2008

Facebook Developer Garage - San Francisco

We're heading to the Facebook Developer Garage in San Francisco. It will be a great opportunity to connect with other developers and hear about applications the use virtual currencies. We see great potential to incorporate virtual currencies into our products as well! Here's a link about this event http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=83054145275&ref=ts

We need your fbFund Vote!

The fbFund is a $10M seed fund focused on enabling innovative and engaging application on Facebook Platform. We're one of the 25 finalists and would love to get your vote at http://apps.facebook.com/fbfundvote/contests/109/entries/3369

Below is our competition video:

3 things to consider before marketing on Facebook

Tom Hespos wrote an interesting blog (http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19976.asp) on how to responsibly market apps on Facebook. He points out that gone are the days where the success of an app is determined largely by how many people you can force, trick or otherwise encourage to forward your app and that now apps must think carefully about how to genuinely offer value to users. Hespos asserts that apps must provide users with value and transparency (i.e. no more encouraging people to invite friends before they even get a clear picture of what the app offers) and must focus on over all uptake of an app, not just maximizing forwarding.

As someone who is tired of receiving invitations to apps that have no relevance to me, I of course agree. Although many apps have managed to spread rapidly and grab attention by encouraging rampant forwarding, I believe that many (most?) of these are one-hit wonders that will soon be abandoned by users. To create a valuable app with a long-life span, I believe that an app should both provide users with value and reach out to only those users who are genuinely interested in the value that the app provides. For this reason, we have developed our WildfireApp so that once a person has received one invite from a promotion running on our app, we will remove their name from the friend invite lists so that they will not receive any more invites to that promotion. The last thing we want to do is bug people who have no interest in the promotion that we're offering. Additionally, we do not reward users for inviting their friends to our app. Instead, we reward them for inviting friends who actually accept their invitation (thus encouraging users to think carefully about who they send their invites to), and we penalize those who invite large numbers of friends who do not subsequently accept the invitation.

Facebook & MySpace dominate the Americas, but not the world!

We came across an interesting graphic on O'Reilly Radar that provides a very visual representation of the popularity of different social networks across the globe. While MySpace continues to dominate the US and Facebook dominates England, Canada and South Africa, the rest of the world tends to hang out on social networks that are less well known in the US: Live Journal dominates Russia, Orkut is the leader in Brazil, and Hi5 is popular in much of Southeast Asia. This indicates that companies wishing to market to social network users should be careful to identify which social networks are popular with the particular geography and demographic that they are trying to reach.

Social Marketing is no longer a 'Nice to Have', it's a Critical Part ofMarketing

Muhammad Saleem wrote a great post on GigaOM this week about the business implications of social media (see this Link). He asserts that social media is not the passing fad that many businesses once felt it was and that, on the contrary, it is the future of marketing. Yet, few businesses are managing to take advantage of social media.

This is certainly our experience in the social networking space. While many businesses have created pages on MySpace and Facebook, it's still a tiny fraction of total online businesses (there are supposedly around 300,000+ business pages on Facebook). As we reach out to businesses to encourage them to engage with social networks, we are encountering a wealth of misconceptions. Foremost among these is the belief that social networks are for college kids only. The reality, in fact, is that over 50% of MySpace users are over 35 and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is those 25 years and older.

Even those companies who are engaged with social networks don't seem to be fully aware of their marketing power. We've noticed a host of big brand names using social ads to promote sweepstakes and contests on Facebook yet when a user clicks on the ad they are taken outside of Facebook to enter the promotion. By taking users outside of Facebook, these companies lose the opportunity to promote their sweepstakes via such viral features as friend invites and newsfeeds (if only they'd decided to use our app ;) )

Check out the post by Saleem on GigaOM for some interesting social media usage stats (especially use of blogs) and for some examples of companies who are successfully engaging their customers via social marketing. Saleem also refers to a great Business Week article that lays the case (in a very simple and engaging way) for why businesses should care about social media.

Facebook launches a contest using our App (prize money is €20,000 –check it out!)

Continuing the good news… Facebook has decided to use our app to run a contest to promote the launch of its developer platform in Germany. As far as we’re concerned, having Facebook choose to use our technology is pretty much the best endorsements we could get! The contest is for German app developers and the prize money is €20,000, so if you’re a developer based in Europe you might want to check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/winaprize/contests/174/entry/new

Wildfire team sunburned, exhausted and content…

We’ve always aspired to be a great company that works hard and plays hard (like the guys at Patagonia that hit the surf during their lunch hour or the Burton team that takes the day off on powder days). This week we’ve come one step closer to achieving this by basing ourselves in Whistler for the week. Working in the morning and evenings and snowboarding and mountain biking in the afternoons….it doesn’t get much better than this. For anyone looking to get in a few more turns before the season ends, Blackcomb Mountain still has a pretty good base. And at this time of the year you get to snowboard with bears (not kidding….we came across one today on the ski slopes) so the adrenaline rush is even better than usual!

Zuckerberg & Sandberg on Facebook's Vision, Opportunities & Privacy

Below is a great interview with Mark Zuckerberg (Founder & CEO, Facebook) and Sheryl Sandberg (COO, Facebook) at the recent D6 Conference in San Diego. Enjoy!

Interview (Part 1 | 5:52 mins)

[brightcove vid=1576310560&exp=910498365&w=486&h=412]

Interview (Part 2 | 6:59 mins)

[brightcove vid=1578613944&exp=910498365&w=486&h=412]

WildfireApp featured at Facebook Developer Garage in Tokyo

Good news….last week we were invited by Facebook to present our app at their developer garage in Tokyo! One of our developers, Masaki, presented at the event (see photos below) and according to him our app was one of the best received….but I guess he could be a little biased ;)

Photo: Masaki presenting our app. Awesome job!

Our app has launched!

The alpha/invitational version of our app has launched! After all-nighters pulled around the globe (many thanks Masaki in Japan, Gugod in Taiwan, Erkki in Estonia and Alain in Boston!) our Wildfire application is finally live and ready for users. So please help us out by applying for an invite at www.WildfireApp.com and telling us what you think. All feedback is very much appreciated!

So what, you're probably asking, is the Wildfire App? It's a handy tool for businesses to create online promotions (e.g. sweepstakes and contests) that are integrated with the viral features (e.g. friend invites, newsfeeds, minifeeds) of social networks. So for any one person that enters a promotion via our app, scores of their social networks friends will hear about it too and the promotion will spread virally. We've especially designed our product so that it's simple and cost-effective enough for even the smallest business to use; you can literally have a sweepstakes or contest up and running in minutes. We enable you to create attractive banners (or you can upload your own) and you can post these on your website, your company's social network page(s) or both.

For those of you who are not regular participants in online sweepstakes and contests, you'll probably be surprised how popular these things are. A whopping 80% of all online users have entered online sweepstakes and 50% enter them at least monthly! According to Jupiter Research*, offering sweepstakes online is one of the most effective ways to attract large audiences to a viral campaign. For example, company pages on Facebook and MySpace that offer contests on average acquire twice as many friends as pages without contests**.

So check out our app at www.WildfireApp.com. We'd love to get your feedback!

Welcome to our blog!

Hey everyone! Welcome to the very first post of our newly created blog. In addition to keeping you up-to-date with new product developments and happenings at our company, we hope that this blog will serve as a useful resource for those of you who are trying to figure out how on earth your company can effectively reach the hundreds of millions of social network users (50% of whom* log into their accounts at least once per day!). The social network crowd is a fairly illusive one as they tend to not like being marketed to and they are (at least in my experience) pretty good at ignoring banner ads. We think we've developed a handy tool for reaching them (in a way that benefits both users and companies) so we look forward to sharing this with you along with our two cents on how best to market on social networks. We'll also, no doubt, keep you posted on the joys and troughs of launching a new business (especially when your business partner is your fiance!). So far it's been mostly joys (despite many sleepless nights and long working weekends) but, as with any startup, I'm sure there'll also be many tough spots. Anyway, thanks for reading and please do drop us a post if you have any comments or questions.

* according to Jupiter Research