Today, we announced the acquisition of CoveritLive, the leading real-time engagement platform. We’re thrilled to welcome the Toronto-based team to Demand Media. We’ve had a great partnership over the last year and a half. And we’ve been impressed by their product, innovation and results, including the more than one billion event minutes powered by CoveritLive per month.

If you haven’t participated in a CoveritLive event already, you’ll likely soon experience it for live Q&A, real-time reporting, announcements and more. Each month, media and brand leaders like General Motors, Le Monde, Sky, ESPN and the Weather Channel use CoveritLive to touch more than 60MM readers.

I personally love how CoveritLive has delivered quality, curated conversations around expansive categories of high consumer interest. As I’ve gotten to know the CoveritLive crew and many of the customers we share with our Pluck product, I’ve been impressed by how much value users derive from the simple, easy to use, intuitive system. Anything that folks gather around, including sporting events, news, entertainment, product launches and more, benefits from the thoughtful, real-time dialogue that CoveritLive powers. In many cases, CoveritLive is the perfect social companion app to broadcast.

For example, yesterday during the iPad 2 announcement, leading Apple watchers from CNET to MacWorld enabled more than 2.4MM readers to glean up to the minute insights, ask questions, and learn more. Many of these readers stayed with CoveritLive events throughout the entire hour. As a comparison, the 2.4MM CoveritLive reader base was about the same size as the television audience that watched the premium NBA match-up between the Knicks and the Heat on Sunday.

Leading brands like Ford leverage CoveritLive to increase customer intimacy and engagement. Thus far in 2011, Ford has run eight CoveritLive events (scaling up from the 25 they ran throughout 2010). 2011 events have included a conversation with KC Dallia, the Focus brand manager, and a chat with executive chairman Bill Ford on the electric future. All CoveritLive events from Ford are available through the Ford Story site.

One element of CoveritLive that journalists, publishers, marketers, bloggers and other customers particularly like is the self-service platform. With no IT requirements, non-technical users can be up and running with CoveritLive events in minutes. And with a free introductory service anyone – from the smallest blog to the largest media property – can experience the power of real-time social media.

There’s a lot more coming from CoveritLive, including new integrated gaming and trivia features we’ll launch soon. For more information, or to take CoveritLive for a spin, please visit www.coveritlive.com 

Steve Semelsberger is the SVP and GM of the Social Solutions group at Demand Media. He occasionally tweets industry and company news via @semels