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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Movable Ink
Score 7.7 out of 10
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The Movable Ink platform from the company of the same name in New York allows marketing content creators to design and deploy a consistent visual experience for customers across digital experiences, from email, to webstore, to mobile apps.
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.
Any business that sends out a lot of email communications, and has accessible data that they can, at the very least, format in CSV sheets can utilize [Moveable Ink] with reasonable success. Depending on how your data is housed or received, the integration within Movable Ink is quite simple. I would recommend looking at the list of partners that Movable Ink integrate with. If your business is utilizing any of them regularly, it would make integration even easier. If you do not do a lot with email or your data is not easily accessible I would not recommend Movable Ink.
Personalization--Everyone likes to see their name in lights. Movable Ink allows you to pull in content such as their name, locations that are closest to them, and content they're actually interested in.
Unique Features--Movable Ink provides a variety of apps that can plugged into emails to make the experience more unique and exciting, such as countdown timers, add to calendar features for events, maps, and social feeds.
Tracking--Adding snippets of code to emails allow you to track data, such as opens, impressions, and clickthroughs. You can also track how individuals interact with specific pieces of the email.
User Friendly--Easy to build within apps for those who aren't graphic designers.
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.
I think they could improve with how to provide strategic guidance to customers on applications and use cases. A lot of recommendations aren't applicable to new business models/scenarios
Their transition to onsite/landing page use cases was somewhat effective but we ran into some hiccups with applying the technology onsite
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.
