Social content platform Livefyre has launched a product that consolidates all of its many services into a evolved suite. In doing so, it provides marketers the functionality necessary to easily manage user-generated content throughout a campaign’s lifecycle. Called the Livefyre Engagement Cloud, it helps brands discover the conversation, organize around it, and participate alongside the community.
What marketers gain from using this Engagement Cloud are an extensive array of tools, including being able to liveblog, curate conversations, accept comments, and much more. These offerings are packaged up into a unified platform and can easily be deployed live on any digital property — think about it like Squarespace, but without the hosting capabilities.
Livefyre chief executive Jordan Kretchmer tells VentureBeat that now, more than ever, “every brand is tasked with coming up with more content than they have in history.” The proliferation of user-generated content gives ample opportunity for marketers to find ways to leverage that for their campaigns, but just how can this be done in a holistic fashion can be somewhat dubious. Kretchmer’s Engagement Cloud product is billed as a way to let companies discover the so-called authentic experience, create a story from it, and win over new customers.
Within discovery, Livefyre is tapping into social content from all around the web. Marketers have the option of looking back historically or creating a real-time stream of data from which to pull from (an offering put together through the acquisition of Storify in 2013). When using the social search option, one of the more interesting things is the way content can be organized. You can run a query that’ll pull up tweets, photos, and videos, but before if you wanted to save them for later, you’d likely have to download them onto your computer. But now that content cataloging is all done using folders within Livefyre’s Engagement Cloud.
When you store photos in a folder within Livefyre, along with the image goes the metadata that’ll help with classification. In addition, the data from the content’s geolocation, coordinates, and tags will also be stored. Certainly being able to have an asset management component is helpful in that users can store everything in the cloud instead of having to MacGuyver up some system just to try and remember how it worked later on.
Content can be tagged, rated, and even shared with team members. This is no longer just one person’s job.
Something that is missing from this social search engine capability is image recognition. While the company has trained the system to recognize its customers’ logos, what it hasn’t gotten around to is including image classifications. So if you want to look at some postings with the Golden Gate Bridge on it, don’t expect the system to recognize it, at least not right now. Kretchmer says that this capability will be made available in the next release sometime in Q2 2016.
With the real-time streams, Livefyre provides content taking place starting from now. No historic data will be provided. Kretchmer says that this is more for campaigns where you’re tracking specific hashtags. Marketers can utilize if/then logic along with different rules to ensure that they’re receiving the right content.
After you’ve queried content, the next step is to find a way to publish it. This part of the Engagement Cloud is where marketers can select a template from one of Livefyre’s apps (e.g. feature cards, mosaics, carousel displays, comments, live blog, chats, reviews, media walls, trending and polls), customize it, and embed it onto any webpage they want. Each template has specific programming included to provide specific displays, such as a photo wall, comments, and more.
Livefyre’s Engagement Cloud comes equipped with basic analytics and makes it easy for brands to scour and share social media content around their products or campaigns. It’ll be replacing Livefyre Studio, which Kretchmer tells us lacked asset management, rights management, and a streamlined interface. Customers that have subscribed to this offering will be upgrade to the Engagement Cloud over the course of the next three months.
The timing of Livefyre’s announcement comes more than a week after a similar service called Chute rolled out its user-generated content offering, complete with image recognition, search engine, tracking, publishing, and sharing. And it also matches with more companies like Sprinklr that have been building a unified platform around what the public is saying.
Amid the competition, Livefyre continues to grow, especially after most recently raising $32 million from investors including Adobe and Salesforce Ventures. It is evolving itself to a point where it’s crafted an ecosystem for marketers to have a self-sustainable social media marketing platform. Today’s news comes as the company is holding a customer event in New York City where 350 customer companies are expected to be in attendance.