Communities 2.0+ and Quick Recap on LiNC 2010 Conference.

I was lucky to be invited to attend Lithium’s LiNC 2010 Conference this week. Everything about this event was awesome: location; presentations, food and entertainment. People from Lithium and ScoutLabs [now part of Lithium] were super helpful, every single detail was thought through – from having power charging stations at each table to availability of hot and cold drinks and snacks all the time!

But the most amazing thing was to see so many happy customers talking about their successes with using Lithium’s platform for their sales, marketing, service/support communities – both internally and externally.

There was lots of excitement in the room. People were sharing their war stories, talking about cultural challenges with getting social initiatives adopted by their companies.

But one of the presentations, the one that was done by Gena Debogovich from Best Buy impressed me the most.

Key highlights:

• Support and enable internal innovation processes: listen to employees ideas, deploy the ones that makes sense to do;
• Do not afraid to try things out: do not over engineer things, sometimes what it takes is just do a trial run…
• Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.
• Listen to your customers and act! Example: noticed customers were trying to get product recommendations within communities – BB is adding option of doing it an easy way!

Selected tweets:

@margaretfrancis: The very idea that brands would show the people ‘behind the curtain’ in a mass way is pretty revolutionary #linc

lylefong: @hp says personalization is a great feature, as long as it is opt-in #LiNC

GarenTatHP: RT @AKAwillardo: Employees are your best brand advocates, but how often do we use them? How often do we teach them to be advocates? #LiNC

@pgreenbe: Most organize communities by product type, not many who org by customer persona #LiNC

Do corporate websites even matter in the future?@comcastcares says: Its more about what it is the customer wants #LiNC

@zazenergy: The best conference I’ve been to in recent memory, #LiNC is AWESOME. Great in-depth case studies on how to build communities. Love it!

@setlinger: Internally & externally, [organizations] need to behave the same way. But most orgs don’t do that internally. @ekolsky #LINC#SCRM

drnatalie: What if your business depended on internal cross-discipine collaboration? Guess what it DOES! #scrm #customerservice #LiNC

mfauscette: Social biz model: feedback, experience, end to end process, actionable insight: SCRM + e2.0 #LiNC

@seanodmvp says “Marketing measures success to get folks to contact them, Support measures for customers to NOT contact them” #linc

erintraudt: #LINC Best Buy social media policy – Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.

bby_community: RT @glfceo: Forums.bestbuy.com 2.5 mln visitors, 79K posts;12 superusers, 3 of them went to CES #LiNC

ekolsky: #LiNC – best buy communities decreased complaints by 18% in 2009 (any stats on reduced return rates you can share?)

glfceo: Forums.bestbuy.com 2.5 mln visitors, 79K posts;12 superusers, 3 of them went to CES #LiNC

pgreenbe: Best Buy brand promise – “Never Leave You Hanging” #LiNC

glfceo: There is no such a thing as a “low value customers” @pgreenbe #LiNC

Congratulations to 2010 Inductees to the VIP Council:

Mark Hopkins, Lenovo (Mark_Hopkins)

Will Rose, T-Mobile (Potential)

Jane Loyless (jloyless)

John Van Horn, Jigsaw Software (JohnnyJigsaw)

Laura Feeney, National Instruments (Laura)

Jason Parker, Best Buy (Jason)

Laura Buchanan, Future Shop (LauraB)

Christian Barnes, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (Mojoswift)

Anton Chiang, Juniper Networks (ac)

Juha-Matti Heikkinen, Nokia (JuhisH)

And:

RT @lylefong: Congrats to all #LiNC Social CRM Excellence Award winners! Future Shop, Betfair, National Instruments, Paypal, Giff Gaff & HP!

@MiaD @Frostola @LizLiz – team #HP