Lots of interesting things at LiNC this week. I couldn’t cover all of it, but here are some highlights.
The “Me too” button was discussed a little bit. It’s a button on posts that allow people to say “me too,” like “I have that problem too” or perhaps “that solved my issue too.” I’m not sure how you’d educate forum members to use it if you get a lot of forum members, but it’s an interesting idea.
Someone brought up the idea of losing control of your brand due to social media. The response was that opinion always existed even before social media. Social media gives brands control and data on opinion.
Ipsos
Andrew Leary, Executive Vice President of Ipsos, discussing having overlaid their social network on other applications and automated escalations based on popularity. Someone could grab a tweet and publish it on the forum. When it reaches enough kudos, it would automatically be escalated to e-mail and sent to people who relate to the tweet’s content. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t exactly apply to a support forum like ours. It also would require heavy text analytics it would seem.
giffgaff
Vincent Boon, Head of Community for giffgaff, a mobile phone company in the UK, discussed how giffgaff uses social networking for all marketing. It’s kind of amazing. They have a forum, and they payback community members with points that can be used for products, donated, or redeemed for money. People create or change banner, design fliers, pass out fliers, and even create websites to get people microsim cards. giffgaff gives all fonts and logos to anyone who needs them but doesn’t hold onto the brand tightly. If people want to create their own logos, that’s fine. It’s interesting to me how responsive and willing to help giffgaff’s community is. Their forum escalation time is set to 24 hours (if a post doesn’t get a response after 24 hours, an employee is e-mailed), and it’s never been triggered.
Sephora
Bridget Dolan, VP of Interactive Media for Sephora gave a talk about the cool things Sephora is doing in the mobile space. Of all social networks, Facebook has been the most useful for them. No real surprise them. Following Facebook is Pinterest. What? Yeah, Pinterest didn’t get a lot of attention at LiNC, but it’s apparently working well for Sephora. When they relaunched their desktop site recently, they created a whole new mobile site as well. They also have iPhone and iPad apps, each with a different purpose. While Android overtook iOS last year among giffgaff users, Sephora is seeing the vast majority of mobile users on iOS, so all their focus are on that OS. The mobile site appears to focus on a similar thing as the desktop site – sales, product information, tutorials. The iPhone application focuses on being able to scan products to find more about them. Every product sold within any Sephora store can be scanned using an iPhone.
For Sephora, the iPad isn’t just a larger iPhone. It’s more for shopping and entertaining because most iPad users aren’t using them on the go. It features more rich materials, for example. It also has a “Today’s Obsession” section, showing trends as well as the latest Facebook and YouTube posts. The iPad app is designed to look like a flipbook or magazine.There’s also a promoted question, pulling people in to answer it (Beauty Talk). They also run contests, such as asking the community for nail looks. One of the coolest ideas I heard all weekend was what Sephora calls the Beauty Studio, which is like a virtual mirror. The iPad is held in portrait mode. After finding a makeup tutorial, a video is played in the bottom half showing you what to do. The top half of the screens shows what the iPad’s front-facing camera is viewing – in other words, it shows the viewer. This allows you to follow along with the tutorial video while putting on makeup.
The iPad isn’t just for use at home. Sephora is experimenting with iPads in store, both for customer use and cast member (employee) use. In-store, you can e-mail yourself steps, product lists, and YouTube videos to ensure you can replicate what was done to you in-store if receiving help. They’re also beginning to use mobile point-of-sale in stores (like Apple Stores I suppose).
Cisco
Joe Clarke and Gonzalo Salgueiro gave a talk about their implementations at Cisco. They’ve done extensive customizing that’s very cool. They wanted to create an exchange of information between internal and external support that would appear seamless to customers. They didn’t want to have solve the same case multiple times, so they focused on how to reuse solutions. They call their forum and knowledge base Tech Zone. My favorite quote of the day? “This lustful union (of Cisco and Lithium) created the love child that is Tech Zone.” Keep in mind that Tech Zone is for internal, Cisco use only. First, to promote sharing of information, they’re pushing reputation hard on the forum. There are many ranks, and when mousing over the rank, you’re shown exactly what that person did to earn the rank. That doesn’t mean saying simply “2000 posts.” It’s in full paragraph form and specific to that user. Besides rank, which is using the out-of-the-box system, they’ve also introduced a separate scoring system used for leaderboards. The reputation worked so well that when they offered their top contributor the role of moderator, he was excited but turned them down when he realized he’d lose his reputation.
When the two speakers traded off, Clarke said, talking about the PowerPoint clicker, “I won’t need this because I, like any mad an, am going to attempt a LIVE DEMO!” Very entertaining guy, and the live demo was impressive as well. Because Tech Zone was designed engineers for engineers, they didn’t want to make it look pretty. They wanted to contain condensed information. They use an expandable tree structure to browsing the forum with short sub-forum titles and mouse-over descriptions. This wouldn’t be good for a customer-facing site in my opinion because mouse-overs aren’t very helpful on touch devices, but can work well internally. To save space and get things above the fold, they use tabbed viewing.
Their very ugly case management tool for support agents uses fuzzy logic to take the call notes and determine the primary and secondary categories of the case. If the tech needs help, they can click “Post question to Tech Zone.” This takes the information from the case and creates a post on the forum, automatically populating the correct fields and placing it in the correct subforum. It doesn’t submit, however, so that the tech can make changes if he wants. He needs to set his own subject. As soon as stops typing in the subject bar, a list of related threads is shown below. This helps decrease redundant threads. It uses metadata as well, like kudos and linked cases. What are linked cases? Well, if the tech decides that some other thread is related, he can press “Link your case” to show that it helps him as well. This also makes a note on that post that it helped another case. If the thread doesn’t help, the tech can return to the form with which he was working, and everything’s still populated.
To help get things answered, there are easy to use filters showing questions without replies and questions without solutions. They also added a “raise hand” feature. The raise hand button isn’t available right away, but after a certain amount of time, the original poster of a thread can click “raise hand” to indicate that he still needs more help. This is used for the same reason bumping is but has the benefit of not increasing the reply count, making it look like the thread is already being considered. This sounds like a great tool, but I think the community would need to be educated on how it works. It probably wouldn’t work for a community that gets many people who sign up, post a couple times, and never return.
Cisco is also using Apache Wave (Google Wave) for collaboration before publishing to their knowledge base or forum. Because their KB is internal, they’ve also added a “Flag for external publication” and can pass the data to their external publishing system. It’s not all about exporting either. They have a content import feature that takes a link and will take the site, formatting, images, and call, and pull it into the knowledge base. It’s all very cool, and Cisco shares all their code. It was all created by the two speakers present at LiNC as well!
Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal, game researcher and developer, also gave an interesting talk. She discussed how the majority of both boys and girls now play games, and how even 92% of all two-year-olds now play video games. Video game usage can even be used to fight depression in moderation. Studies have shown that children who play video games are more creative than their non-gaming counterparts. Take that, non-gamers!
Conclusion
I’m sure I’m missing a ton of stuff. I know I have notes that I didn’t discuss here, and there was plenty of interesting conversations that didn’t end up in my notepad. However, that does provide a nice segue into another topic. I had an iPhone and an Android tablet with me. I could have brought a laptop. My note taking was done with a pen in a pocket-sized notebook. Of course, that isn’t to say that I wouldn’t use electronic devices if they were adequate. With all the advances, what happened to Palm’s Graffiti (and I’m thinking of Graffiti, not Graffiti 2). I miss it. Many other people were using devices, although I don’t know if it was for note-taking. It’s no surprise that at a conference about social networking, I saw a lot of Facebook and Twitter on computer screens!