Livefyre’s Engagement Cloud helps brands create sites around user-generated content

Social content platform Livefyre has launched a product that consolidates all of its many services into one 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 relevant conversation, organize around that interaction, and participate alongside the community.

What marketers gain from using this Engagement Cloud are an extensive array of tools, including the ability 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 — like Squarespace, but without the hosting capabilities.

Livefyre chief executive Jordan Kretchmer told 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 provides ample opportunity for marketers to find ways to leverage that content for their campaigns, but doing so in a holistic fashion can be a challenge. 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 the area of 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 (an offering put together through the acquisition of Storify in 2013). One of the more interesting things about the social search option is the way content can be organized. You can run a query that’ll pull up tweets, photos, and videos, but whereas before if you wanted to save them for later, you’d likely have had to download them onto your computer, now that content cataloging is performed using folders within Livefyre’s Engagement Cloud.

When you store photos in a folder within Livefyre, along with the image goes the metadata that will help with classification. In addition, the data from the content’s geolocation, coordinates, and tags will also be stored. Certainly, an asset management component is helpful in that users can store everything in the cloud for later use. Content can be tagged, rated, and even shared with team members.

Something that is missing from this social search engine capability, however, is image recognition. While the company has trained the system to recognize its customers’ logos, what it hasn’t started including is image classification. So if you want to look at some postings with the Golden Gate Bridge on it, don’t expect the system to recognize the iconic image, at least not right now. Kretchmer said this capability will be available in the next release, sometime in Q2 2016.

With the real-time streams, Livefyre provides content starting from that moment the tracking begins. No historic data will be provided. Kretchmer said this works 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 (e.g., feature cards, mosaics, carousel displays, live blog, chats, reviews, trending, and polls), customize it, and embed it onto any webpage they want. Each template has specific programming to provide specific displays, such as a photo wall or comments page.

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 told us lacked asset management, rights management, and a streamlined interface. Customers that have subscribed to this offering will be upgraded to the Engagement Cloud over the next three months.

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 the new service also matches with companies like Sprinklr that have been building a unified platform around what the public is saying.

Amid the competition, Livefyre continues to grow, recently raising $32 million from investors including Adobe and Salesforce Ventures. It has now 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.

https://vimeo.com/143176028