.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
I really want to make community accessible and desirable to the user segments who are either ‘less-than-tech-savvy’ and feel intimidated by the tools, or who are turned off by the mention of ‘forums’ or ‘peer-to-peer self-help’.
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If you want to follow Will on Twitter, his id is @TMobile_Will
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: Dr Michael Wu - Principle Scientist, Analytics, Lithium Technologies
Dr Michael Wu is the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium Technologies. Michael received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Biophysics graduate program. His graduate research focuses on modeling the human brain, specifically the visual cortex, with techniques from math, statistics, and machine learning. He is one of the principle minds behind Lithium’s Community Health Index standard of measuring the success of a community.
He will be hosting an expert chat session on Analytics, giving practitioners the opportunity to talk about the science of measuring community, and what the metrics really mean for their business.
Q: What got you involved in community and/or social media to begin with?
The better question might be ‘what got me into social analytics’? I’d have to say, it’s all about the data. Because of the SaaS platform run by Lithium – it has recorded a huge data set over the 10 over the past decade. The data at Lithium is very rich and diverse. Besides the 200+ metrics that Lithium records, there are also loads of conversation data between real, everyday people. This is what got me excited about social analytics.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Primarily my research is focused on two groups of users, superusers, and lurkers and the interactions they have. Superusers are obviously interesting because they contribute so much and bring so much value to the community. But why are they involved in the way they are? What drives them? It’s safe to say that nobody joins a community as a superuser. Yet, in every community, we observe the emergence of this particular group. Can we accurately predict who will become a superuser soon after they join the community?
Lurkers on the other hand are interesting in their own right - because up to 90% of a community displays this behavior. What keeps them engaged even though they don’t participate? Can we incent lurkers to participate and move up the rank ladder? These questions are something that have all community practitioners searching for answers. We can already measure superuser interaction, but if we can predict which lurkers will become superusers you have an incredibly powerful targeting metric.
Q: What is big community topic on your mind at the moment?
As well as investigating superuser/lurker behavior, I am very interested being able to derive predictive models for business value. The goal being to discover the mechanisms where our platform can bring values and quantify the value they bring to a company. Some of these mechanisms, such as call deflection, are well understood and their return on investment are readily quantifiable.
But the value of ‘word of mouth advocacy’, and people who are influenced through lurking are less tangible. Currently I am working a model that quantifies the value of word of mouth in a community. I am hoping that this will lead us down the road to ultimately quantifying the value of a superuser to a business.
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Michael writes regularly in the Lithosphere blog, ‘Analytic Science’ – he is currently writing a two part article on his participation at the Virtual Summit.
Join expert community practitioner and Lithium's Chief Community Officer, Joe Cothrel and Genesys Senior Product Marketing Manager, Lisa Abbott for a free live webcast exploring how customer interactions and feedback can be harnessed via community and contact center integration.
Not signed up? Register now
For every one interaction your company knows about, there are hundreds and thousands of others that are already happening between customers, influencers, and prospects. This is your opportunity to tap into that pool of knowledge.
In this webcast, Joe and Lisa will cover:
- How a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls.
- Ways to deliver tangible marketing savings, increased sales, and improved conversion rates through a successful customer community.
- How to accelerate innovation by listening to customer ideas that yield new product revenues and process improvements.
Customers are the keys to unlocking millions of dollars in untapped value by empowering them to innovate for you; to support each other for you; to promote and sell for you. In this webcast, co-hosted with our newly announced partner, Genesys, the world's #1 contact center software provider, we will show you just how valuable your customers are to your business. Join us!
Title: Leveraging Your Customers to Drive Revenue, Generate Brand Loyalists, and Lower Support Costs
Date: Tuesday 13 October
Time: 4pm GMT, 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific
Duration: 1 hour
Cost: FREE!
Register now
October 27th through 28th sees Forrester Research’s annual Consumer Forum hit the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago. The Consumer Forum examines the challenges facing practitioners in today's online ecosphere.
This year, Lithium Technologies will be in attendence as one of the event's Silver sponsors. We'll be demostrating our Social CRM suite and examples of how our customers are using the Lithum platform to drive their businesses. If you're there, drop by our booth (#113)--we'd love to see you.
Forrester's depth of research gives them a unique perspective on what is happening in the industry, and they are able to draw out pragmatic insights and strategies and can highlight a wealth of best practices for companies and marketing professionals to draw on.
But attendees won't just hear from Forrester, an army of executive and expert speakers from companies pioneering social and community interaction will also be sharing their experiences. Lithium customer, Best Buy, and their Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Barry Judge, will be attending delivering a keynote speech on the 'Blurred Lines between Customer Service and Marketing'. If you're attending the event, we highly recommend this session.
This year's Consumer Forum will focus in on topics including the following :
- What is the 'three-dimensional consumer'?
- How to build a true digital brand consumer expectations from online channels?
- How can digital channels focus consumer relationships?
- What is the role of social media as an engagement channel?
- What is mobile's role in connecting consumers?
The winners of the 3rd annual Forrester Groundswell awards will also be announced -- and we're rooting for all the Lithium customers who submitted entries.
For more info, or last minute registration you can visit Forrester's Consumer Forum site and to keep up with the event on Twitter, use the hashtag #fcf09
Greetings everyone!
Mark_Hopkins
on:
A View from the Social CRM Virtual Summit Control ...
Dieds
on:
Come see us at the next SV Tweetup
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