As the amount of digital and social content continues to increase across the web, lots of media companies can start to feel lost in the noise. Newspapers, Magazines, and other news organizations look for a way to drive user participation through digital and social means while also cutting through the noise.
Enter Livefyre.
Livefyre, founded in 2009 by Jordan Kretchmer, “helps power the world’s conversations through real-time comments.” A service like this naturally fits with the goals of many sports leagues, teams, and media organizations. Livefyre’s services like LiveBlog and LiveChat “build real-time community and conversation.” The beauty of Livefyre’s services is that they can be embedded onto another website. So, the company/team/organization still gets to drive all content to its own site while also driving digital and social conversation.
Livefyre most recently partnered with Sports Illustrated during the NCAA Tournament to improve SI’s live game chat experience. SI’s writers generate a lot of traffic and conversation on Twitter, and Livefyre helped aggregate those comments into a stream on SI’s website. This helped SI direct traffic back onto its own site while still capitalizing on the popularity of its writers. Livefyre and SI partnered in a similar way for the NFL Draft.
For more information, we sat down for a Q&A with Nick Cicero, Lead Social Strategist at Livefyre.
SportTechie: How did Livefyre get started?
Nick Cicero: Livefyre was founded in 2009 by Jordan Kretchmer, who had a vision to power the world’s conversations through real-time comments. Since then, we have added LiveBlog and LiveChat applications to our suite of offerings, and most recently announced social curation capabilities as part of StreamHub, our real-time platform. Sports leagues, teams and media companies can use Livefyre to build real-time community and conversation into their websites and mobile apps and display large walls of social activity about specific hashtags, teams or topics at live events. This enables them to connect directly with fans, increasing awareness and brand engagement while driving ticket sales.
SportTechie: What types of unique campaigns (in sports and beyond) have you worked on so far?
Nick Cicero: Livefyre customers include Fox Sports, CBS Sports, and Sports Illustrated, who use us for LiveComments, LiveChat, and social media curation. We powered the New York Times’ live chat coverage of last year’s Super Bowl, and this year Sports Illustrated hosted a LiveChat with Mallory Rubin for the College Football BCS and National Championship games. We’re also working with Fox Sports on some exciting social TV initiatives that will be released later this year.
SportTechie: How many users does your service have?
Nick Cicero: The Livefyre network delivers real-time experiences across 1 billion page views to more than 120 million people each month.
SportTechie: How did your partnership with Sports Illustrated for March Madness come about?
Nick Cicero: We worked with the Sports Illustrated social media team to determine how we could work on improving their Live Game Chat experience. The SI editors (and March Madness on the whole) generates a lot of conversations on Twitter, so we wanted to provide a way to bring that social content back to their own site so people could follow along with Seth Davis, Andy Glockner, and their other popular College Basketball writers who are usually livetweeting during games.
Livefyre StreamHub allowed Sports Illustrated to curate tweets from their editors around team-specific keywords and hashtags, keeping content on each GameFlash Game Chat page highly relavant to the game being played.
SportTechie: Are there any plans to further the relationship with SI into different sports throughout this year?
Nick Cicero: We work with Sports Illustrated regularly across many different types of sporting events. Earlier this year, Editors from Sports Illustrated hosted a LiveBlog for the USA-Mexico World Cup qualifier, curating in Tweets from editors at the event.
Today, the SI NFL Draft page currently features a Livefyre LiveChat widget along the right rail of all their draft boards and expert analysis for fans to discuss the draft in real-time.
SportTechie: Where do you see Livefyre expanding in the future?
Nick Cicero: Livefyre is rapidly expanding our product suite to make it as easy as possible for marketers to create real-time, social experiences. We believe that social media has forever changed how brands connect with consumers and want to be the platform powering this shift for the rest of the web. In five years, we believe that every website will be real-time and social and social networks won’t be the only place people go for real-time news and information. These Live experiences are changing how consumers interact with brands, events, content and each other – bringing everyone closer to the action.