Press Releases

EMERYVILLE, Calif. – October 28, 2008 – Lithium Technologies, provider of the leading on-demand enterprise social media platform, announced today the release of Lithium Ideas, a new service aimed at capturing, categorizing and ranking customer ideas. By providing a simple and cost-effective way for organizations to continuously harness and respond to customer feedback, Lithium Ideas drives innovation and customer loyalty. Lithium Ideas is the latest addition to the company's portfolio of on-demand enterprise social media applications.

Value of an Idea Exchange

An idea exchange is a collaborative space within an online community where customers post, browse, comment on, and vote for ideas related to a product, event, or other topic. Marketers can use idea exchanges to hold contests, such as an ad slogan contest, that generate customer excitement and participation, and product managers can use them to systematically capture and prioritize customer and employee feedback for improving products and services.

For enterprises just now embracing Web 2.0 tools as emerging drivers of business success, deployment of an idea exchange can jumpstart their use of social media. Idea exchanges offer a compelling user experience and give companies an opportunity to identify and cultivate engagement with passionate customers who are the foundation of a thriving community.

"With Lithium Ideas, we are giving our customers a compelling and structured way to engage their customers on what they are most passionate about – their own ideas," said Lyle Fong, CEO of Lithium. "Because the value to both a company and its customers is so clear, many organizations are launching an idea exchange as their first social media initiative, with plans to add new services quickly down the line."

Lithium Ideas

Lithium Ideas is built on Lithium's core platform – including a common reputation engine, data and metrics system, and search capabilities – and is tightly integrated with Lithium Forums and Blogs to ensure a cohesive community experience for users and administrators. For example, ideas that surface in Lithium-powered blog conversations, support forum questions, or engagement sites can easily be moved to an idea exchange.

"Lithium Ideas is a great step forward in how we gather and process feedback to improve both our online and in-store experiences," said Robert Pearson, director of e-commerce for Future Shop, Canada's largest consumer electronics retailer. "Because Lithium Ideas builds on a social media platform, idea exchanges can be part of the broader Future Shop community experience, so we're both benefiting from and extending our customer engagement."

Lithium Ideas is built to capture customer-driven innovation. Key end-user features include idea submission using a rich text editor, idea browsing via a vote-driven front page or leaderboards, idea sorting by status, category, or tags, and voting for ideas with a single click.

The application is also enterprise-ready, inheriting the scalability, security, and manageability of the core platform. In particular, Lithium Ideas leverages a rich set of moderation tools that enables moderators to protect the company's brand by scanning for malicious key words, preventing ballot-box stuffing, and managing or banning misbehaving users. Moderators can manage content by merging similar ideas and weighting voting based on users' reputation.

"Our first of several planned idea exchanges lets Sage easily tap into the collective insight of our Certified Consultant network to guide the strategic direction of our products," said David van Toor, general manager, CRM solutions for Sage Software, a world-leading supplier of accounting and business management software to small and medium-sized businesses. "Since we plan to quickly grow the number of idea exchanges we run, Lithium's moderation capabilities are critical to our success."

Lithium Appoints Ron Rasmussen Vice President, Engineering

To lead future releases of Lithium Ideas, as well as Lithium's full portfolio of social media applications, Lithium today announced the appointment of Ron Rasmussen as vice president of engineering. Rasmussen brings to Lithium over 20 years of enterprise software development leadership. Rasmussen was most recently CTO and vice president of engineering for KnowNow, a Kleiner Perkins-backed pioneer in enterprise RSS solutions. Prior to KnowNow, Rasmussen held executive and senior engineering positions at Digital Impact, SCO, and Hewlett-Packard.

About Lithium Technologies

Lithium Technologies is the leading on-demand enterprise social media provider for deploying and managing successful customer communities. Working with large and medium enterprises such as AT&T, Dell, Sony Playstation, Univision, PayPal, and other market leaders, Lithium delivers solutions that inspire customers to share knowledge, leading to lower support costs, higher customer satisfaction rates, and increased brand loyalty. Lithium's flagship platform, Lithium InterActive, is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides the security, analytics, APIs, and multi-language support that enterprises demand. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, visit www.lithium.com.

***

Lithium Media Contacts:

Michael Paige, Corporate Headquarters & Global, michael.paige@lithium.com , +1 (510) 318 7014
Sandra Teuber, Central & Southern Europe, sandra.teuber@lithium.com , +41 (79) 223 7356
Prelini Chiechi, UK & Northern Europe, prelini.chiechi@lithium.com, +44 (7826) 912788
Imogen Riley, APAC & Australia, imogen.riley@lithium.com, +61 413 274 210