Lithium Updates Suite of Online Community Building Tools
- Jan. 16, 2008
- EMERYVILLE, Calif. – January 16, 2008 – Lithium Technologies today announced enhancements to its flagship on-demand community product that enable community administrators to recognize the efforts of diverse community members, and allow all community users to find answers to their questions faster. Lithium communities are helping dozens of organizations, including AT&T, Dell, Comcast, and Doubleclick, improve the overall customer experience by empowering their customers to help one another.
Enhancements to Lithium’s reputation system, already widely recognized as state-of-the-art, reward users for any of several dozen different behaviors, each of which can now be weighted individually. Lithium clients can thereby acknowledge the contributions of users who categorize content, users who post interesting questions, and users who answer other users’ questions. The result is a richer community that benefits from the special skills of a wider range of members.
“As providers of a hosted solution, we are in a unique position to see trends, particularly in the larger and more mature sites,” said Joe Cothrel , Lithium’s Vice President of Community Management. “We’ve always known that ‘super users’ contribute a disproportionate amount of the most useful content in many communities. We’re now learning more about the behaviors of these different kinds of super users, and how they help make communities successful. The new features we’re developing now reflect this.”
Another new feature dynamically adjusts search results to reflect the community’s view of the value of the information. Posts that members determine are solutions to questions, for example, might rise to the top of the search results list. Thus, even users who do not post content themselves can help their peers find answers to their questions. The new search algorithm can be tuned to the needs of individual clients and to reflect the habits prevailing among the community’s members.
“Our clients’ communities have become integral customer support and engagement tools,” added Cothrel. “They are prominently displayed and easily accessible via companies’ home pages, and in some cases represent a substantial fraction of their overall site traffic. Features that add structure to the experience are thus becoming critical as increasing numbers of customers turn to communities to learn more about the products and services they use every day.”
Lithium’s products are delivered on-demand, which means that these enhancements will be automatically made available to the company’s clients.
About Lithium Technologies
Lithium Technologies provides market-leading solutions for building successful online communities, including forums, chat, blogs, search, polls and private messaging. Lithium’s on-demand platform, backed by community management expertise, enables clients to increase brand loyalty, sales, and customer satisfaction while decreasing customer care costs. Lithium’s solutions have been implemented by many of the world’s largest organizations, including Dell, AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, DoubleClick, Real Networks and others. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. For more information, visit www.lithium.com .
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