Press Releases

Emeryville – 20 October, 2010 – Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social Customer Solutions, today announced that Sephora North America, a part of Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the world's leading luxury products group, has deployed Lithium Awareness, the key marketing solution in Lithium’s Social Customer Suite. Sephora deployed Lithium Awareness to create the first industry community of its kind—a conversation on Sephora’s Web site discussing all things beauty. With BeautyTalk, Sephora generates an unprecedented volume of content on beauty topics, energizes word-of-mouth advocates known as Beauty Mavens to spread the brand's influence, and moves the conversation closer to the point of purchase to drive revenue. The site is now live and can be found at: sephora.com/beautyadvice.

"Sephora customers are extremely passionate and very social. We have more than 865,000 Facebook fans and 95,000 Twitter followers and wanted to deepen our engagement with our audience" said Bridget Dolan, Senior Vice President Interactive Media of Sephora. "Using Lithium Awareness and the guidance and advice from their team, we created BeautyTalk to capture the conversation around Beauty as well as all the content and insights that go with it."

Move Beyond Facebook & Twitter With Social Customers

With almost all of the Top 100 brands owning a Facebook page and maintaining a Twitter presence, the reach of existing social channels is well understood. Marketers have experimented widely with campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While these campaigns have had varying degrees of success in creating fans and followers, marketers are increasingly looking for solutions that grow both reach and engagement—allowing for a deeper conversation with prospects and customers that sparks action.

Global brands like Sephora as well as less familiar brands seeking to generate leads and foster awareness are looking to social marketing strategies that are self-sustaining and grow in sophistication over time. Key requirements include:

• Methods for identifying superfans and key influencers
• Detailed tracking and customer analytics that inform future marketing efforts
• Search Engine Optimization benefits that drive organic search traffic toward purchase or lead-capture programs
• The ability to tie together marketing activities across social networks
• Ownership of customer-created content and the conversation around it

In an independent Forrester Research, Inc. report entitled How to Create An Effective Brand Presence on Facebook (August 2010), Industry Analyst Melissa Parrish states, "With hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, it’s a good bet that you can reach your customers there. But don’t just think of Facebook as a channel to push messages out to a random audience; the most successful marketers take the time to think through how they’ll attract and retain true fans, and ultimately craft conversations — and meaningful relationships—with their consumers."

The Lithium Awareness Solution

Using Lithium Awareness, a brand can implement comprehensive programs across multiple social channels that generate leads and improve conversion rates through deeper engagement with social customers. Key components of the solution include:

• The Lithium Community Platform: Lithium Awareness sits on top of the company’s industry-leading community platform, reputation engine and sophisticated analytics.
• Lithium Social Media Monitoring: Lithium Awareness takes advantage of millions of social customers' conversations to identify key topics of interest and opportunties for outbound conversational marketing, and enables brands to measure the resulting buzz and sentiment.
• Q&A: a lively question and answer system enables casual visitors to ask expert peers for advice and information, and allows everyone to vote for the best results.
• Reviews: ratings and reviews encourage participants to share their opinions and experiences.
• Facebook and Twitter: Lithium's unique integration platform enables marketers to combine the reach of Facebook and Twitter with the engagement of a customer community without duplicating efforts or forcing customers to navigate away from the channel of their choice.
• Community Success Services: Lithium Awareness includes moderation, measurement and advisory services specifically geared toward creating and sustaining passionate conversation.

Ultimately, enterprises create a content asset that is the foundation of their thought leadership, increases their SEO and Web traffic to drive more leads, and improves their consumer insights by enabling them to follow and analyze the customer conversation across the social Web.

"Facebook and Twitter have the critical mass that appeals to marketers as the key place to connect with prospects," said Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-founder of Lithium Technologies. "The reality is that this reach is only one part of the equation. Innovative companies like Sephora are looking to take this engagement deeper so they can measure their marketing effectiveness beyond just fans and followers and create a sophisticated corps of advocates."

Lithium Social Customer Solutions

The Lithium Awareness solution is a key component of the Lithium Social Customer Suite and runs on top of the Lithium Community platform, which has set the standard for social customer engagement.

Lithium Awareness is one of the company's first three business solutions tied explicitly to the customer lifecycle, leveraging the power of social customers to drive measurable business results. Lithium Commerce and Lithium Service are described further in separate announcements.

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