LiveWorld launches first public tool — a high-speed management platform for social conversations

20-year-old community/social management provider claims moderators on its platform can process conversations up to 10 times faster than with other tools.

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From the LiveWorld web site

From the LiveWorld website

The job description of the modern brand includes managing countless streams of conversations across social and messaging media.

But there’s so much of it that “management” can seem like a metaphor. To turbo-charge a brand’s social wranglers, San Jose, California-based community and social media management provider LiveWorld released this week its first public product — a self-service cloud-based platform that combines social media scanning, moderation and engagement with case management and a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Founded 20 years ago, LiveWorld is headed by CEO and Chairman Peter Friedman, who was vice president and general manager of Apple’s Internet Services in the mid-90s. Since its inception, LiveWorld has provided a service and then backend tools to brands for community management and social media.

The new product is an updated and public version of the company’s existing tools. It currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, WordPress and one messaging app, Facebook Messenger. Friedman told me the platform will soon support WeChat and Snapchat. The do-it-yourself product is also available through a managed service.

While there is no shortage of social media management platforms, Friedman said that most of them “began as publishing platforms.”

The key thing about LiveWorld’s, he said, “is we started with the conversation itself, [handled] at massive scale.”

He claims that a mortal human moderator, empowered by the platform, can conduct 500 to 1,000 actions per hour on social posts. Actions include reviewing, approving, escalating, tagging and responding. The speed of moderation, Friedman added, is “two to 10 times faster” than any other tool.

A common scenario, he said, is that a brand will use the platform to look at everything that comes into its Facebook page. The system pulls the comments in, automatically tags them and routes them with natural language processing and employs “smart listening” for sentiment analysis, topic detection and identification of opportunities for loyalty marketing.

After that, the moderator looks them over and decides whether to keep the comment, reject it or respond to it and whether to designate it as a case to be resolved. Here’s a screen with a case management pane:

LiveWorld screen

There’s a built-in case management framework to facilitate rapid response on complaints or other issues, and there’s an on-board CRM to track and maintain profiles and conversation histories.

Friedman points out that case management systems often lose the conversational thread, but LiveWorld’s is designed to keep the entire conversational history as it makes its way through issue resolution.

In responding to a post, a moderator can move a public comment to private messaging, such as from an open Facebook post to a closed Facebook Messenger conversation. The CRM can access the Salesforce CRM to look for the same person and mirror the record if found, and there is also API-level integration with Oracle. Other customized APIs are in the works.

The platform is only using bots for greetings, but Friedman indicated that more sophisticated ones will eventually find a job here.

“The world of marketing has to learn to be like customer service,” he told me, “personal, empathetic, [with a] customer context.”

“People are tired of ads.”


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Barry Levine
Contributor
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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