Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and is now part of Adobe Experience Manager. Later versions of AEM include features of Livefyre pre-installed. Livefyre (or the Livefyre Studio app) is a content curation, social media UGC, audience engagement application that enables users to access user generated content that can be streamed in real-time to a customer’s sites, digital billboards, apps,…
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Bambu by Sprout Social
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Bambu is a social media marketing tool from Sprout Social that leverages employee advocacy. It allows users to organize and encourage distribution of company blog posts, press releases, news and articles, thought leadership, and customer case studies through employees' personal social networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There are three main use cases for Bambu: Marketing, HR, and Sales. In terms of Marketing, Bambu aims to leverage employee advocacy to increase brand awareness…
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
Routinely sharing job postings from Bambu by Sprout Social to LinkedIn, using the canned content our Marketing team provides and revising so that it "sounds like me" prior to sharing on LI. Cadencing my content shares for the week in the "Scheduling" option Creating a new link to share content via Bambu by Sprout Social to LI, to position myself as a thought leader in my space
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
It was similar in that it helped us push prewritten messages out to our team, but the UX/UI was far more dated and not as intuitive. It's mobile app also wasn't very useful; made it difficult to edit messages and would constantly need you to log back in. The two things GaggleAMP had over Bambu however was more comprehensive analytics and the ability to automatically push out social posts
The social amplification effects of our employees sharing brand content helped us achieve a 400% increase in website visits following our re-brand.
With some "Executive nudging" when we announced that Bambu would be used as our internal comms tool, and that we would only be sharing real-time updates via the mobile apps push notifications, we were able to double the # of employees who use the App in addition to the desktop application. Mobile users aside, another positive side effect of using Bambu as an internal comms tool is that it exposes users (the non-social butterflies who don't like to share) to all other content that has been curated into the system and has helped garner more social impressions.
The majority of our employees come from the BabyBoom/Gen X generation and didn't come of age in the world of social media, which has presented some challenges in user adoption rates.
