Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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MobileMonkey
Score 8.0 out of 10
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MobileMonkey, headquartered in Boston, offers their social media messaging marketing tool to marketers and agencies, featuring chatbots, landing page creation, integration with social ads, and an emphasis on Facebook. They offer a free plan and a paid plan with more advanced features (e.g. bot analytics, drip campaigns, etc.). MobileMonkey acquired ChattyPeople to extend their chatbot building capabilities.
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.
MobileMonkey is an excellent tool for those wanting to automate their communication on their Facebook business page and having zero knowledge on how to use Messenger and Chatbots. MobileMonkey provides plenty of education, training, and webinars on how to use its features. This tool is great no matter the size of your business, and indeed does help you to understand how to create messenger bots and flow that work for your business and customers.
It's pretty flexible. There were only a few things we found that were too specific to our environment and could not be easily done.
The out-of-the-box GUI design was decent. It was also configurable with limited custom CSS, anticipating the need for each company to customize the look and feel to suit their own needs.
Basic interface is good, providing the necessary data points like total comment count. Visual effects are good too, with fade-in effects for new comments.
They also provide back-end APIs to gather information about the "hottest" threads. We used this to construct our own "Hot Topics" section that could link users to the related article so they could comment themselves.
Good support, even after implementation. They were always available by phone and even through realtime IM chats direct to their developers, skipping awkward non-technical middlemen.
We are planning to continue using Livefyre comments on several of our blog properties due to its simplicity, transparency and speed of operation. We are actively researching it's more advanced features for some other platforms that need higher end results. Keep up the good work Livefyre.
Their terrible marketing ethics. MobileMonkey sent me numerous emails (after I had unsubscribed several times), bot messages on Facebook, and auto-mated e-mail marketing newsletters. It's as if they either don't give AF or their 'unsubscribe' link is fake and does absolutely nothing. They have called me 6 in the morning twice already (all within 4 days!!). Every time they email me I reply with please unsubscribe. Not only they haven't replied to my concerns, but the same person, David Mercurio, their "Senior Account Executive" has continued to spam me, trying to upsell me with his template messages. This is just absurd! I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. I have received less spam from signing up on unknown shady websites than I have from MobileMonkey. Shame on them for creating such an image for our industry!
MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.
