LiveFyre is pulling all its apps under one umbrella with its LiveFyre Engagement Cloud, being released today.
Engagement Cloud is a significant upgrade from its predecessor product, LiveFyre Studio, according to Jordan Kretchmer, found and CEO. “This is a ground-up rebuild of the whole platform.”
Engagement Cloud brings together a number of capabilities that enables a corporate user to search all social media for any mention of their product or brand, identify it according to pre-set rules, and bring it back to the company web site. This capability is powered by Engagement Cloud’s Social Library.
In addition:
- Social Hub templates allow a user to create, customize and launch their own user experiences.
- The App Publisher will create updates for the corporate web site without the need to write any code.
- SocialSync will capture any Facebook or Twitter conversations about the brand and import them into the company web site.
- User Permissions can configure who does what job assembling content.
- ModQ enables the user to pre-set rules to govern content.
- Comments, Chats and Reviews ties in existing user profiles, allowing a company to continually engage audiences on the company web site instead of elsewhere.
Perhaps the most notable characteristic of Engagement Cloud is the integration of various apps into one work flow found in one app. “There were four different screens before,” Kretchmer said, and the ability to save material found in other social media just did not exist. “We’re making it dead simple to publish content,” he said.
Engagement Cloud alllows a corporate user to capture material about their brand from other branches of social media and bring it in-house to the corporate web site, where it can be controlled. From there, one can construct a user experience that will drive people to the company web site. There, “you can engage the audience directly and build a one-to-one sales channel.”
Company material that appears on Twitter or Facebook “is owned by that social channel,” Kretchmer observed. “It’s not your audience.” Nor is the material under the company’s control. The Social Library feature is another asset in this regard, as users can rate, tag and describe photos captured from other social media, which can then be viewed and used with single-click ease. Prior to this, users would cut-and-paste URLs into other applications, like SharePoint, but there was no view, no organization and no management of the content, he said. If you wanted to find a picture, you had to do a lot of scrolling, he noted.
Key to this is a massive set of APIs that the user can configure in just a few mouse clicks. “We don’t want them to break the stuff,” said Kretchmer, noting that experienced IT people cannot go below the API level to modify Engagement Cloud. But the API set should give users a useful app “between Apple and Windows,” he said.
A user can set up an automated stream of content to the company web site, coming from any social media, but filtered by pre-set rules.”Magic moderation” can screen out insults, threats and porn, based on grammatical analysis, Kretchmer explained. It can distinguish between “he will kill it tomorrow” and “I will kill him tomorrow,” Kretchmer said, just to illustrate the example. Likewise, it can also screen photos and drawings for rude gestures.
Engagement Cloud goes to market after two months of beta testing by 15 customers. “We tweaked it a lot,” Kretchmer said. Kretchmer says LiveFyre will not be standing still. Come Q1 of 2016, the company hopes to release an analytics package that can provide live racking of all content to chart the effectiveness of the user experience. The package should also connect with analytics provided by Adobe and Google, he said. “Customers want to tie it with all their data.” he said.
