Community Feels Good ...with Lithium!

Building tightly knit communities around a brand is a topic that’s generated a lot of buzz recently in marketing circles. It’s long been known that communities help people do things better; We humans are social by nature and are most effective when working together in groups. A good example is the open source software movement. People team up to volunteer on projects that are much larger than any individual could accomplish alone. Now innovation in community management (and the rise of Social media) has made it possible to socialize while getting things done.

Community management on the other hand tends to foster a more distributed network, empowering members to produce more of their own content and have more peer-to-peer interaction. It enables communities to feel more ownership and to be more effective in solving problems. The diagrams above, from a 1964 report by the Rand corporation, outline steps to a future vision of enhanced connectivity that eventually became the internet. Note that diagram (C) – the distributed network – exhibits more connections with shorter distances indicating more peer-to-peer interaction and (it is presumed) effectiveness.

Why is peer-to-peer interaction important in community? When members of a community become enfranchised, they tend to act in everyone’s best interest. Moreover, when properly motivated they tend to team up on common problems and produce results. Happily, the most effective motivation has proven to be social rewards like recognition and status rather than material rewards. Therefore a tremendous amount of value can be gained at minimal cost through careful community management.

Community can provide (almost) free, what companies would otherwise pay for. 

•  customer service
• documentation
• technical support
• training
• news updates
• brand advocacy
• advertising
• QA and testing

But community is about more than just saving money; Leveraging the power of the crowd can also pioneer new ways of doing business. Communities can produce unanticipated innovations.

• anticipate existing market’s needs and generate solutions
• innovate new features for unanticipated use-cases
• present new ways to engage and enlist new customers
• identify new markets and user groups

It’s disruptive in the ‘business’ sense that it changes the playing field; It creates new value and opportunities for those that get on early and gives them a competitive advantage. Use of community is growing rapidly. Small companies that maximize their communities’ value will challenge and eventually replace the old-order companies that try to do everything in-house.

This trend affects more than just companies that use community and their competitors. It accelerates innovation and causes market movement across the board by changing customers’ expectations. Brands that don’t invest in a well managed community are doubly missing the boat: letting untapped value go to waste, and also disappointing customers who want to engage.

While there are many social platforms that include community management (see Sharepoint, Jive etc…), few focus exclusively on community, and fewer still offer a comprehensive suite of features out of the box.

Lithium’s platform has 4 core offerings:

• Lithium Communities
• Lithium Social Web
• Lithium Mobile
• Lithium Social Intelligence

Lithium has the power to turn a brand’s website into a social hub and maximize its potential value. They have pioneered the field of community analytics: codifying the parameters of community that drive real results like ROI. Lithium has quantified real-time performance metrics, and can drill down to the level of each conversation and community member to identify the users and ideas with greatest influence.

Lithium also offers marketing and strategy services to put all that deep data to work. However their big selling point is integration for a single coordinated face. They have allowed for fine-grained control over the appearance of its huge list of features, even across platforms to mobile devices and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Everything can be skinned to seamlessly match the core brand’s existing look and feel. That’s where we come in.

We provide Lithium development for innovative companies like SuccessFactors, including layout, styling and custom components. We also provide ongoing maintenance services to keep lithium-based sites up to date with branding and content changes.