Livefyre Engagement Cloud Is Much More Than Comments

Social Library found in Livefyre Engagement Cloud

When Livefyre announced their new Livefyre Engagement Cloud on Wednesday, Jordan Kretchmer claimed that "Today, we’re going to make some history". With history yet to be written, this could come across as typical grandstanding made by a company's CEO and founder. Yet the deeper you dig into this story, the more you realize if not history being made then at the very least Livefyre has charted a better course for user engagement and the use of user generated content.

The Livefyre Engagement Cloud has been labeled by the company as "the only platform on the market that allows marketers to make their sites the hub of conversation, creating long-term value from user-generated content through a blend of social curation and onsite engagement". In a product briefing with Livefyre's David Scott (CMO),  I teased him a bit that this is a tall order for a company known as a commenting service provider. Scott was quick to counter. He rightly so pointed out to me that although Livefyre started with comments and shares six years ago, they have since then added 20 additional applications. Livefyre Engagement takes these applications and groups them onto a single platform which Livefyre believes offers the best experience for brands to engage audiences.

User Generated Content (UGC) has become a critical marketing tool, but brands struggle with curating high volumes of traffic to find, organize, and store the best content for future use. As one of the leading social depth platforms on the market, Livefyre is making the current tedious task of locating and leveraging mass amounts of UGC, quick and hopefully painless for brands and publishers. For Scott, the future is all about social depth and sees the Livefyre Engagement Cloud the best platform for the job.

Forrester Research defines social depth platforms as “technologies that add social content and interactions to branded websites to drive exploration of products and services.” Social depth platforms, like the Livefyre Engagement Cloud, are increasingly important in a world where millennials require authenticity of the brands they follow, and trust recommendations from friends, family and experts over advertisements and traditional marketing campaigns.

“The Livefyre Engagement Cloud provides brands and publishers with a centralized way to aggregate, store and repurpose user-generated content. This enables them to move their customer communities out of the corner by infusing social content in every aspect of their websites and owned properties and not limiting social experiences to one piece of their marketing strategy,” says Kretchmer. “This allows them to gain insight into their customer community, deliver interesting content and turn their owned properties into positive, engaging experiences.”

Leveraging User-Generated Content to Drive Engagement

With the Livefyre Engagement Cloud, brands and publishers can manage all aspects of large volumes of user-generated content. The Social Library is a new platform feature that simplifies content management by enabling real-time access to historical and current social content. Unlike other platforms, the Livefyre Engagement Cloud empowers brands and publishers to effortlessly locate, collect, tag and store the best user-generated content from across the social sphere for archiving and future use. The Social Library also allows brands and publishers to find, organize and request rights. The Social Library Image Classifier app automatically recognizes objects in photos, applies tags as metadata and builds a visual library for use in marketing campaigns and in populating owned property.

The Livefyre Engagement Cloud requires little IT intervention; seamlessly integrates with existing technology infrastructures, including website analytics tools; and offers more than 40 APIs to enable customizable experiences. The social depth platform incorporates a number of features, including:

  • Social Library: first of its kind feature that finds a brand’s future content by trawling the web for user-generated content for and about brands
  • Social Hub Templates: Easily creates, customizes and launches experiences that align with the experience the brand wishes to create
  • App Publisher: Creates, configures and updates website experiences without requiring a single line of code
    SocialSync: Automatically captures reactions to a brand’s Twitter and Facebook content, perpetuating the conversation and facilitating audience participation
  • User Permissions: Assigns specific roles to specific users, while maintaining control of every aspect of user-generated content collection and publication
  • ModQ: Allows brands to establish specific content rules based on community guidelines, and facilitates reviews only of content that follows those rules
  • Comments, Chat and Reviews: Integrates with existing profile systems, keeping brands’ consumer audiences engaged on proprietary websites rather than off-site networks 

 Screenshot of Livefyre Engagement Cloud's ModQ (Moderation)

For more information on Livefyre Engagement Cloud, you should visit the Livefyre website.

Images provided by Livefyre.