Wildfire is Joining Google!

Four years ago, we set out on a journey to make social media marketing easier and more effective. We thought our idea had potential, but little did we know what an incredible ride it would be. Not only have we helped to define and build an entirely new industry, but we’ve created a company that’s larger (from 5 to almost 400 employees in two and a half years!) and more successful (we’re proud to serve 16,000 customers including 30 of the top 50 brands) than we ever imagined.

Today we are about to start a new chapter of our story and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news: Wildfire is joining Google! We truly could not think of a more perfect home for Wildfire. It makes us so happy to know that joining with Google will make it easier for us to realize our vision of changing the way the world markets and enable us to live up to our commitment to make Wildfire an incredible place for our team and our customers.

We believe that over time the combination of Wildfire and Google can lead to a better platform for managing all digital media marketing. For now, we remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers. To this end, Wildfire will operate as usual, and there will be no changes to our service and support for our customers.

So many people have helped us get to this exciting point in Wildfire’s evolution; more people than we could ever list or recognize. But we would like to call out a few of you. First and foremost our wonderful customers — thank you for choosing Wildfire as your partner in social media marketing. Thanks to our awesome team — you are the most impressive group of people we have ever had the privilege of working with and it goes without saying that we wouldn’t be where we are today without each and every one of you. Thanks to Summit Partners and our other investors for all your support; your guidance has helped us to not only be one of the most successful companies in our space but also the most capital efficient.

Finally, a huge thanks to our friends and partners at Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ and most especially Facebook. Were it not for the social media revolution that you have all helped to create, Wildfire would not even exist. We are committed to continue building tools that help enhance the way brands and consumers experience each of your respective social networks.

Alain and Victoria

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Wildfire in the Press: VentureBeat Comes to the Office

“Social media has a positive impact on marketing. It democratizes it. It’s not just about who’s got the biggest budget, but who really understands their consumer.” — Victoria Ransom, Wildfire CEO, to VentureBeat journalist Jolie O'Dell, who recently visited Wildfire's headquarters for a tour in time for the release of Wildfire 2.0.

O'Dell's experience visiting Wildfire is an amusing and accurate portrayal of some of the best parts of our company culture— she noted our vibrant open-space office, the energetic team, and our interesting...style (wolf-shaped hats? Definitely!).

The remainder of this post is a reprint of Jolie O'Dell's original article, published here.

I’m talking to Victoria Ransom (pictured above) about one of my least favorite things in the world, social media marketing. But there’s no one better equipped to talk about this ever-so-timely topic, and Ransom breaks it down handily on the eve of her company’s big product launch for its social marketing suite.

Ransom runs Wildfire, a rather large social media marketing company that develops software for brands to connect their marketing efforts across most of the big social sites currently in existence. Today, the company is unveiling Wildfire Suite 2.0, a social media marketing maven’s über-tool that allows marketers to get much more specific, much more personal, with their followers and fans all over the social Internet.

The suite will let brands tweak their online marketing to appeal to very specific groups of consumers based on those consumers’ activities and interests. For example, for a sporting goods store, Wildfire’s software can tell the difference between snowboarders and skiers, and it can help the store tailor messages and other promotions (as well as analytics, of course) for each group separately.

It fits right in with the so-hot-right-now concept of interest graphing, but the new tools are also very much in line with the M.O. that is embedded in Wildfire’s DNA: Don’t broadcast; interact. Don’t shout; listen. Don’t apologize after the fact; ask for permission now.

Most of all, Ransom emphasizes that brands aren’t in control of the message, and if they want to get their customers’ attention, the only way to do so these days is by giving them a truly valuable online experience. It’s a belief that pervades Wildfire’s own corporate culture of empathy and charm (yes, the word “charm” actually pops up in internal company materials).

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Inside Wildfire

This emphasis on honoring the consumer is quite divorced from old-school, spray-and-pray marketing tactics of broadcast, print, email, and direct marketing. And it has a lot to do with the Wildfire team’s makeup: They’re mostly young or young-ish social media users, themselves, and they deeply understand what works online and what doesn’t, if only because they were born and raised with it.

Wildfire’s office is located on a glittering campus in Silicon Valley, where the glass-plated buildings rise up in hues of blue and green against a cloudless summer sky. It’s new and spacious and strangely reminiscent of Oracle’s mega-campus not too far away; as it turns out, the building is the most corporate thing about the company.

Once inside the building, you could be in any college common area. A neon sign proclaims that the shop is open. Gangs of youngsters in flip-flops saunter around the open spaces filled with pirate flags and huge vinyl sunshades in the shape of leaves. Memes and inside jokes pepper the visual paraphernalia; for reasons I can’t fathom, one scruffy salesman is making his over-the-phone pitch while wearing a cartoonish hat in the shape of a wolf’s head. There’s a small bar, staffed only by a cardboard cutout of Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World, and within minutes of of stepping into the world of Wildfire, I’m invited to participate in an upcoming game of beer pong.

Ransom, the co-founder and CEO, takes a deep breath and says, “It’s a pretty young team.”

Ransom is fairly young, herself. Her hair is sun-streaked, and her face has a healthy glow one doesn’t usually associate with tech startup CEOs. When she speaks, she is direct and confident, as befits a Harvard MBA.

Right now, she’s particularly confident about the state of social media marketing, despite Facebook’s shaky IPO and GM’s public pull-out of ads on the social network.

“The only indication has been GM,” she said, stating that with most other Facebook advertisers, “we haven’t seen that at all. … I really divorce the IPO from social media marketing. It has little or nothing to do with marketers, and I haven’t seen any other major advertisers make the same announcements. We’ve actually seen the opposite.”

And all that adds up to more social marketing all the time, everywhere we go online. Ransom and her cohorts are convinced they can make such marketing both less annoying for consumers and more profitable for brands by targeting carefully and messaging judiciously.

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Early days, even now

Facebook in its relatively early days was the primordial soup for Ransom’s company’s genesis. In an unstructured, Wild-West environment, Ransom and her co-founder came up with a way for brands to play and profit using the social network. They built simple Facebook apps for sweepstakes and contests, then used those apps as a template for their clients to create campaigns.

During those early days, Ransom tells me, she recognized that Facebook interactions were more important than Facebook ads on their own.

As social networks were founded and grew up, Wildfire started building tools for the newer sites, as well. Of course, Twitter is huge for Wildfire, since, as Ransom says, “It’s a great mechanism for having conversations.

“More than Facebook, it’s been a great channel for getting messages out and a customer support channel,” she says. “That may change over time, depending on the directions Twitter heads in. Brands may be able to provide retrospective content.”

Ransom notes that Google+ has similar opportunities for brands, but it doesn’t yet have the same richness of content when compared to Facebook. It also doesn’t yet bring a critical mass of highly engaged, mainstream users or a full suite of APIs for the marketing and analytics crowd.

“Pinterest is a really interesting one,” she continued. “It’s a delicate balance that brands and the social networks are playing.” Ransom notes that while on most networks, brands risk overwhelming users with promotional content, “The funny thing about Pinterest is, there’s not that tension. People come there to look at products, and they don’t care if it came from Joe Schmo or the Gap,” she said.

“So it’s easier for Pinterest to have a good realtionship with brands and to really commercialize it without offending consumers.”

But again, Ransom said, the site isn’t giving out all the APIs that companies like hers would want. “We have some Pinterest tools,” she says, “a way to display a Pinterest gallery on Facebook.” But what Wildfire and other marketers really want are APIs to gather more analytics, develop richer campaigns, and create better-branded pages. “We anticipate that the APIs for that will come,” she says. “But have you been to their office? It’s tiny, there’s like 30 people there. It’s incredible what they’re doing with a really small team.”

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With age comes standards

Aside from wishing for more APIs, Ransom dreams of a world in which social marketing is held to some real standards — real metrics around performance and real expectations from networks, brands, and consumer groups.

“In the offline world, [measurement] is still hard,” she says. “It’s hard to prove it … because it’s kind of a lot like TV. How can you prove that TV sells product? Over time, studies and standards have showed what it means to get a view on TV. Social media is still so young, we haven’t got those standards yet.”

The CEO tells me the social web as an industry that lives and dies by brands’ marketing budgets, is slowly moving toward an industry standard for measurement.”What is a relationship worth in social media?” she asks. “There are research agencies that can help us agree on the right metrics there, and frankly, the social media networks should be, too.”  —Jolie O'Dell.

This article was originally published on VentureBeat.

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Wildfire Social Marketing Suite 2.0 Launches

Since launching Wildfire Social Marketing Suite more than a year ago, we’ve continuously extended and enhanced the Suite to deliver increasing value for clients at an incredibly rapid rate. We’re proud of the strong uptake in the market – and are hugely grateful to our clients for all the great feedback and encouragement along the way.

Today, we’re very excited to announce Wildfire Social Marketing Suite 2.0, which introduces some exciting new capabilities for our clients. Our new website provides more in-depth information, but here are a few highlights:

• Social Ad Optimization. Wildfire 2.0 introduces our new social ads offering, featuring tight integration with Adaptly, the leading provider of ad optimization technology. This allows you to plan, purchase, manage, and optimize your social ads across multiple networks – so that you minimize your ad cost while maximizing your ad impact and engagement.


• Extended Multi-network Support. Wildfire Suite 2.0 provides the industry’s broadest support for social marketing across networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, and Pinterest.


• Enterprise Management and Control.  We are introducing powerful new management and control capabilities, including role-based permissions, workflow, and audit trail.

There’s a lot more to come. Imagine a future where consumers can allow the brands they love to make them special offers, where brands can give their best consumers VIP treatment and let them deliver real 1-to-1 feedback. We're really excited to work with our partners at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to make this vision a reality – this is an exciting long-term journey, and we’re here to help our clients every step of the way.

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Is it the end of the Facebook "fan" as we know it?

Our CEO Victoria Ransom says it is, in this contributed post for AdAge.com, originally published here. The article, reprinted below, takes the position that we are still lacking the technology necessary for brands to build real personal relationships in social media.

When the concept of a social media "fan" emerged a few years ago, it held out the promise of enabling meaningful, one-to-one conversations between brands and consumers at unprecedented scale. But that promise has yet to be delivered. Think about it: do you know whether your fans are moms, or sports enthusiasts or country-music aficionados? Do you know which ones are "superfans" and consistently engage with your programs, and systematically use that information to increase word-of-mouth?

Chances are you don't, because there hasn't been a scalable way to capture and use information about the "fans" you're engaging with on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels. And because marketers lack a deep understanding of their fans, they've been using social networks as another mass communication channel, broadcasting to "faceless," unknown masses.

Social-media marketing needs to move in a new direction that finally delivers on the promise of personalized interactions between brands and consumers. This will require new technologies that enable marketers to develop rich data profiles of the consumers they're interacting with on social networks.

The model for this transformation will be the social data "system of record." Just as an organization's accounting system is its system of record for financial data and transactions, and its HR system is the system of record for personnel and employment data, social-data systems of record will become the central repository of all social data that is leveraged across other parts of the organization.

With a system of record for social data, brands would be continuously aggregating, organizing and updating consumer data from across multiple sources -- everything from ad clicks and comments to public profile data on Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks. Based on these detailed profiles, marketers could then target content to consumers' specific interests, resulting in increased conversion rates and deeper relationships.

If you are a sporting goods manufacturer, for example, you'd be able to know which of your fans are snowboarders vs. skiers, which are active advocates of your brand vs. passive consumers, etc. -- so you can tailor and target your messages to those different consumers based on what you know about them.

These systems should share social-profile data with other business systems, so that organizations can leverage social data to inform and power business processes through every stage of the customer lifecycle, from pre-sale awareness and consideration, to in-store promotions, to post-sale support and loyalty management. For example, in a customer-support situation, knowledge that the customer is a "highly engaged" consumer and a major influencer in social media could trigger a higher level of support for that customer -- in real time, at the point of interaction -- to ensure a superior support experience and continued brand advocacy by that influential consumer.

The ability to have personalized interactions with consumers would also provide brands with a powerful lever to drive word of mouth at scale. If you know who your consumers are and if you understand their interests and social behavior, you can create content that is highly relevant and engaging, and therefore more likely to be shared with your consumers' personal networks.

In the first phase of social media marketing, brands understandably focused on creating a presence in social channels and building their base of fans and followers. The strategy was largely about growth -- it was a pure numbers game based on racking up the biggest fan count. Today it is no longer sufficient just to build a base of fans and followers. Brands need to focus on engagement, conversion and nurturing relationships with their consumers, by understanding who these people are.

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