You may have seen yesterday's reminder to attend the webcast today over at Customer Think’s Innovation@Work Showcase on Harnessing the Power of Social Media and CRM Systems. Well now it's your chance to participate on the topic here in the community!

Lithium’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sanjay Dholakia, and Vice President of Products, Phil Soffer, and the other panel members from Helpstream and SAP had an opportunity to showcase examples of concrete success - some of whom are members here on the Lithosphere, including Barnes & Noble, Intel, Future Shop and Logitech! So if you have a question or comment about what was presented, feel free to post your question here and Lithium will endeavor to respond!

This discussion board will be made read-only after October 15th, so be sure to stop by before then to join in!

This Thursday (October 1), the Lithium team will be taking part in Customer Think’s Innovation@Work Showcase webinar on the topic of Harnessing the Power of Social Media and CRM Systems.

Join Lithium’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sanjay Dholakia, and Vice President of Products, Phil Soffer, and the rest of the Customer Think Panel to see concrete examples of how enterprises can fully realize the potential of Social CRM connectivity.

As part of the webinar, Phil will feature tours of real-world examples from Barnes & Noble, Intel, Futureshop and Logitech, highlighting how these companies have embraced the best of the social networking and CRM worlds to create tools and experiences benefiting both themselves and their customers.

Details:

Social Media and CRM Systems Webinar
Thursday 1 Oct 2009
10-11am Pacific Time
Url:  http://www.customerthink.com/showcase/social_crm

Registration: FREE

Last week the team and I attended the 3rd Silicon Valley Tweetup as a premier sponsor. For those of you who don’t know what a tweetup is, well…  Urban Dictionary does a good job describing it. Basically it’s a real-world meet up organized through Twitter.

The SV Tweetup group is a growing fast and the latest event, at the Cielo bar on the roof of Santana Row’s Valencia Hotel was packed on Weds with well over 100 bay area social media-ites.

This event drew an extra large crowd as author Brian Solis (from PR 2.0) was attending, signing copies of his newly published book ‘ Putting the Public back in Public Relations’. Barnes & Noble | Amazon

All the funds raised during the signing went to the Anissa Lopez Foundation  and the http://www.georgemark.org/www/index.htm  charities.

Congratulations also to Robin Lee, at Spherix Capital who won our Lithium prize draw for a new Sony Playstation 3 Slim. I’m sure he’ll have some fun with that!

It was a great night, we got to talk with a lot of people and ‘hi’ to all our new friends and followers on Twitter (@lithosphere). Thank you Michael Brito (@britopian) too, who’s brain child it was to organize the SV Tweetups.

And thanks to the Lithium team who had the task of socializing on the roof of a bay area hotel--Dan, Manjeera, Michael, Danny and Jeff!

More photos from the event can be seen on SV Tweetup's Facebook group

The Lithosphere is 1 year old today!

It seems like it was just a sort time ago, but so much has happened. Of course, time past is only one way of looking at the community and what we've achieved - so I thought I'd share a couple of other numbers from the last year that you might be interested in:

Over 5 million page views
Over 2.2 million user sessions

About 620 user registrations

Number of new members registered last month: 93

Nearly 500 forum threads started, with over 1400 replies

170+ ideas submitted, with over 300 comments (since November '08)

• 8 ideas have been implemented, with 14 more under consideration

200+ blog articles,with at least 235 comments

• Includes 10 guest posts and 6 interviews

There have been over 33,000 searches

The top search term of all time is 'restapi' (over 8000 times!)

Number of forum posts on the Rest API: about 120

• Number of times JakeR stepped up to answer a REST question: at least 20

Number of forum posts on ranks: about 127

There have been over 7 webcasts, and 9 web cast speakers and moderators have participated on the community

1 major upgrade, and about 7 or so minor ones

2 major design changes

Uses of the word Lithosphereans: 4

• Number of times it has been misspelled: 2 (my fault)

Number of ranks currently in use: 23

Comments on the pink rank names: 4

Comments on the gray rank names afterwards: 4

Over 50 accepted solutions, which have been viewed over 50,000 times

Members have given out over 1700 kudos

Kudos Leaders:

• Last week: MoniqueL (3)
• Last month: JohnnyJigsaw (14)
• Last year: Mark_Hopkins (164)

...and 7 All-Star members recognized at the customer conference last May!

Avatar pictures I've had: 4

Minutes I've spent on the community: 102012 and still going

Moments of apprehension: a few

Moments of amazement and pure joy: too many to count

My thanks to each and every one of you for all that you've done to make this community a welcoming and helpful place - it's really because of you that we achieved what we have to date!

Here's hoping for many happy returns in the years to come!

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Long time residents of the Lithosphere know that when we have a webcast here at Lithium it can mean only one thing. Yep, it's your chance to ask follow-up questions of the speakers and discuss it here in the community!

Today's featured guests: Lois Townsend, Manager of Social Media Strategy and Operations at HP and Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

The topic: The New Customer Service Imperative: Driving ROI with Peer-to-Peer Social Networks

Key points:

• Best practices for using social media to reduce expenditures on costly support channels
• How to obtain feedback, identify emerging product issues, and improve support content from your customer network
• Key steps for building your business case and measuring results

A huge thanks to both our speakers for sharing their experience and research during the webcast, and also for coming back to the Lithosphere community afterwards to participate!

Once you've seen the webcast or the video, you can continue the discussion and ask additional questions here on the community!

This discussion board will be read-only after September 18th, so be sure to stop by before then to join in!