There’s been a big push from startups promising to help marketers and publishers take advantage of all the user-generated content that’s posted to social media, but Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer suggested that one area has been relatively neglected — pushing UGC to a brand’s own website.
Kretchmer is announcing a new product today called the Livefyre Engagement Cloud, which brings together the company’s existing products into a single platform while also adding some new capabilities.
“Everything we’ve built is within our Engagement Cloud,” Kretchmer said. “It feels really good and nice and organized, and we didn’t lose any functionality in the transition. We didn’t deprecate anything. We use every piece in our platform.”
Livefyre started out as a commenting platform but has since expanded into other areas like liveblogging and content curation.
Kretchmer pitched the Engagement Cloud as a suite of products that brands and online publishers can use to connect with their visitors, whether it’s through comments, discussion forums, polls or a gallery of images from social media.
The “centerpiece,” he said, is the content management system, where marketers can search for different types of social media content, save the content for future use and organize it in different folders. You can even automate the process by setting rules for saving content to Livefyre or publishing directly to your site.
Kretchmer emphasized the bit about saving UGC, because it allows brands create a library of content that they can use in future marketing efforts, rather than starting from scratch every time they prepare a new campaign.
“Without content, you have no audience,” he said.
Livefyre also includes a rights management system, where marketers can obtain a user’s permission to use their content with just a hashtag — without that permission, anytime a user deletes their post, it gets deleted from Livefyre, too.
Aside from collecting and saving content, the Engagement Cloud also includes an App Publisher, which is where marketers can actually publish all this UGC to their websites in the form of customized Mosaics and Carousels and so on. (This is where all those other Livefyre products live now.) Marketers can also use Livefyre’s APIs to create more custom presentations.
So is this only useful for your website? I mean, if it helps you create this great content library, wouldn’t it be nice if you could push that content back to your Facebook and Twitter and Instagram accounts, too?
Livefyre Engagement Cloud from Livefyre on Vimeo.
Well, Kretchmer isn’t ruling that out in the future, but he said the social publishing side is “a messy place,” so he’s happy to focus on the “owned-and-operated” world for now.
Borrowing a term from a recent Forrester report that named Livefyre (along with Jive and Lithium) a leader among “social depth” platforms, Kretchmer said, “You need to build social depth on your owned-and-operated properties, so you build that one-to-one relationship with your audience.”
Livefyre will gradually roll out the Engagement Cloud to all of its customers, he said.