Tag Archives: Lithium Network Conference

Bay Area vacation and the Lithium Network Conference 2015

Bay Area friendsLast week I was attending a conference in the Bay Area, so I went a few days early to visit friends! I stayed with Katie and Matt, hung out with Marc as well, coincidentally saw some Southern California friends, and attended the Lithium Network Conference. I had a great time!

Lithium is all about social: they’re the providers of Toshiba’s forum as well as Lithium Social Web, the web application that I use that pulls the forum, Facebook, and Twitter into one screen.

Friday

I flew in Friday night after some delays. Matt and Katie picked me up from San Francisco International, and we headed back to their place in Fremont after a quick stop for some tasty In-N-Out. It was late, so we mostly talked, and Matt and I played games.

Saturday

Saturday was the action-packed day! Marc came over, and then we visited Matt’s university, San Jose State University, where we failed to return library books and failed to see a flight simulator. We tried at least. Luckily, San Jose is also filled with delicious foods.

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At SmokeEaters I ate some delicious wings, onion rings, fries, and a beer. This was the start of a bad day for my stomach.

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I was kind of excited to see a banner for Fanime. I don’t know. I’m sorry.

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After our unhealthy lunch, we stopped at Psycho Donuts. Just look how good they look! Yes, yes, yes!

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We walked past a place called Iguanas just because I wanted to take a picture of their sign. Burritozilla! I want to eat Burritozilla!

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When we got back to Katie and Matt’s, we tried some of the donuts. Another bad stomach decision, but a great decision for my taste buds. The top-left one was the Cookie Monster donut. Reminds me of Afters Ice Cream! 🙂

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We made some White Russians, watched some YouTube videos, listened to Spotify, and talked. The White Russians were the final bad decision for my stomach, haha.

Matt found this playlist on Spotify – 2000’s Rock by Scott Sweatman. It’s… kind of great. It caused a lot of nostalgia, but at the same time, I can tell why I don’t listen to this music anymore. It was pretty perfect.

This might sound uneventful, but it was a pretty important evening. I had a lot of fun with them. Marc’s friend even came over as well.

Sunday

gem was in te Bay Area to go rafting with a group of friends, which included one other person I knew – Vivian. Marc came over again, and then he drove us to Berkeley to meet with them.

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We decided to meet at Sather Tower, a bell and clock tower, commonly called The Campanile.

You could hear the music from a pretty good distance.

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I liked the bears at the base.

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After realizing you could go up the tower for a nominal fee, we had to check it out.

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I wish this photo offered a better sense of scale. The bells could totally crush a person.

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gem, Katie, and Matt!

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Here’s where the musician sits to play the carillon, which is the bell system.

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Here’s the view.

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And here’s a group of photos of a lot of us.

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Here’s gem, Marc, Katie, Matt, and myself. I was trying to spread the Half Past Two, So Cal ska love to the Bay Area.

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We stopped at Sheng Kee Bakery, where I tried some of Vivian’s tea eggs – basically eggs boiled in tea rather than water. Delicious! Then it was off to Sliver Pizzeria. Each day of the week they feature a different pizza, but that’s it. That means that each day they only have a single kind of pizza. On Sunday, it was roasted potatoes, roasted onions, mozzarella, jalapeño jack cheese, Italian parsley, oregano, thyme, and olive oil. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. It was great! I’m going to need to try to make something like this some time.

Over lunch, someone I had just met that day asked me what I did for a living. I said, “I work for Toshiba…”

He replied with “hey, that’s my line!”

I’m paraphrasing, but he works for Toshiba as well, although he works for a different Toshiba company. Small world! And speaking of small worlds, another person was going to take the BART back to Fremont, so Marc just gave him a ride too.

It was cool seeing the university as well as the city. The city was pretty interesting. I can understand how it gets the reputation it has, because the people clearly cared a lot more about the environment and helping each other than I’m used to seeing in Orange County.

Once we got home, we had a quiet evening mostly of watching TV and chatting. I got some work done as well, and we watched American Ninja Warrior. It’s a cool show pitting athletes against insane obstacle courses that require a great deal of strength, agility, and balance.

Katie made an amazing fish dinner that made my stomach feel much better. It was super good!

Monday

I started Monday morning by working before Matt drove me to the BART station.

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When I got into San Francisco, I took a picture of the building outside the Powell Street station like I always do.

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This was the view from my hotel room. Not amazing, but I like that Scalzi always posts photos of his view, so I like doing it too. I stayed at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, which was right next to Saint Patrick’s Chuch, where Patrick and Caroline got married. Pretty cool!

Anela gave me some recommendations of things to do. Some of them I’d done previously, and some, like hike recommendations, just didn’t fit with my schedule. But some things had to be done!

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Did you know that at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory you can watch people make fortune cookies? Well, she did, and now I do, and now you do.

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They start out round, while they’re still hot, she shapes them into fortune cookies. I got to try some nice hot ones that were still round, and I bought a bag of normal and chocolate fortune cookies.

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I tried one chocolate one from the bag, and my fortune was “Your luck will soon be at a high point.” That seems good, but what if it just means my luck is going to be terrible for a long time after that? Uh oh.

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I took some other random photos too.

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Building art.

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Yummy not-quite-a-fortune-cookie!

I had to stop at a bakery too, so I got a pineapple BBQ pork bun from The AA Bakery & Cafe. I love pork buns!

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Anela also recommended I get pastries in Little Italy, so off I went. I often say I don’t really like looking up recommendations because it’s more fun to find stuff on your own, but I wasn’t sure about Italian pastries, so I turned to reviews and found Stella Pasty and Cafe. Everyone seemed to recommend their Sacripantina.

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According to their site, it contains “vanilla sponge cake, zabaione (a delicate custard made with egg yolks, sweet butter, marsala and sherry wine) cream, and rum.” It was light yet rich. I could only eat about half of the piece actually.

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I knew I wanted pizza while I was there too, and I felt like looking around to see what caught my eye. Spoiler alert – it wa Golden Boy Pizza. I just liked the feeling and look of the place. Foursquare recommended the garlic clam pizza, so I went with that.

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It was a thick slice, and I put red pepper on it. It was good, although I didn’t find it amazing. Still, I liked the place enough that I might try to go back and get a different kind if I can. It was small on the inside but was covered with stickers and similar art.

I also want to mention Victoria Pastry Company. I didn’t eat there, but I got detoured as I followed the amazing smell. I just wasn’t hungry enough.

My final goal was Ghirardelli Square. Anela recommended this as well, although I’d actually been there already. However, I just love chocolate. On the way, I stopped at Dennis Rae Fine Art. They had an exhibit on the art of Theodor Seuss Geisel – Dr. Seuss. It was neat.

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I bought a few things to take home at Ghirardelli before purchasing a hot fudge sundae to eat! The fudge was just so awesome. I kinda sorta maybe love hot fudge.

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Even so, I couldn’t do it. There were just too many things to eat that day and not enough room in my stomach.

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Here’s a nice view from the Fisherman’s Wharf area near the San Francisco National Historic Park (or maybe it’s part of it).

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Look, a ship.

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This was a really heroic ship, but I heard it killed its family once.

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I liked the view from the end of the pier.

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Hey, it’s me!

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On my way back to the hotel, I happened to walk past Lombard Street at it’s famously twisted block. This was actually another recommendation from Anela, although I wasn’t aiming to see it this time since I’d already seen it. I just happened to walk past it, so I took a picture because of how beautiful it looked.

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I just thought this door was cool.

The welcome event for the Lithium Network Conference was held at Jillian’s. There was a variety of food and an open bar. I know what you’re thinking, but actually I only had a small glass of wine. Too exhausted, so I didn’t stay long. After a detour at Target to buy water, I went back to my room for the night.

Tuesday

Tuesday was the first actual day of the conference. After a quick breakfast, I was off to the weird introduction!

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That woman was a bunch of bananas.

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And that woman was the whole city!

The opening was about three and half hours, and it mostly talked about what customers expect from social engagement. Blah, blah, blah. You don’t care about that.

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But then there was lunch and time to socialize! Yes, some of that was through texts to home, but I also talked with some cool people at the conference.

After lunch, I went to a session on “Self service content publishing” and another on “How to get content in the right place at the right time” that were both interesting. They were more about developing applications and custom modifications to the Lithium platform, which isn’t something I have the power to go implement, but I like seeing new ways to think about the process.

The conference ended for the day with two pretty great speakers. The first was Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a free online tool for education. It originally sprang from him tutoring his cousin on the phone, then tutoring many of his cousins, then making custom tutoring software to help him tutor them, and then creating videos to help as well. I can’t really do it justice. He discussed how school goes at a certain pace for the whole class and then judges them rather than helping them master something before continuing. He wants to bring this free education to everyone in the world. It’s a beautiful idea, and a couple parts of his talk made me tear up. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

The second speaker was Orny Adams, a comedian. “Let’s talk about what we really wanna talk about. We hate our customers. Because they’re stupid.” He was joking, I swear. Yeah, he didn’t really care about crossing any lines as he also made fun of people who avoid gluten or are scared of germs (uh oh) and even had to end with some differences between men and women. He was pretty hilarious.

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That night’s party was held at City View on the fourth floor of The Metreon.

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There were a lot of people inside and out. I talked to some cool people, including a long conversation with a Greek woman who compared Greek family members with me! She’s actually a contact at Lithium I hadn’t met, so that was very cool. I also had a great conversation with a man from Zürich.

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The view was nice!

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There were oh so many desserts. Combined with all the normal food I had that night, it added up to another terrible health night.

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Oh, and then after all that I discovered more food.

Wednesday

I didn’t really take many photos this day, but I did attend sessions on “Master social lead generation” and “15 tips for new community managers.” I don’t really need sales leads, and I’m not a new community manager, but I like looking at new ways of thinking.

Later I had a meeting with my coworker, the VP of Global Strategic Accounts & Value Engineering at Lithium, the Chief Revenue Officer of Lithium, and a woman in charge of Customer Success at Lithium.

Dr. Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium, did a talk about how customers perceive brands, customer expectations, and a lot more. He wears a distinctive hat and glasses, so the conference gave a hat and glasses to everyone in attendance!

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I didn’t take the glasses since I already wear glasses, but a free hat? Sure.

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I also took an accidental selfie on the way to the BART.

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And the last photo I took in the city was this. It reminded me of the RISK! podcast.

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It was a great trip, but by the end I was exhausted and happy to get home. If only I didn’t have two work days left in the week.

Thanks for the wonderful time, Bay Area.

And the best part? I didn’t really gain much weight!

There are more photos in my Flickr album.

Lithium Network Conference Part 2 – The Play

In addition to the conference proper, I got to enjoy seeing San Francisco a bit. I took a 6:40 AM flight from Orange County to San Francisco so I could have some time to see the city. After eating in the airport a little, I took the BART to the Powell St. station, which is where I always get off when I visit SF. It’s also where I always take a picture of the same building.
Powell St.
Then I headed to the InterContinental San Francisco Hotel, stopping to take a picture of the hotel, to drop off my bag.
The InterContinental San Francisco Hotel
Then I headed back to the shops near the Powell St. station. After getting bored of that, I checked out some little parks and then looked on Google Maps for interesting sites. I realized that it wasn’t far to reach the water, so I started walking that way. There were plenty of interesting things along the way, including a restaurant called Crepe & Curry in the Financial District. I had a quick snack and then checked out Justin Herman Plaza, which had a really awesome fountain.
Fountain at Justin Herman Plaza
Then I walked along edge of the bay, heading north toward what Google Maps told me was a submarine. I did stop to take some photos too of course, like this cool snack shop.
Snack shop
I eventually reached an arcade that featured very old attractions. I wouldn’t even call most of them games. Put in a coin to see the figure dance – that kind of thing. But outside was the cool part. The submarine, the USS Pampanito, was out back!
USS Pampanito
I took a bunch of pictures of it.
Gun of the USS Pampanito
I also paid to walk through it!
USS Pampanito
After I was done, I stopped to take a quick picture of a seagull before continuing on my way.
Seagull
I headed toward Fisherman’s Wharf and wandered around for a bit, getting a delicious crab sandwich. When it was time to head back to the hotel, I took the cable car back to the Powell St. station, which I guess acts as a landmark for me!
View from my room on the 30th floor of the InterContinental San Francisco Hotel
At the hotel I went up to my room and took a photo before heading to registration. I discovered that the payment for my registration didn’t go through. There was some confusion and phone calls to Julie back at the office, but things were fine of course. Then there was a fun reception full of delicious foods (mmm pork buns) and beer.
Thursday was packed full of fun and went fast. Before I knew it, it was evening and we were piled into buses to go to Bimbo’s 365 Club for dinner, drinks, and music.
Bimbo's 365 for Lithium's Heropalooza featuring Tainted Love
There was an 80s band playing called Tainted Love (who, by the way, never did play Tainted Love). They were really good. But then again, I was drinking a lot of Heinekens. There was a pair on the dance floor who were more entertaining than the band. She was really into the music and getting flipped all over. Half the dance floor must have belonged to those two!
Friday didn’t go quite so smoothly. There was an announcement of a security breach of some sort at SFO. As it turned out, it was at my terminal. “Expect delays,” they said. Well, my flight was scheduled to leave at 3:59, so I figured I’d leave the session at 11:45 to pick up my bag from the bellman. That way, I could probably catch the 12:15 BART train, get to the airport by 1:00, and still have time to get through security with the delays. If I got through quickly, great, because I hadn’t eaten anything that day and would appreciate the time for lunch.
Well, it wasn’t that easy. There were malfunctions on the tracks apparently, and they made us all get off at some random station between the hotel and the airport. We were told we’d get further instructions, but I could also see a lot of people with bags waiting at that station. We must not have been the first train to unload there. Soon after we were told to get on a train that would take us to the end of the line, just past SFO. Then a shuttle would take us to the airport. When we got to that station, we were told that now the shuttle was going to go to the station just on the OTHER side SFO. We had to take a train back there. Guess what? After getting there, they changed their minds again, and we were headed back to the other station again.
There was also the bit where they told everyone to get on the train no matter where they were headed and then said “whoops, if you were heading to the airport…” Anyways, then a train took us from that station to the airport. Having to manually flip the switches probably didn’t help. (Nor did the trains travelling at 20 MPH so that the track could be watched by eye.) My 40 minute train ride became over two hours. Regardless, my flight was delayed about a half hour, and I got through security in decent time, so I had more than enough time to eat and read my novel. And then I got to finish my novel on the plane!
I just wish I knew who got my sick on that plane!
All in all, it was very fun trip. I enjoyed the conference itself, and I enjoyed getting to see a bit of the city. I’d certainly love to spend some more time there. Hopefully, I’ll get to visit with gem next time! And as you might have seen, I spent some time after getting home uploading some photos to Instagram!

Lithium Network Conference Part 1 – The Work

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!