Jordan Kretchmer is the founder and CEO of Livefyre.com, a platform that helps brands and media companies build and manage real-time content experiences on their own sites. Over 1,000 customers strong, it's powering real-time content and social on most of the largest sites on the web.
In this interview, we talk to Jordan about why he launched Livefyre, his plans for the company over the next year and key issues in the industry.
TechRadar Pro: Why did you launch Livefyre, what problem were you trying to solve?
Jordan Kretchmer: People are truly passionate about the subjects and products they consume; we wanted to give them an easy way to comment, share, and discover within the sites they're browsing, rather than having to hop off to social networks.
Meanwhile, publishers and brands can now truly give their audiences a voice and create much higher levels of engagement. I saw a way to potentially impact millions of people with the products we were setting out to create, while also innovating in a space that had become static.
TRP: Livefyre was traditionally known for commenting but you have a fairly expansive product suite at this point. Can you tell me a bit more about how these all fit together from a technology standpoint?
JK: Whereas other products on the market are a patchwork of point solutions, we've developed a single platform called Studio for all content marketing, user generated content and engagement. Studio puts billions of pieces of content at marketers' fingertips, where they send it to their websites, mobile apps and all of their digital marketing – in seconds, and without writing a single line of code.
Studio acts as the central command centre for all of Livefyre's social visualisations, engagement apps, design tools, and management features. So with just a few clicks, marketers can quickly find and manage content and design interactive experiences for their audiences.
For publishers and brands the integrated product suite acts as a single control centre through which to connect with audiences. Not only does this give them total flexibility to switch on and off functionality (e.g. Comments or a Media Wall), it also means that we can really easily move to act on consumer preferences.
For example, one of our latest products, Sidenotes, allows readers to engage directly with content – a quote, a paragraph, an image – anywhere on a page. Rather than requiring a new implementation, for existing customers it can be turned on within seconds. Our customers love that we're constantly innovating on their behalf. We take a lot of time to listen, so that our product development roadmap is always aligned with where our customers are taking their business.
TRP: Lately there's been a lot of discussion on Facebook's diminishing organic reach; should brands and publishers even focus on having a social presence at this point?
JK: Absolutely, but this focus must be directed in a different way than say two years ago when everyone was obsessed with reach on Facebook and Twitter. Instead, we're seeing brands, as well as publishers, wanting to bring people to their site for a consistent and richer experience.
They've realised the need to take back control – CMOs can't rely on third-party networks to build and maintain communities. People expect much more from sites, as well as the ability to directly interact with brands. Now that it's here, this expectation will only become deeper as brands and publishers get closer to their communities than ever before.
TRP: Livefyre has built some customised projects for brands, including My Oscar Photo, which allowed at-home viewers to take photos on the red carpet, for the Academy Awards. Where do ideas like this come from, and can you talk us through the technology behind this?
JK: #MyOscarPhoto was an incredibly fun and crazy project to run. The idea was to make viewers feel as connected as possible to the Awards ceremony. We invited people to tweet photos of themselves which we processed and moderated.
Livefyre then rapid fires 10 pictures a second and a slow-motion camera picks up the whole scene, processes each frame algorithmically, and then tweets back the photo to the correct user. So that within just 10 minutes of tweeting the hashtag, each user should have a photo of themselves stood next to a celeb on the red carpet.
Ideas like these come from a collaboration between ourselves and the brand. They know what their specific goal is, and we help them by technologically making it possible. #MyOscarPhoto was a particularly strong, visual example, but we run projects similar to this all the time with news publishers around certain campaigns or sporting tournaments, or with brands like PlayStation to get real-time feedback from gamers.
TRP: How do you see content aggregation progressing over the next ten years?
JK: I think people's understanding of the word content will change, such that we will see a shift in ownership of brands – by which I mean publishers and corporates – to produce and push content out to media and consumers.
Instead we will see much more curation of snippets of commentary, videos and articles from across the web being brought in to the site. Brands are expected to be much more transparent in their communications today and so taking advantage of the huge volumes of discussion that happen across the web, about your brand or related subjects, is a real no-brainer. It's extremely cost-effective and moves towards common brand goals.
TRP: You help publishers and brands build and engage their own communities – what are the steps you take with your customers to accomplish that?
JK: First off we look at their overall goals – what is the business objective? So often we talk about 'engagement', but without knowing why you're trying to achieve that it's really hard to put in place something that will help the brand and feel authentic to readers.
Once we know what overarching goal we're working towards we always audit their current audiences to understand what the current perception is and base level we're working off e.g. time spent on site, number of pages viewed etc.
From there it's a case of identifying those core groups within the audience that will be the champions and delivering an experience that is well suited to their needs. For example, do they have a short time on site, or do they prefer to contribute longer blog or forum posts, would reviews work best or is there a lot of discussion on Twitter that we should feed in to the on-site discussion. We help our customers to tailor every experience.
TRP: Content quality is a big deal to brands – can you talk through the moderation and content filtering capabilities behind Livefyre's platform?
JK: Creating an online environment which features high quality user generated content is extremely important to publishers and brands. We work with our customers so their readers don't have to encounter unwanted noise, including content with lots of expletives, or plain spam.
We address this in a few ways. One is allowing users to comment on and like other users' ratings. Peer moderation can be an effective tool to ensure authenticity, promoting those reviews that are most useful and sincere, and clearly labelling – and eventually screening – those that aren't.
Another key part of this process is an effective moderation platform, one that can screen not just for profanity but also sentiment, defamatory language and spam. Our Magic Moderation tool analyses content as a user posts it in real-time to identify potentially offensive content and matches it against unique site settings, where customers can designate a particular action based on the type of content and threat level. The tool automatically flags hate speech, cloaked obscenity, insults and other offensive content that most spam and profanity filters don't catch.
TRP: Livefyre streams content to audiences in real-time; why is that important and can you talk us through the technology behind this?
JK: Facebook posts get over half their reach within the first 30 minutes, and on Twitter this figure is even greater. Think of the biggest brand successes this year, and most will be those that are instantly shareable. Stats alone should tell you why real-time is so important – the truth is that people want to feel like they are a part of what's happening right now, rather than being served news that's even an hour, let alone a day old.
This isn't something that's news, it's just that with online media updating so rapidly now we have come to expect that it's possible. This is of course true of publishers and their readers, but for brands also this is now a major opportunity. They can prove how quickly feedback is responded to through new product launches. Or share a positive customer review on their site that proves how recently someone enjoyed their product. In order to have the 'talkability' factor, brands must create a real-time experience.
TRP: The industry is moving at such a fast pace, what do you think will be the next big trend in content engagement and how is Livefyre planning to respond to these changes?
JK: There are a couple of major trends bubbling. The first is that recommendations are becoming a much more important factor in online commerce, as consumers have almost unlimited choice. Rather than trawling the web or defaulting to search engines, people will ask their friends much more often for advice. Socially shared content will therefore hold more weight in the minds of consumers.
The second trend is that the content strategy being adopted by publishers and brands will really start to give back. Not only in engagement levels, but also in data points as we separate out what works for individuals as well as whole communities. The data you will get from your site will be much more rich and plentiful so that you can then drill down into it for much more personalised interactions and experiences.
At Livefyre we're continually looking at the data to see how people are using the web so that we can create products that people really want to use, and add to a positive on-site experience of sharing and reward.
TRP: Livefyre is based in San Francisco, but also has offices around the world. What markets are the most important to you, and do you see this changing in the future?
JK: We've opened many offices over the last few years, and are expanding rapidly. I see opportunity everywhere, for example we opened an office in London because of its thriving tech, publishing and advertising scenes. There are many fast developing areas of the world such as Brazil and South-East Asia where traditional publishing models are opening up through mobile, and ecommerce is starting to boom.
The platform itself is extremely well suited to brands with a global presence. And the bigger we get, the more efficient it is for us to deliver a pageview, so our customers join us in our success.
I firmly believe that ambition is the most important asset in business. As we grow we continually reset our goals so we have a new bar to reach in impacting the online experiences of people around the world.
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