A mouse among giants, LiveFyre announced today it will be integrating its automated cloud-based brand curation service with similar services offered by Adobe and Salesforce.
“The reason why each is working with us is because neither [Adobe or Salesforce] has access to user-generated content in the cloud,” said Jordan Kretchmer, founder and CEO at Livefyre. “In general, user-generated content is the most trusted form of content to put in front of an audience.”
Livefyre can find content on a brand anywhere on the Internet and “bring it in.” The business logic embedded in Livefyre will create streams of content that can be sorted and managed by the brand, Kretchmer explained. Social media can also be managed in this manner as well. “Bad content” is filtered out.
In case a brand should suffer a crisis or disaster, the filter feature can also be used to collect and monitor any critical content that reflects badly on the brand. “A community manager can open a dashboard…and access all the things people are saying,” Kretchmer noted. From there, a company can track user sentiment and respond, even pushing out notices from the dashboard.
Adobe and Salesforce signaled their interested in Livefyre last February, when the two companies put up a total of $32 million to invest in Livefyre. This came on top of a $15 million investment made by a consortium of venture firms. Since then, engineers have been busy incorporating Livefyre’s technology into Adobe Experience Manager and Lightning Components for the Salesforce Community Cloud, Kretchmer explained Opening either application will show a menu of Livefyre apps that can be dragged and dropped into your web page. Then set configurations and go. “You don’t have to write any code,” he added.
“The automated component is important. It’s where they get a lot of scale.” Kretchmer continued. “On any day, we will pull in about one million pieces of content per hour into the system.” An above-average vent, like the first Republican candidate debate, clocked in at more than 4 million pieces of content per hour.
“We now have the largest infrastructure in this market,” Kretchmer said, capable of pulling in about 3.5 billion pieces of content per month to be viewed on pages powered by Livefyre. That requires a lot of server space to be available on call. To this end, Livefyre is a major customer of Amazon Web Services to add capacity when needed. The service level agreement with Amazon calls for 99.99 percent guaranteed uptime. “We have never broken the SLA in the past three years,” Kretchmer added.
In terms of size, Livefyre only has about 155 employees, compared with Adobe’s approximately 13,500 and Salesforce’s 16,000 or so workers. “For us, it’s all about scaling sales.” Kretchmer said. “How do we get enough leads out the door without overinvesting in marketing?”
Adobe alone has about 2,500 sales people, compared to the 15-16 fielded by Livefyre. What Kretchmer wants to do is to keep his precious investment dollars in-house to be used for R&D and product development, while shifting the sales efforts to his larger partners, Adobe and Salesforce. “It’s all about growing revenues,” he said.
Livefyre is privately held and still largely funded by venture capitalists. However, the company has seen revenue growth of 35 percent year-over-year for the past four years, Kretchmer said.
