LiveWorld was founded in 1996 in San Jose, Calif. by a group of Apple veterans who’d worked on Apple’s online services, such as AppleLink and eWorld, and also with starting up AOL and Salon.com. Co-founders Peter Friedman and Jenna Woodul have since grown the company to serve clients all over the world and open offices in New York and London.

We spoke with co-founder and CEO Peter Friedman as part of our ongoing series of Page management profiles, which most recently included Conversation and Involver.

Providing strategy/community management, moderation and platforms and software solutions for its clients, which include: Campbell’s Soup, eBay, MINI Cooper, HBO, HSBC, P&G, Sony Ericsson, Sprint and Unilever, among others. Part of LiveWorld’s service to such clients includes moderating more than 2 million posts every month and providing more than 1.5 million hours’ worth of moderation services.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Peter Friedman: LiveWorld’s clients are primarily in the Fortune 1000, and we help them create and manage engaged communities on both their own central site and on Facebook. We have clients in a number of industries, with a very strong presence in consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, travel and financial services. We work directly with the brand, or through their agencies including firms like Beam, Dare, Digitas, G2, imc/2, MEC, Mindshare and Wunderman. We offer strategy and day-to-day community management to help brands define and preserve their online culture, community moderation to keep their communities engaged and clean, and technology platforms to tie it all together on the back end.

We offer moderation of the Facebook Wall using our power moderation tools. We have three unique Facebook Conversation Applications that enable brands to more deeply engage customers in two-way conversations. Those applications are: Facebook Forums (with full discussion board features and functionality), Facebook Idea Power (crowd-sourcing idea collaboration) and Facebook Ask & Answer (optimized question and answer customer support).

Our LiveConnect feature for each of these applications is brand new. LiveConnect lets people enter into the same online conversation, whether they come in through the brand’s own website or through the brand’s Facebook Page. This means brands have a consistent presence across both their Facebook and website, more customer relationships and less time and resource needed to manage their presence across Facebook and their central site.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

PF: Many brands use their Facebook page to organize, motivate and inspire their members to contribute to global and local causes.

One such LiveWorld client is a global community for women that encourages women to be ‘inspiration in action.” In October 2009, LiveWorld developed a strategic and social engagement plan and assumed daily operations to extend the women’s community to Facebook. We recommended Facebook Connect and educating their community users in Facebook best practices and outlined the benefits of implementing a cross-platform engagement strategy. By following this plan the client’s Facebook presence grew from less than 200 fans to more than 2,100 — a growth rate of 900% over 9 months.

More importantly, by incorporating Facebook into their other marketing initiatives, this women’s community has seen site registrations increase from 30,000 members in October 2009 to nearly 140,000 members today. By bringing their community to Facebook, they have increased their global visibility and have attracted new community members at an accelerated rate unforeseen prior to adopting a Facebook strategy developed with LiveWorld.

Another client, a multi-national hamburger chain chose LiveWorld to help develop its Facebook strategy and provide moderation services. Adopting LiveWorld’s suggested strategy of engaging and embracing dozens of the client’s ‘unofficial’ fan sites on Facebook, this hamburger chain has grown their Facebook Page rapidly from zero to 260,000-plus fans in just over a month in a manner that is positively received by fans of the unofficial sites.

With LiveWorld moderators actively monitoring the brand’s official page, a Facebook-wide spamming attack (the “INCI hackers”) was detected and escalated rapidly to Facebook. The client’s use of LiveWorld moderators provided not only an early detection system that helped minimize the impact and preserve the user experience on client page, but also yielded benefits for the entire 500 million users on the Facebook platform.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

PF: LiveWorld is a publicly traded social network marketing company, reporting profitability and positive cash flow from operations. Revenues have been in the $8-$10 million a year range. Our customers include global brands increasingly turning to Facebook for marketing purposes. LiveWorld moderates over 2 million posts per month and has delivered over 1.5 million moderation hours for global brands, with our moderators keeping conversations friendly and on topic in 70 country-language combinations.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

PF: For now, we use relatively simple metrics that are based on the campaign objectives. If it’s a moderation project, how many pieces of content did we review? How many required action, such as a deletion or a response? If it is an engagement campaign, how many fans or Likes do we get on the Page, or on the content? Do page views on the central branded community site increase by adding Facebook Connect? Does registration increase on the branded site because of wider visibility on Facebook?

We provide weekly (or in some cases, daily) reports on tone and culture of what is actually being said on a clients’ Facebook Page. We find that listening with actual humans reviewing a client’s Page provides actionable business intelligence more effectively than an automated software service that depends on algorithms to determine trends and sentiment analysis.

As a private label provider, the client defines the metrics for success — what is the value of a customer complaint that was answered with a speedy response instead of languishing for days? What is the ROI of protecting your brand reputation from spam attacks on a web site? What is the value of developing and implementing a social engagement crisis response plan so well that the brand is not attacked?

Our clients define the metrics that determines success, simply because they know their business and revenue models better than we do. We show them how to engage and behave in the Facebook environment in order to successfully meet their business goals.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

PF: One of the biggest challenges that we have faced is maintaining our ability to be flexible enough to incorporate changes introduced when Facebook updates their platform. As we build new features into our products we remain aware that we may have to revisit aspects of our products that had previously worked as designed. Planning is important, but being flexible enough to adjust the plan as your environment changes is essential.

To accommodate for the unpredictable delivery of Facebook platform updates, we attempt to stay as ahead of the curve as much as possible. As new Facebook platform changes are confirmed, we incorporate it into our product with a control to toggle the new functionality on and off. Using the application tab width reduction to 520 pixels as an example, we modified our products to display properly in either width. Once Facebook made the switch permanent, it was easy for us to flip the switch as well.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

PF: The recent data storage policy change has definitely helped us reduce the complexity that was required to keep the information that users share with our applications accurate. The introduction of Facebook Insights reporting for fan Pages and domains also helps us provide a richer view into the success of our clients’ social media efforts.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

PF: Our development planning is often times at the mercy of new Facebook platform announcements and changes. We make the best of it by being as agile as possible so we can react as quickly as necessary to keep our clients unaffected by the platform changes.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

PF: Change the terms of service (TOS) so that a brand can have their employees have additional Facebook Pages (in addition to their personal page). This will enable those employees to engage users on the brand Page without using their own personal pages.

Why is this important? Because true brand engagement and relationship building in social networks requires representatives of the brand to personally engage. They need to have distinct personalities, with names, not be “brand admin 1.” The more brand people doing this the better. But Facebook’s current TOS prevents this because people are limited to only one Page on Facebook. Since most people will have used that Page for their personal life, it’s not appropriate to ask them to use it for work and the content of their personal page may not be appropriate for the brand. By allowing a brand’s employees to have an additional Page that they use for work, they can then engage the brand’s customers on Facebook, in a personal and social way, without interfering with their personal lives.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

PF: While Facebook creates a phenomenally new and massive social media channel, the core principles of social network marketing and relationship marketing – which are LiveWorld’s expertise – apply. Our extensive experience in community management services, moderation services and applications for brands’ central sites is now being extended to Facebook and other social venues, so that brands can expand their presence across the social media landscape.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

PF: In community management, we’re creating a specific set of management practices for social crisis management. We’ve all seen brands struggle with this. In the moderation area, we’re creating more moderation-based insight services providing tracking and reporting (quantitative and qualitative) information on what consumers are saying and thinking about the brand’s Facebook Page and the brand’s products. And in the Facebook conversation area, we’re working on more aggregation and integration of the consumer and back end management experience between Facebook and a brand’s web site.

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