Livefyre Lights Up Its Rebuilt UGC Platform Today

Livefyre is firing up today a new incarnation of its platform for managing user-generated content (UGC).

Founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer told me there were several reasons his company decided to create its new Engagement Cloud from the ground up.

One was to merge into a single user interface the variety of UGC and user interaction products — including commenting and social curation tools — that the San Francisco-based firm had developed. Now, all the tools are built around a central library of user-generated assets.

That Social Library, Kretchmer said, is the first one specifically designed for the “high velocity volume” of social media content, which generates a firehose of images and videos that have to be quickly filtered and sorted.

The Engagement Cloud automatically filters streams of images according to set rules, such as separating offensive imagery via machine vision. Images can be curated by the brand’s rules and then directed toward an app or folder, which can be handy for a company that is managing UGC from a live event.

Another reason for the new platform was to make social marketers’ lives easier by allowing UGC found on social networks, such as photos on Instagram, to be saved to a brand’s own folders in the cloud. From there, the brand can seek rights permission from the creator.

Previously, images remained on the social network. Kretchmer noted that one client, an unnamed bank, had actually screen-shot the user-generated images and saved the screenshots, so it could have a local record of the material it was using.

It’s also now possible to add and configure multiple site-embedded apps for UGC display or for user interaction from the dashboard, without any programming. There are currently 10 of these Livefyre apps, including Carounsel, Comments, Live Blog, Chat, Trending and Polls.

Previously, Kretchmer noted, only one app could be added or configured at a time, you needed to add JavaScript to embed them into a website, and you had to code the feature modifications.

Kretchmer said that the new capabilities in Engagement Cloud help his company maintain its status as providing UGC aggregation and management, as well as user engagement tools like polls, comments and blogs.

He noted that a competing content aggregator/manager like Spredfast doesn’t offer user engagement, while a user engagement provider like commenting platform Disqus doesn’t do aggregation.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.