Lithium Delivers Next-Generation Solution For Social Marketing

Lithium Technologies today released its next-generation social marketing solution designed to help brands deepen their engagements with customers. The Lithium Social Marketing Solution adds  rich media interactions, ad hoc groups, streaming conversations, and a ratings and reviews module.

Along with this new release, Lithium also announced a strategic partnership with Shoutlet to power social marketing campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Shoutlet publishes content across social channels, amplifying the reach of high-value Lithium content, such as blog posts, knowledge articles, and contest entries.

"Shoutlet's strong suit is in helping companies design social campaigns that underscore larger business goals, and our partnership with Lithium will deliver easy-to-build custom apps and creatives to help end-users accomplish this," said Jason Weaver, Shoutlet's CEO, in a statement. "Our combined capabilities allow Lithium's customers to build highly customized social campaigns to drive fan engagement, easily identifying and deepening fan relationships for their core audiences."

A separate deal with VMware brings Socialcast integration to the Lithium platform. This integration allows Socialcast users to automatically receive posts in their work streams from their company's Lithium community so customer ideas can be discussed and refined. This direct connection with customer activites will enable joint Lithium and Socialcast customers new levels of visibility into what is driving their businesses.

The Lithium Social Marketing Solution allows companies to do the following:

• Put Community at the Heart of Customer Engagement: Use Social Engagement Apps to put branded community at the center of an integrated social customer experience strategy. New capabilities include enhanced photo sharing, in-line conversations, group spaces and deeper integration with social networks through social login, Lithium LevelUp for Facebook and Lithium Twitter Integration.
• Monetize Web site Traffic Through Online Reviews: A brand new Ratings and Reviews module allows brands to infuse community content via widgets on critical product Web pages.
• Engage Social Customers Anywhere Through Mobile Apps: New development tools for iOS make it easier to integrate social conversations into brands’ custom iPhone and iPad apps.

"While new social networks offer a host of opportunities for marketers, they also introduce unprecedented complexity," explains Rob Tarkoff, Lithium's president and CEO. "Marketers need to use all of these social networks to acquire new customer leads, however they aren't the way to deeply engage with customers and ignite their advocacy. To get the most out of your social programs, we have completely reimagined the brand-owned marketing community as a driver for deep engagement and a catalyst to creating customer advocates.

"Brands that don't embrace this strategy fail to create a social customer experience that they can control and, ultimately, are missing brand-building and sales opportunities," Tarkoff added.

The solution is already helping brands like Sephora, Aruba Networks, and Fox Networks host and capture social conversations that grow Web site traffic and increase conversion rates by 25 percent or more.

Fox Networks Group, for example, is using Lithium's next-generation social marketing tools to gain insights and enhance the overall viewing experience. "Our goal is to build a direct consumer connection to ultimately make better programming and scheduling decisions," said Chris Blandy, senior vice president of digital media at Fox, in a statement. "We've already seen our viewer engagement increase dramatically since deployment."

Ipsos, a global market research company, has partnered with Lithium to bring more than 60 vibrant customer communities to its clients. Collectively, these communities have attracted more than 1.3 million members. "We chose Lithium because the platform is highly flexible and gives us the freedom to create engaging customer experiences that connect consumers more deeply with the brand and surfaces important insights on customer needs, tastes, and preferences,” said Andrew Leary, executive vice president of global innovation at Ipsos.

---

Related Articles

Lithium Technologies Acquires Social Dynamx

Lithium Social Web born out of new alliance.

MetrixLab Snaps up MarketTools Research Solutions

Acquisition expands digital and cross-media research offerings.