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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TINT
Score 3.6 out of 10
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TINT is an enterprise User Generated Content platform boasting users among 5,000 brands around the world to incorporate authentic user content, engage consumers, convert sales, and inspire action across every customer touch point.
The platform is used to find, filter, curate, obtain legal rights, and display user generated content (UGC) on websites, digital screens, at events, social commerce, in emails, and ads.
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.
[Tint should] Improve response times in between initial quotes and questions to same-day support as promised. Overall, for our limited needs for a social media at hosted conference, it suited our needs, but would not have paid extra for customer support - you will be on your own for this one. Customer support was factored into cost, which is why it is difficult to recommend TINT.
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.
Customer service: it took 10 business days to get initial questions answered from our sales contact, Matt. After we purchased the mid-grade package that came with prioritized email responses, it took 4 hours to respond to an emergency issue. We were never informed that our LinkedIn accounts would not be compatible with the Tint platform, which is significant is this is one of your main sources for content generation. After being able to jump on to a call with Alex and Customer Success in the middle of a crazy busy conference, we were promised a follow-up call to see what could be done about billing. 2 emails later and no response. I just received responses to some tickets 30+ days after event ended. Do not pay for the mid-grade package. Your emails will not be prioritized. Be sure to double check that all social media platforms you intend to use are functioning with platform before purchasing.
The auto scroll feature is a bit abrupt in transitions and would advise smoother visual when sliding between social media posts.
Better improvement on duplicate posts and pictures - many still made it through filter and generated repetitive content.
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.
I chose Tint because of the ability to customize and better brand for social media wall engagement. And for promised customer support, which ultimately Tint lacks. I'm a nice guy and I also believe in holding companies accountable to the high standards that are promised.
