Using Social To Support The Human Dynamic: LiveWorld & SMW14

For the past 18 years, LiveWorld has been helping corporations improve relationship marketing, customer support, and market learning through engagement, moderation, and insight. They provide a customizable platform with a range of social networking features, having worked with the world’s leading brands, like Pfizer, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson, Louis Vuitton, and Kimberly Clark, as well as the number one companies in the world in retail and consumer packaged goods.

We’re honored to have LiveWorld and Pfizer joining us again this SMW NYC, and we think it’s time you got to know more about them. We sat down with Peter Friedman CEO and Chairman of LiveWorld to learn a bit more about how they work.

Make sure you catch them in action this February at our new Campus for “Making Social More Social Within Regulated and Consumer Sensitive Industries” and their famous cocktail party. It’s an event you won’t want to miss — especially if your brand deals with regulations in any form.

  1. LiveWorld has been around since basically the beginning of social. Can you tell us more about how the vision that helped create LiveWorld and where you see social going in the next few years?

    Friedman: Our core team began work in social, or rather online community, all the way back in 1984 and 1985 at Apple, with products such as AppleLink, which today would be called an Apple industry social network. The entire industry side of the world of Apple — employees, dealers, developers, user group leaders, point people at K-12, universities and IS — were all in that community. Later, our work included AppleLink Personal Edition, which later became AOL, as well as, eWorld and Salon. Our core team left Apple in early 1996 to do for other F1000 companies what we had done for Apple — use online community/social media to help them deepen their customer relationships to improve marketing, customer support, and insight.

    Our vision for social has its roots at Apple. We fundamentally believe social is about the transformative power of online dialogue and relationships. That conviction underlies our major focus on the human element, enabled by technology. It’s similar to Apple’s core belief in the transformative power of personal technology with a major focus on the human experience. And just like at Apple, we focus on the brand’s presence in social as a deep cultural experience.

    Social has had explosive growth; but it’s only the beginning. While we have a massive number of people in the medium, the strength and richness of usage patterns still has a ways to go. Certainly we see a continued shift to mobile social, as well more visual social. That shift will definitely include more video and live camera — but we think photos will dominate. On the business side, we think social media marketing is still mostly traditional advertising, print, digital, and PR broadcast messaging being shoved at customers through social channels. This is beginning to change as brands realize they have to focus on engagement. But even that, for the most part today, is about interacting with broadcast content. Where it needs to go, and will go eventually, is to a focus on dialogue and relationships that truly involve customers — building their commitment to the brand and affecting sales.

  2. Many of the brands you work with have to address federal regulations. How has LiveWorld learned to navigate this area and still excel?

    Friedman: First it’s important to define goals and strategies that factor in the regulatory environment: understand the regulations, how they affect the business goals, and how to manage, mitigate, or eliminate the associated risks. The customers have moved to social, and so must the brands. The regulations are intended to protect consumers but haven’t necessarily kept pace with the media. Still, the brands can manage in a regulatory environment by having a systematic, organized model, plans, and process flow, with support from appropriate technology. Again and again, we have helped our clients’ legal and marketing departments partner together; the issues can be dealt with as long as they are thought out well. One legal counsel put it this way: “We know we need to go into social and we want to help marketing do it. We just want them to plan well and execute more with a thoughtfully aimed rifle shot, not shooting from the hip.”

  3. Our global theme this year is The Future of Now: Always On, Always Connected. We’ll be addressing how to use tech to be more human and connected. Recently, you expressed that living more balanced would be a focus for your organization. How do you see that playing out within the company and industry?

    Friedman: Social by definition is a medium about humans connecting, engaging, and being social with each other. We have to remember this at all junctures. Use technology to support the human dynamic, help customers get closer to each other, and the brand to get closer to customers. Rather than getting seduced into thinking technology can replace that human dynamic — or enable us to avoid it.

  4. What important trends are you seeing as important for marketers and brands to understand this next year?

    Friedman: As the market grows in size, users, usage, vendors, etc., it’s becoming more difficult to achieve true engagement that causes a customer to really think and feel about your brand on a sustained basis. Some brands will stick with prior strategies and find themselves slipping away from their customers. Others will develop longer form social storytelling and other models that will deepen customer involvement.

    Customers are going cross-channel and brands will need to do so as well — partly to follow the eyeballs, but also to provide richer experiences. However, brands need to be careful not to follow a “one-post-fits-all-channels” mentality. Each channel has its own unique character, and the brand-fostered experience is best tailored to fit that unique context.

    Increasingly the primary competitive dynamic will be how brands leverage social for real-time customer insight and then action it.

  5. This is your second year joining SMW NYC. Can you share more about why this partnership is exciting for your team and what attendees can expect from LiveWorld and Pfizer?

    Friedman: Pfizer is a great client and a great partner. They are a social media leader in the Pharma industry and currently support the corporate brand and many product brands across multiple social channels and community websites. We’ve worked with them to create engaging customer experiences, while managing within the regulatory boundaries. They are also committed to moving the entire industry forward (or rather industries, meaning both pharma and social), which leads us to Social Media Week last year and this. Our goal was to provide a focused series of sessions that would be informative with practical take-a-ways for the group — not generic “good social,” but experienced based insights. Our program last year included a panel on “Legal and Marketing in Social: Friends or Enemies,” and a keynote by the CMO of the Cleveland Clinic, with network cocktail hour. Feedback was great.

    This year we’re bringing a wider set of panelists together to discuss the challenges and approaches in regulated and consumer sensitive industries overall (not just healthcare). We’ll cover managing in a regulatory environment, achieving true engagement, and how to scale.

    And don’t forget the cocktail party. That is a returning favorite.

12 Events to Register for NOW


With hundreds of events (over 200!!!), we aim to highlight the ones that catch our eye and share them with you.
Here are a dozen that grabbed our attention this week, each from industry leaders — several of which were just named Fast Company’s most innovative companies of 2013 — aiming to bring you the best content and conversation at SMW NYC:

  1. Ogilvy presents: Contextual Awareness: What Is The Future of Social Intelligence?
  2. BuzzFeed presents Genuine Appeal: Creativity and Authenticity in the Social Age
  3. Games for Change presents: Half The Sky Movement: Using Transmedia to Inspire Real Impact
  4. Pfizer & LiveWorld present: How to Improve Social Media in Regulated Industries and Consumer Sensitive Markets
  5. OfferPop presents Keeping Up With the Agile Consumer
  6. Time.Inc presents: The Secret Sauce of Native Advertising? Authenticity.
  7. Conversocial presents: The Social Engagement Hub: Re-Imagining the Contact Center as a Critical Marketing Tool
  8. Imagination presents: Connections: How the Internet of Things is Transforming Our Social World
  9. Code for America Presents: We Built This City: The State of Civic Technology, with Code For America and IDEO
  10. House Party presents: All Earned Media is Not Created Equal: Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets via ‘Experience-Driven Social Marketing’
  11. Google Presents: Google+ Hangouts: Go Way Outside the Box(es) – expert tips & tricks to further innovation
  12. SideTour presents: SideTour: The P2P Experience Economy: Four Unique Events for the SMW Community

For the FULL SCHEDULE click here. And keep in mind, if you want to skip registration and lines, and attend events that are already full, you can still BUY A PASS here.

5 Minutes With LiveWorld


Photo: LiveWorld CEO, Peter Friedman

Our NYC Opening Party Supporting Sponsor and Event Host, we sat down with LiveWorld to talk all things social media. A user content management company, LiveWorld is a trusted partner to the world’s largest brands, including the number-one companies in retail, CPG, pharmaceutical, and financial/travel services.

1. What is LiveWorld’s greatest success with social media to date?

LiveWorld has hundreds of success stories from our stellar roster of Fortune 500 clients. To name just one story is tough, but to highlight our capabilities: we brought a Fortune 10 brand from an initial social media presence to being the #1 most engaged brand on Facebook worldwide, #1 brand for fans in the US and #1 share of Twitter voice in its category. We achieved this by deploying our proprietary user content management technology and working closely with the client on social strategy, insight analysis, engagement content and moderation.

2. What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the emerging technology and/or new media space right now, as it relates to the health and pharmaceutical sector?

Healthcare is undergoing significant change in this country. Everyone is feeling it, and consumers have more questions regarding their healthcare and an increasing need for emotional and content support from other consumers and brands. Healthcare and Pharma have an unprecedented opportunity to become trusted sources of information and support for consumers, but are constantly caught battling legal and regulatory stipulations that hinder their ability to engage in social media. At LiveWorld, working these issues is our core strength. Our solution ensures regulatory and legal considerations are met through careful content monitoring, moderation, engagement, and crisis management protocols.

3. Tell us about your goals for SMW? What do you hope attendees will take away from your installation and reception?

All brands, including those in healthcare, must be actively engaged in social media across all of their strategically important markets. This worldwide and highly targeted approach to social media can seem complicated and intimidating to many brands that lack the internal resources or knowledge to implement such a program.

Our goal is to impress upon our attendees the importance of a comprehensive social media strategy, integrated implementation approach, and keeping the human element at the forefront.

LiveWorld’s brand clients go beyond just being on social media – they achieve something. The programs we develop with our clients are world class. They protect the brand, obtain actionable insights, and true engagement.

4. What is the most creative way you’ve seen social media used? (This could be a meme, campaign, installation, etc.)

We highly recommend the Walmart Elves Twitter Program and Sprint/Unilever Suave Shampoo In the Motherhood Program. Through creating a dialogue and relationship with consumers, both social media programs have had a transformative power to positively affect the consumer experience and brand loyalty.

5. This year, our global theme is “Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World.” How does LiveWorld support this idea overall?

“Open & Connected” is what we at LiveWorld have been evangelizing for over 28 years. User content moderation and true engagement is a challenging element of social media for many large brands, and we work hard to make sure that everyone’s voice is being heard. Sometimes, however, we encounter harassment, spam and other comments that do not contribute to the conversation. In fact, they detract from it. This is where LiveWorld steps in so that our clients’ fans have a safe and respectful atmosphere in which to interact.

We like to think of social media as the brand’s big, online party. You want to create an engaging memorable party that your customers will recommend and want to come back to. We always ask our clients to consider questions like: “What kind of party are you throwing?”, “Who is invited?”, “What is the topic of conversation?”, “How will your customers experience your brand, when the primary method is through conversations with other customers?”.

Social media is all about human beings connecting, dialoguing, and building relationships. Our approach from strategy, to moderation, to engagement, to actionable insight, keeps that human element at the forefront. If social media is a brand’s party, consider LiveWorld a brand’s party planner who brings the bouncers, ushers and DJ, all to create the best customer experience.

LiveWorld partners with Fortune 500 brands to develop social media strategies user content moderation, engagement, and insight that span across 70 different country-language combinations, over 4,000 social media properties and over 1 million pieces of user content/month. We leverage our backend social content management system technology for scale, quality, and flexibility.

Every piece of user content is seen by a real, human LiveWorld moderator. We create true relationships and understanding among consumers and with the brand.


Make sure you check out Liveworld during SMW NYC when they join up with Pfizer to talk How to Improve Social Media Engagement in Regulated Industries and Consumer Sensitive Markets. It’s bound to be a day full of knowledge and information.

Best in Show: LiveWorld at SMW NYC

With only a few weeks until Social Media Week New York, we are daydreaming constantly about one thing: the opening party. Our partner LiveWorld, a user content management company and trusted partner to the world’s largest brands, is one of several sponsors making it happen. Along with Nokia, BuzzFeed and Whole Foods, LiveWorld is throwing a most fabulous VIP fete at the Metropolitan Pavilion – home to our new Global HQ.

Featuring, interactive installations, a mobile photo studio, a live simulcast lounge and food and drink, the event will mark the 5th anniversary of SMW NYC. As an added bonus, you’ll also have the opportunity to strike a pose at LiveWorld’s flip book photo booth and nab a complimentary copy of Ekaterina Walter’s bestselling book “Think Like Zuck”, which illustrates how to make your mark in the world using the five success principles of Facebook.

(Please note: The Opening event is by invitation only, however, if you wish to attend there are a limited number of Insider Passes available, which grant you access to both the official Opening and Closing events, Ideas Connected at Global HQ and full access to all four Official Content Hubs.)

But LiveWorld didn’t stop there! They, along with Pfizer, are hosting an afternoon long series of events at Pfizer Headquarters, focused on social media engagement for regulated and consumer sensitive markets such as Healthcare, Financial Services and CPG. This event will appeal to communicators and marketers in Healthcare, Pharma and other regulated industries. See the agenda, below:

  • 2 PM to 3 PM: Case StudyBuilding A Global Brand Through Content Marketing, Cleveland Clinic
  • 3 PM to 3:30 PM: Coffee break
  • 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM: Panel — Legal & Marketing Social Media Allies or Enemies
  • 4:30 PM to 5:15 PM: Keynote by Peter Pitts — Social Media and Pharma: The age of Reality
  • 5:15 PM to 6:45 PM: Cocktail Reception

To see the full details of this day, and register for the event, click here.

We look forward to seeing you there!