| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software Social software Social media online community |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Emeryville, California, United States |
| Key people |
Rob Tarkoff,President & CEO |
| Products | Lithium Social CRM |
| Website | lithium.com |
Lithium Technologies provides Social CRM solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, Lithium has additional offices in San Francisco, London, and Zürich.
Lithium was founded in 2001 as a spin-out from GX Media, which created technologies for professional rankings and tournaments and now hosts a number of popular gaming sites. The company's founders include brothers Lyle Fong and Dennis Fong, who together also founded GX Media. The company sells largely to enterprise customers, including HP, Best Buy, Research In Motion, Sony, Comcast, Symantec, and AT&T.[1] [2]
The Lithium Social CRM solution combines online customer community applications such as forums, blogs, innovation management, live chat, and tribal knowledge bases with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes, resulting in a wide range of online customer interaction methods.[3] Lithium's SaaS-based platform delivers products on-demand in a hosted environment rather than as traditional, packaged software. Stemming from its gaming roots, the platform incorporates elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges, and “kudos counts.”[4]
In late 2008, Lithium Technologies completed a detailed, time-series analysis of up to a decade's worth of proprietary data that represents billions of interactions, millions of users, and scores of communities. This research, coupled with the company's expertise in planning, deploying, and managing customer communities, enabled Lithium to identify and calculate key factors that have contributed to a new standard for measuring community health - the Community Health Index.[5]
In November 2009, Lithium hosted the first annual Social CRM Virtual Summit which, according to USA Today, "drew more than 2,200 registrants, and about half logged on for the 10-hour event. A quarter were from other countries."[6]
At the beginning of 2010, Lithium announced over 100 percent growth in annual recurring revenue, coupled with securing $18MM in Series C financing.[7] On May 11, 2010, Lithium acquired social media monitoring (SMM) provider, Scout Labs, whose service allows brands to engage with their customers beyond the community and monitor, map, and measure customer conversations on the social web.[8]
In August 2011, Lithium announced the appointment of Enterprise Software Veteran Rob Tarkoff as Chief Executive Officer to succeed Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium. Fong took up the role of Chief Strategist and continued serving on the board of directors. [9]