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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MobileMonkey
Score 8.0 out of 10
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MobileMonkey, headquartered in Boston, offers their social media messaging marketing tool to marketers and agencies, featuring chatbots, landing page creation, integration with social ads, and an emphasis on Facebook. They offer a free plan and a paid plan with more advanced features (e.g. bot analytics, drip campaigns, etc.). MobileMonkey acquired ChattyPeople to extend their chatbot building capabilities.
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.
MobileMonkey would be great if you have a really strong social media presence and want to capitalize on people visiting your pages. It's great if you have a tech friendly audience who is not afraid to talk to a chatbot. If you have an audience where they might be uncomfortable or more of an "uptight" audience then it might not be fore you. It's also not great for heavy B2B if your focus is on high level targets as they're likely not logged in to Facebook at work. B2C is probably the best function for MobileMonkey, although it could be used to help field support messages.
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.
MobileMonkey support is second to none when you have a paid plan. Always willing to help and make your life a lot easier when you're facing any technical difficulties or frustrations. When I was on the free plan, I found plenty of useful resources that helped me solve my problems, and I could still contact support for help.
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.
MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.
