Press Releases

Emeryville – 20 October, 2010 – Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social Customer Solutions, today announced a fully integrated suite that turns passionate customers into real business success. For more than 10 years, Lithium has developed, deployed, and managed customer communities for global companies like AT&T, Best Buy, HP and Research In Motion Limited (RIM). The Lithium Social Customer Suite now offers a set of business solutions tied to specific business objectives in market awareness, commerce, and customer service. This newly combined suite incorporates the social media monitoring capabilities the company acquired via Scout Labs in May 2010 and includes powerful new capabilities for identifying and motivating customer experts. The result for clients is one technology platform to engage social customers, observe their activity and behavior, take action, and understand the results.

The Lithium Social Customer Suite ties together Facebook, Twitter, the entire social web, and branded communities, which enables clients to:

• Engage social customers the way they want—through a browser or mobile device, through Facebook, Twitter, or a branded Web site.
• Identify, nurture, and reward influencers through technologies that find customer experts and create incentives for those experts to engage with others over time.
• Deliver and measure business value through a comprehensive set of dashboards that benchmark their efforts against their peers and against their own goals.

"We created a customer engagement strategy with Lithium that is successfully addressing marketing and service initiatives across 18 different communities around the world,” said Larry Nelson, director of digital strategy, HP. "We’re delighted to see Lithium expand and integrate their capabilities, which bring value to HP every day by enabling customers to more easily connect with us and each other."

Addressing the Needs of the Social Customer

Now more than ever, customers are online and are connected, empowered, impatient and discerning. Market leaders need to build new methods for engaging with these social customers. Consider the following data that a recent Omnibus survey conducted by Lithium reveals about today’s social customers:

• Seven in ten consumers believe that getting online support when they have issues with products is one of the fastest ways to get help when they need it.
• Six in ten Americans agree that they are more likely to be loyal to a brand that offers product support in an online community or forum.
• Nearly 70% of those surveyed have read recommendations or posted questions in a community forum prior to purchasing a new product.

In the face of this evolution, marketers have experimented with campaigns through social channels like Facebook and Twitter. While these campaigns have had varying degrees of success, marketers are increasingly challenged to create strategic relationships with social customers that provide lasting value across the business.

To address these emerging business requirements, Lithium has updated every area of the Social Customer Suite with exciting new enhancements.

Lithium Community Platform

Lithium released the latest version of its community platform, which has set the standard for social customer engagement. The company announced that:

• Lithium’s industry-leading Reputation Engine includes new technology to identify customer experts in any area of the site, route questions to those experts from Twitter, Facebook, or a client’s Web site, and reward those experts with status markers that they can take with them to other sites. The result is deeper engagement with the social customers who are best positioned to help achieve a company’s business objectives.
• Lithium Studio now enables marketers to implement sweeping changes to the branding, layout, and text on a site, preview it through the eyes of different users, then deploy it to production on their own. This dramatically reduces the time and expense needed to launch new marketing initiatives through the community.
• Lithium now offers new and enhanced customer interaction styles, including multi-media, ratings and reviews, and questions and answers, increasing the breadth of ways that social customers can create and enjoy content.

Lithium Social Media Monitoring

Lithium released the next generation of social media monitoring and analysis based on the Scout Labs product foundation. Key new features include:

• Real-time monitoring and analysis of a company’s Facebook pages, giving marketers the ability to measure buzz, extract quotes, and assess sentiment from Facebook and compare this to other social media channels including Twitter, Flickr, blogs, and forums.
• An enhanced search interface that makes it even easier to create social media searches, extract relevant data and view the results in real time. This further empowers marketers to assess the activities of social customers without resorting to expensive and time-consuming consulting engagements.
• Elegant reports, exportable via PDF, that enable marketers to share key metrics and trends from social customers with colleagues across the enterprise.

Lithium Customer Intelligence Center

Lithium combines data from 10 years of customer interactions on its community platform with the acquisition of Scout Labs to create the Customer Intelligence Center, a comprehensive data platform for measuring the activities, influence, sentiment and business impact of a company’s social customers. Key new capabilities include:

• Sentiment analysis, topic measurement, and automated quote extraction from community members’ interactions, providing a simple way to synthesize key findings from the community and compare them with findings from the social Web.
• The ability to identify potential influencers before they actually become influential, enabling proactive outreach to high value social customers. The algorithms for this were developed by Dr. Michael Wu based on historical analysis of more than twenty million social customers and fifty thousand influencers.
• Reporting and analytics on over 800 facts and dimensions, giving marketers unprecedented access to specific details about social customers’ behavior for use in future marketing campaigns.

Lithium Social Customer Solutions

Lithium launched its first three solutions tied explicitly to the customer lifecycle, leveraging the power of social customers to increase a company’s reach and engagement, drive revenue, and provide enhanced service. Lithium Awareness, Lithium Commerce, and Lithium Service are described in separate announcements.

Lithium’s Business Momentum

Lithium’s announcements come on the heels of tremendous success in its target market, namely Fortune 1000 firms and other small- to medium-sized business in need of proven social strategies. Lithium closed the third quarter with record sales including sales across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe and South East Asia. Additionally, the team has hired a new CFO, Carlton Baab and added as board member former Interwoven CEO Martin Brauns.

"Lithium is the only provider that can offer global enterprises a proven, comprehensive solution for the social customer,” said Lyle Fong, co-founder and CEO of Lithium. “Not only have we built a reputation for the most dynamic technology platform to engage customers, but we also continue to singularly focus on things that will strengthen a company’s relationship with the social customer and that will deliver measurable results back to their business."

The Social Customer Virtual Summit

Lithium will be hosting a virtual conference for marketing and support professionals on Wednesday, November 10, which includes webcasts by industry leaders in an interactive exhibit hall, a resource center with extensive materials for download, discussions on the Lithosphere community, and a group chat lounge.

For more information—including a continually updated list of speakers and sponsors—and to register, visit: Social Customer Virtual Summit Registration

About Lithium Technologies

Your customers are everywhere. Lithium helps you find your social customers, understand their influence, and build lasting relationships. For market leaders such as Best Buy, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is the leading provider of social customer solutions that deliver real business results. The Lithium Social Customer Suite offers complete social monitoring, comprehensive community platform, and actionable analytics across millions of blogs, forums, and social networking sites. Our technology is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides security, open and custom APIs, and multi-language support. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, visit www.lithium.com. Or, engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, and our community – the Lithosphere.

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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