Lithium Social CRM Suite
On-Demand Platform for Supporting Customer Communities
By Matthew D. Lees, Vice President and Analyst
November 19, 2009

NETTING IT OUT

Lithium Technologies’ Social CRM platform is an impressive set of SaaS applications—forums, blogs, private messaging, an idea exchange (for crowdsourcing), a wiki-like collaboration system (the Tribal Knowledge Base), polls, and more—interconnected via member profiles, search and tagging, ratings and rankings (via Lithium’s industry-leading reputation system), and a variety of other integrated tools and services. Lithium’s moderation and administrative tools work well to help community managers and others maintain a productive and friendly environment, and its greatly improved analytics and reporting systems can help ensure the community’s overall health and impact on the bottom line.

But even these items are just the starting point, as the complete package includes a great many other pieces and parts, some of which come at additional cost, and all of which are explored and discussed within. Of particular note are Lithium Studio (for getting the layout and content of each community page just the way you want it), Lithium Content Discovery (for moderating and managing massive sets of user-generated content), Lithium Mobile 2.0 (no download required), and an extensive set of integration points to connect your community with your other business systems and with the greater Social Web.

Lithium’s customer base has historically skewed toward high-tech and telecom companies, which used the platform largely for peer-to-peer service and support. That’s fine, and it certainly makes sense considering the platform’s forums-centric origins. But Lithium’s current incarnation supports not only such communities (which it continues to do well) but also many other social media use cases that span other vertical markets, such as media and publishing, consumer products, retail, and services industries.

The key factor in deciding whether Lithium is right for you has less to do with the business you’re in and more to do with the size of your customer base. Lithium Social CRM is best suited for organizations with a lot of customers (or users, readers, subscribers, etc.). That’s not because of Lithium’s not insignificant price tag, but because taking advantage of many of the platform’s benefits simply requires large numbers of participants. In other words, you need a crowd for crowdsourcing to be effective. For Lithium, the baseline is on the order of 5,000 (eventual) registered users (so your customer base would need to be substantially larger than that, as not all customers will register).

If your customer base is sizable enough, and your organization can provide the necessary resources (particularly a dedicated community manager), we recommend Lithium for your short list of online community platforms.

EVALUATING LITHIUM

Building a Community using Lithium

To build a successful online customer community—whether your customers are looking primarily for answers to questions, for fellowship, for opportunities to interact with your brand, to investigate a potential purchase, for fun, or for something else—it is crucial to match your business goals to the technology platform you use. But ever-increasing expectations from more and more socially aware customers, and the increased need for efficient workflows and integrations, make it especially challenging to determine what’s best for your company and your customers. Our product reviews look to help with that decision by providing in-depth analysis on relevant online community platforms and the companies that sell and support them.

On the product front, Lithium has consistently continued to develop the capabilities, security, and extensibility of its software, which is available as a hosted, on-demand solution.

This report applies our online community evaluation criteria1 to one of the leading community platforms on the market from Lithium Technologies. An update of our 2006 review, it focuses on Lithium’s core product and add-on applications as they are available today, with some discussion of soon-to-launch tools and interfaces.

Some key things to note about Lithium are:

• It is an on-demand, enterprise-ready platform that supports some of the largest communities on the Internet.

• It is an integrated suite of community and social components, including discussion forums, blogs, private messaging, crowdsourcing, collaboration and knowledge management, reputation management, search and tagging, analytics, and more.

• The company provides a variety of professional service offerings that complement its technology platform (some of which are part of every Lithium deployment).

OVERVIEW OF LITHIUM TECHNOLOGIES

Lithium Technologies, Inc. was founded in 2001 in order to bring to a wider market the community platform developed in 1997 for online game players (including Gamers.com) by its founders, Michel Thouati and Lyle Fong. Michel Thouati has long left the company, but original CTO Lyle Fong has been leading the company as CEO since 2006.

Since 2001, the Emeryville, CA-based company has raised $21 million through two rounds of investment in 2007 and 2008. It has also grown to over 100 employees, acquired one company (Keibi Technologies), opened up offices in England and Switzerland, and recently reported 80 percent growth in new monthly recurring revenue year-over-year.

On the product front, Lithium has consistently continued to develop the capabilities, security, and extensibility of its software, which is available as a hosted, on-demand solution. The company also provides a mix of professional service offerings that supplement and support its technology platform.

PRODUCTS. Lithium’s product, the Social CRM Suite, is an integrated set of built-in and add-on applications to support customer communication and collaboration. See the section below on Pricing for information on what’s part of a typical implementation and what’s available at additional cost.

• Core Components. Search, reputation system (ratings, rankings, rewards), member profiles, member roles and permissioning, moderation and administration tools, and so on.

• Customer Community Applications. Forums, blogs, chat, and private messaging, as well as the tools and services described below (Lithium Ideas, etc.).

• Lithium Ideas. Crowdsourcing application for posting, discussing, and voting on ideas.

• Tribal Knowledge Base. Similar to the way that idea engines let customers present, rate, and comment on either others’ ideas, the Tribal Knowledge Base supports the creation of documentation through collaborative efforts.

The Best Buy Community is Powered by Lithium

© 2009 Best Buy

Illustration 1. The international retailer Best Buy uses Lithium to run its customers community, using Lithium’s discussion boards and blogs, among other components.

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