2013

How Enterprise Brands Staff and Budget for Social

How are top brands measuring, managing and budgeting for success in social? And what strategies will the top social brands follow in 2014?

Wildfire by Google, in exclusive partnership with Ad Age, recently conducted the largest survey of its kind to date, asking over 500 enterprise marketing managers and executives about their approach to social marketing. We learned what the best and most successful brands are doing to engage audiences, as well as what those that struggle with social are doing. In our three-part State of Social infographic series, we’ll share with you the key learnings and top strategies you can apply in 2014.

In this first infographic, we look at who is driving social strategy and who is paying for it. As social becomes more integrated into the overall digital and brand strategy, the key players are starting to change. Want to see where the influence is shifting? Just follow the money.

45% of companies with revenue over $1 billion have 50+ social employees.
Marketing, PR, and Customer Experience are the top teams with a stake in social, yet social impacts up to 10 teams across the enterprise.
68% of companies expect to increase social spend in the next budgetary cycle, indicating that social’s role in the marketing mix is recognized and prioritized.

Which departments touch social at your company? And where are social budgets coming from? Please share your perspective with us in the comments.

12 Months of Social: It's a Wrap

Fellow marketers,

What a year! 2013 has come and gone in a flash. For Wildfire's marketing team it was a year of facing our challenges head on, embracing the need to be "always on" in social, and integrating social into our broader marketing strategy. We’re sure you can relate.

We know that just like us, you’re up at night worrying about the nonstop changes in the world of social. You’re constantly scrambling to dish up a steady stream of compelling content. And you’re always working hard to get and keep the attention of today’s “new normal” consumers who are socially savvy and increasingly immune to traditional marketing. But those are the kind of challenges we marketers live for, right?

So, to inspire us all for the year to come, we kicked off 2013 with our 12 Months of Social campaign, which debuted a fun, new social campaign every month. We highlighted creative ideas that were easy to duplicate, and showed how the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite could be a strategic technology partner to help you keep your social fresh and flowing.

Each monthly campaign showcased one of our easy-to-use social landing pages from our template gallery. But that was just for starters. We also used all the other Wildfire tools to follow the social marketing best practices we’re always talking about. For instance, we made sure we always had a fully integrated marketing program that supported our broader marketing objectives. We used our messaging and ads tools to schedule posts across our social channels. We promoted the campaigns through display media, emails and website promotions. And of course, we used our analytics tools to measure our results and identify shortcomings so we could repeat our most promising successes.

Now we’ve got 12 months of unique campaigns under our belts, big smiles on our faces, and a long list of priceless lessons learned along the way. Since social is all about sharing, we thought we’d pass along our top five lessons:

1. Integrate for success. Social must be part of your digital marketing strategy. Sure, some of your marketing goals can be met by traditional efforts. But by adding social into the mix you’ll get a better return on your investment. You’ll gain more insights about your fans, followers, customers and advocates. And trust me, that little marketing fire inside you will burn brighter than it has in a while.

2. Integrate for success. Didn’t I just say that? Yup, but this time I’m talking about integrating your team. Make sure you’re organized so that your social experts play a bigger role. Does that mean another meeting? Yes, but it’ll be worth it. Hold a regular meeting that includes every member of the team from the community manager, to webmaster, to the art director and project manager. Then answer these three pointed questions: (1) Where do we stand with social campaign X? (2) How are we measuring our results? (3) Are we meeting our objectives?

3. Have fun, but be relevant. Of course your fans and followers love to have fun, but you’ll have the greatest impact if you’re also relevant. If someone makes the effort to engage with you, make sure it’s worth their time. What’s your payoff? It doesn’t always have to be about a sale … making a consumer feel good about your brand is an investment that pays dividends for a long time.

4. Embrace technology. Great social never stops! But how do you keep it going strong in a large organization with many brand channels, a wide variety of campaigns, and a myriad of objectives? The answer is technology. The right technology helps you create great content once, then launch it everywhere. It lets you segment promotions, target content, and schedule posts. It gives you control over user permissions so you can safely tap into more resources. And it helps you gauge responses and test results to ensure your success.

5. Fall in love with your fans and followers. This is a natural outcome, by the way. We learned that we have amazing fans and followers, and we bet you do too.

The Wildfire marketing team would like to thank each and every one of you for joining us for our 12 Months of Social adventure. We hope we showed you that social marketing can be easy, fun, impactful and well worth the effort. Social truly is the gift that keeps on giving, so if you need our help to get started, get back on track, or take it to the next level, just let us know. We’d love to hear from you!

From our team to yours,
Alana Zamora

Social Marketing Cheerleader, Wildfire

How to Measure Social ROI

Social media is evolving at an incredible pace, and - let’s face it - many marketers are still finding it difficult to measure what matters. What should we be paying attention to after we post, promote, tweet and pin? How should we do it?

As our Google colleague and digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik says, you’ve got to be able to answer the big “so what” of social:

“Did you grab attention? Did you cause people to take an action? Did your participation deliver economic value?...Social media participation, done right, adds value to the company's bottom-line. Some of its benefit can’t be computed. That is okay. But some of it can be and it is your duty to quantify that.”

Earlier this summer we announced that Wildfire products would be integrated with DoubleClick Digital Marketing. Today we’re happy to share that two Wildfire integrations are available with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. These integrations are part of our vision for helping you better measure how social works alongside all your other digital channels, and how social can drive real business results.

1. Measure your ROI from social with Google Analytics
If you use Google Analytics (GA) to measure activity on your websites, our new GA integration will allow you to zero in on the bottom of the marketing funnel – i.e. what happens when someone hits your website after clicking on a social link.

For the first time, you can understand which social posts and pages are driving website conversions without huge amounts of manual time and labor.

When you direct someone to your website from a social post on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, or from a social landing page, Wildfire will automatically add tracking links and allow you to view all conversion metrics in Google Analytics.

For example, in a GA Campaigns Report, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of metrics - time on site, revenue, clicks, etc. - for each social page and post. This level of integration is unique to Wildfire.

2. See how your customers interact with social on the path to conversion with Google Tag Manager
Social used to be a black box. If your customer saw one of your social landing pages at some point, it likely wouldn’t be credited as part of the customer’s path to purchase. Until now! Wildfire’s new integration with Google Tag Manager (GTM) gives you a full picture of how social fits into your customer’s journey without the expense and hassle of manual tracking and tagging.

Google Tag Manager is a free product that allows you (and your agency and website team) to easily tag content across any of your domains and websites. We’ve integrated with GTM so that in one step, you can automatically add GTM code to all your Wildfire campaign landing pages--sign up, sweeps and coupon forms. You can also tag ads related to those specific campaigns, allowing you a full view of how customers move from ads to social landing pages to your website.

This works for both Google and non-Google tags and will give you tremendous insights in one place:

First, it can help you spend your ad dollars more wisely: If you send users from a digital or social ad to a Wildfire-built landing page, you can easily track which ads were most effective in driving the most social conversions, such as coupon downloads, sign-ups and sweepstakes entries.
Second, you can view the full customer journey: For example, you can see if customers who started in social vs. display generated more revenue, or if social ads directing customers to a landing page were more effective in driving conversions than mobile ads sending customers straight to your website. The possibilities are almost endless.
Third, you can compare the effectiveness of organic vs. paid content: See if users who landed on your social page organically (from a brand post or user share) lead to more revenue or social conversions than those who came from paid ads.

Much of the value your brand gets from social media comes from having a place where you can have a two-way, engaging conversation with customers. Yet showing how social delivers real business value will get you permission, and the budget, to do more of that brand and relationship building.

Digital marketers are only just beginning to realize the true potential of social, and with these new integrations Wildfire by Google is working to help you take social from siloed to integrated…from nebulous to concrete. We invite you to join us in our quest to better measure social’s impact on customer interactions, web visits, ad effectiveness and ultimately revenue.

Learn more about measuring social with Wildfire’s Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager integrations here.

Wildfire goes social all summer long

Summer offers some awesome opportunities to connect and have fun with your social community. But with vacations, holidays and the swimming pool calling your name, it can be tough to find the time. Never fear. We put together a Summer Social Calendar that makes it quick and easy for you to stay on track.

Every day in July, we’ll be serving up a social best practice, strategy video, trivia nugget, insightful stat, social platform tip, or special surprise to keep you in the summertime spirit and inspired with new ideas. We even have a schedule of recurring themes so you can get excited:

Messaging Monday, featuring weekly advice and strategies for crafting compelling messages so your fans and followers are moved to engage and take action
Template Tuesday, featuring a Wildfire template and ideas for how to creatively incorporate it into your social media plan
Watch Wednesday, featuring a never-before-seen video interview with one of our social experts discuss a topic all marketers are wondering about
Throwback Thursday, featuring a look at a “historical” fact about social media— though our industry is young, we have some rich history to save for the trivia books!
Fun Fact Friday, featuring, you guessed it, a fun fact you can amuse your colleagues with
STATurday, featuring a weekly, can’t-miss, social media marketing statistic or research insight
Sunday Social, featuring notable thought leadership on each of the major social network platforms and how to harness the opportunities for your brand on each

After you visit our July calendar, be sure to check out our 12 Months of Social campaign to see how flexible and reusable our templates can be. We built both campaigns using our Daily Reveal Calendar template, but the two experiences are totally unique.

What do you think? Excited about learning something new everyday? Tell us in the comments!

Your top social media questions, answered

Great social media marketing never stops, and neither do all the learning and best practice tips you can pick up about it. In May, we embraced education with a little celebration...of Cinco de Mayo, with a Wildfire twist. All month long, we welcomed our community of fans and followers to submit all their burning questions about social media, marketing, best practices and the like— and in exchange, we'd pick a question a week and answer it in a video, straight from our social marketing expert, Wildfire's Chief Evangelist Maya Grinberg! That was five videos over five Fridays— Cinco de Maya! so

Now that our month-long celebration of social media is concluded (and make sure you check out our June promotion) we're putting all the videos in one place for you, for the easiest access to five weeks worth of learnings.

Week 1: Do you have any examples of brands that have found success in using social to drive ROI?
We sure do!

Week 2: Do you have any special recommendations on how to build my fanbase and increase social media engagement?
Absolutely.

Week 3: What are the best ways to get consumers to share photos and videos that feature a brand?
There are many ways, we'll share three in the video.

Week 4: How do I get the most engagement from my social campaigns?
It really depends what you mean by engagement, so let's talk about that.

Week 5: What's the difference between social ads and regular ads?

Social ads are one form of digital marketing, but they have many unique differentiating features that we detail in in this video. Watch below to learn about optimizing social ads, segmenting your social audience, and how social ads software works.

Thanks again to everyone who participated and asked us all their burning social media questions! What did you think of our video series? Tell us in the comments below, we'd love to hear from you.

Marketers win on Wednesdays with Wildfire

Sorry Friday, Wednesday just became our favorite day of the week. That’s because, for our June installment of the 12 Months of Social (#12mosocial) initiative, we’re giving away a selection of branded Wildfire goodies every WINSday!

All you have to do to win is answer a simple marketing related question each week— we want to know how you think about social media within your company, what keeps you up at night, how you organize your team, that kind of thing. In exchange for helping us get to know you better, every week we’ll draw 20 winners from the pool at random, giving away Wildfire t-shirts or Flamey plush toys— winner’s choice!

We built this giveaway application using our super simple Engagement Sweepstakes template. Check out our full library of templates to see all the other engaging things you can do for your brand’s social audience.

Join the live stream of thinkDoubleClick 2013

Wildfire invites you to join Google and top agencies, advertisers and publishers for the annual thinkDoubleClick event. thinkDoubleClick, formerly known as DoubleClick Insights, is an annual meeting of senior executives from agencies, advertisers and publishers to discuss industry trends and the state of the digital marketing ecosystem. Watch live on YouTube as digital media visionaries from some of the world’s most influential companies engage in spirited and eye-opening conversations about:

Cutting edge digital trends that are having an instant impact on today’s business
How brands are incorporating social into the marketing mix, and the ongoing debate over the value and best practices of paid, owned and earned media
Innovative technologies that are changing the way advertisers use video and mobile in cross-channel campaigns.

Join the conversation in real time on DoubleClick’s YouTube channel or post your comments on Twitter with the mention of @DoubleClick and the hashtag #thinkDCLK. Be part of one of the most important marketing forums of the year, so register now.

Wildfire by Google - Enterprise-class social marketing

Remember the day your company created a handful of social accounts to “see how this social thing worked?” And when you realized you should also be creating custom content for each of your brands and regions? And how about when you moved beyond PTAT and +1’s and started talking leads and sales instead?

In less time than it took Psy to topple Justin Bieber, social marketing has transitioned from being managed by a “lone wolf” with little oversight, to becoming a core part of every marketing campaign. As we’ve seen, the opportunities to increase sales, extend your reach and be more relevant to your customers on social are enormous, but so is the complexity. The average enterprise brand has almost a dozen people working on their social media alone, and over 170 social properties (Altimeter). We have many clients managing large teams of globally distributed users across hundreds or even thousands of social properties. It can be overwhelming, inefficient and risky to build your brand on social without a technology platform that unites your social marketing across activities, teams and properties. That’s where we can help, with Wildfire Social Marketing for Enterprises.

Though you may best know us as one of the pioneers in Facebook social promotions, we've undergone a significant transformation since early 2011. We’ve been busy building an enterprise-class Social Marketing Suite that serves some of the largest brands in the world -- 31 out of the top 50 global brands, to be precise. We’ve always built our product for the largest and most sophisticated marketers, and now as part of Google, we’re more agile, more secure, more scalable and more global than ever before.

The Wildfire Social Marketing Suite has all the integrated tools you need (Ads, Pages, Promotions, Analytics and Messages) to find new customers, build your brand and drive revenues on social. Underlying these tools are a set of governance, collaboration, reporting and support capabilities that we’ve specifically created for today’s social-ized global enterprise.

Governance and Compliance

Custom teams : A flexible and customizable role-based approach to creating custom work groups. Your users can be part of multiple teams, with different levels of access per team
Custom workflows : Automated approval processes so that the right people in your organization approve every post
Rules-based post moderation : Pre-defined rules automatically trigger an action (such as flagging, deletion or routing) when certain words are posted on your social properties by your consumers
Audit logs: Records all your users’ activities within your organization to track back unauthorized or compromising behavior

Collaboration and Efficiency

Batch uploader : Allows efficient collaboration on, and scheduling, of all upcoming messages in a shared spreadsheet, which can be uploaded at once for instant scheduling
Central messages calendar : A shared calendar for all your brand’s users and teams to see which messages are scheduled to be sent. View by social property and by originating team (i.e. the ACME brand team)
Keyword filtering and auto-routing : Scales your marketing and customer service teams by auto-routing incoming messages based on keywords. If someone’s crying for help, get them to customer service pronto. If someone’s making a product recommendation, get that to your development team without having to manually route it.

Custom Reporting

Role-specific editable reports : Enables customization of your reporting for any member of your organization - easily create high level aggregate reporting for your VP of Marketing, or let each of your social managers drill down to the details to see property or campaign level performance.

Strategic Advice

Customized account strategy : We’ve worked with thousands of clients - more than any other vendor - and we put that experience to good use every day. We go beyond advising on individual campaigns (although we think we do that pretty well). We’ll work with your team on an ongoing basis to implement an organizational structure, messaging strategy and integrated marketing plan that supports your business goals.

Social marketing is serious business, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun. With Wildfire’s technology and support, we’ll do the heavy lifting for your enterprise so you can focus on creating authentic connections with your customers, and providing real value for your brand.

Download our white paper to find out more, or give us a call . We’d love to talk.

#CincodeMaya celebrates social media marketing all month long!

Great social media marketing never stops, and neither do all the learning and best practice tips you can pick up about it. This month, we’re embracing education with a little celebration...of Cinco de Mayo, with a Wildfire twist.

If you’re scratching your head about something social, we can help. Ask us your most perplexing questions, and every Friday in May our resident social marketing expert, Maya Grinberg, will post a new video answering one of the top five. Five Fridays. Five videos. Cinco de Maya!

Submit your questions here, maybe yours will be one of the chosen inquiries that gets a follow up video next week!

We built this campaign using our Social Gallery template, which is designed to make it super simple to engage with fans and followers. You can use it to post videos and do Q&As with customers in real time.

Want to see more ways you can keep your social going strong all year round? Check out our 12 Months of Social for new ideas every month.

Wildfire explores the "New Normal" at iStrategy Miami conference

One of the best parts of being a social marketing technology provider and thought leader is hearing what’s on the mind of our customers, partners and other marketing professionals. Last week, we traveled to Miami, Florida for iStrategy’s latest Global Digital Marketing Conference, a gathering of more than 350 senior brand marketers to discuss the latest innovations in digital and social marketing technology and strategy.

During the conference, Wildfire spoke about how the digital-social revolution has delivered to us a “New Normal,” where technology has empowered consumers by giving them access to information. This phenomenon has fundamentally changed how brands drive value from marketing, and was frequently discussed throughout the conference.

The New Normal has been driven in large part by Generation C, an emerging class of consumers who demonstrate core behaviors that begin with the letter C: they are connected, and constantly curating and creating content. These consumers’ voices are more powerful than ever before; they decide who and what they trust -- and as a result, they are in control of the conversation around your brand.

Brands that are successful in the New Normal use social and digital to create interactive experiences and transform their businesses. Here are three key concepts Wildfire presented at iStrategy to help you do that:

Ditch the pitch. Connected consumers are savvy: because information is always at their fingertips, they don’t care if your brand is better, faster, cheaper or stronger. They aren’t interested in a sales pitch, they are interested in what is interesting to them: “I’ll be interested if you are interesting.”

Pique Generation C’s interest by building a social strategy that shows your brand is listening to their needs, wants, expectations and preferences. Gen C is interested in brand experiences that they relate to, connect with and believe in. Your job, then, is to understand your audience’s passions, preferences and desires; then create experiences around your brand and mission that demonstrate these things.

Execute your strategy with an orchestrated approach to reach connected consumers on multiple screens and multiple social networks. In today’s always-on, multi-screen world, people consume your content in many ways and from many devices. Whether it’s a retail store, website, YouTube Brand Channel, Pinterest page, or on a tablet, PC or smartphone, you must be where your consumers are. Your digital-social strategy should incorporate all channels and networks to engage your consumers wherever they are, on whatever screen they’re on.

Mike Nabasny, Wildfire’s Head of Midwest Sales, talks about engaging Generation C.

Procter & Gamble is an example of a brand that’s been wildly successful at applying these concepts and connecting with its portion of of the Gen C audience. About a year ago, P&G launched its “Thank You, Mom” campaign in conjunction with its sponsorship of the London Olympics.

The campaign included 35 P&G brands sponsoring 150 Olympic athletes, and the effort was tied around interactive content on YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest. It was one of the most ambitious integrated marketing campaigns to date.

In an interview with AdAge last summer, P&G’s Global Brand Building Officer, Mark Pritchard, estimated that the company would bring in $500 million in incremental revenue as a result of the “Thank You, Mom.” The campaign also deepened P&G’s connection with millions of social followers; it was so popular with Facebook fans, in fact, that it spawned its own Facebook page. “Thank You, Mom” continues to provide a significant source of social engagement for P&G’s brand.

How are you engaging consumers in the New Normal? Leave us a note about your strategy below. We love to hear from you!

The Wildfire Team

A New Turn for Wildfire Promotions

Five years ago, we were a team of two, working out of our apartment and creating a way for businesses to run promotions on social media. Today we’re a team of hundreds, and we offer businesses a suite of products to help them manage all of their social media. It’s been a learning process for us.

We want to do all we can to poise our customers for success when they begin using Wildfire. So that we can better focus on doing that, we’ve decided that we’ll be retiring our Basic, Standard, and Premium promotions after June 30th. We’ll continue to offer promotions as part of our Social Marketing Suite. We understand that some of you will still want to run standalone promotions, so we’re glad to know that there are other companies dedicated to helping you do this. But we’ll be sad to see you go. Of course, we’d love for you to stay in the Wildfire and Google family, so if you want to learn more about the Wildfire Suite, then please give us a call at 888-274-0929.

For more specifics, here are answers to questions you might have about our transition:

Can I create a new Basic, Standard, or Premium promotion before June 30th?

Yes! If you already have an account with Wildfire, you can build, publish, and run promotions up until June 30th. Your campaign just needs to be complete before June 30th.

What if I have a campaign in progress now that ends before June 30th? Will it keep running?

Yes, your campaign will continue to run like normal.

What should I do about the lead data in my account?

All customers with promotions that are completed by June 30th will be able to access and export their lead data until July 31st. If you’ve run a Basic promotion, we’ll upgrade your account so that you can export your leads. If you don’t know how to export your leads, you can check it out here.

Can I sign up for a new Wildfire account in Promotions? Can I invite someone to join my account?

While you won’t be able to create a new account in Promotions, you’re welcome to continue using your existing account to build promotions until June 30th. You can also invite other members to your account until June 30th.

Who should I talk to if I want to learn about the Wildfire platform?

If you’re interested in learning about the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, please give our sales team a call at 888-274-0929 or visit our website at www.wildfireapp.com.

Can I keep my same Wildfire account if I decide to start using the Wildfire Suite?

Yes, you can keep your existing account if you’d like to start using the Suite. Just mention that you’d like to do so when you speak with a member of our sales team.

What if I’m an existing Suite client? Will I still be able to run promotions?

Absolutely. Promotions will still be available as part of your subscription.

To those of you who were among our first customers using Promotion Builder, we want to say thank you so much for believing in us and helping us get to where we are today. We hope you choose to continue to work with us in the future.

Calling All Marketers: What Makes You Tick When You’re Off the Clock?

Marketers are busy people with a variety of interests and inspirations outside the office. But often times, these things get lost amidst work demands and the hustle and bustle of today’s always-on world.

At Wildfire, we think your interests and inspirations are meant to be celebrated. With Spring’s recent arrival – and the arrival of longer, brighter days – we think now is the perfect time to celebrate.

During the month of April, as part of Wildfire’s 12 Months of Social, we’re inviting you share your interests and inspirations with us, through photos. We used our popular Instagram template to build a special page to house your submissions in a gallery that’s viewable on Facebook, microsite and mobile devices.

How can you share your story? It’s easy. Think about what interests, inspires or otherwise gets your through your day as a marketer. Then follow three simple steps:

(1) Take a photo and upload it to Instagram.

(2) Caption your photo and fill in the blank, “I’m a marketer, I’m a _________.”

(3) Add the hashtag #thismarketinglife.

By selecting “Share,” your photo will automatically be pulled into Wildfire’s This Marketing Life gallery. Ready to get started? Click here. And be sure to revisit the gallery throughout the month to see your photo featured among others’ -- we hope you’ll find it inspiring!

Visit the photo stream first if you need some inspiration! We can already tell you, there are a lot of caffeine fiends in our audience!

Wildfire Supports YouTube One Channel

For brand marketers, YouTube, with more than 800 million users, is an incredibly powerful way to engage consumers through the magic of sight, sound, and motion. Wildfire is proud to work with YouTube as a Google Engagement Solutions Developer, helping brands tell their unique stories through video. Today we’re pleased to announce our support for the new YouTube One Channel design.

The new design introduces key changes that give marketers some great new features:

Designed for mobile

Mobile now makes up 25% of YouTube’s total views, and the YouTube iOS app has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Whether your consumers access your channel on their desktop, tablet or mobile device, they’ll see a beautifully rendered and perfectly scaled version of your brand channel page. This includes a new big cover image, which YouTube calls Channel Art.

Curated video library

“Shelves” of videos let you showcase and organize your channel’s content however you want. Create and edit “Sections” of content, so you can group your videos by most recent, most popular, or by function, such as product demos or customer support videos.

A customized welcome

You’ll be able to customize your featured video to subscribers vs non-subscribers to your channel. Subscribers get a view that helps them discover what’s new and what to watch next on your channel. For unsubscribed viewers, you can now publish a new channel trailer, which lets you highlight your channel’s value and encourage subscribing.

Guide integration with channels

The Guide is now integrated into channel pages. This means that your full channel (not just the Feed) will appear whenever a subscriber clicks on your channel in their Guide.

When will the changes take effect?

Through May 15, you’ll have the opportunity to switch your channel over to the new design. On May 15, if you have not published a custom-built page, with what YouTube refers to as “gadgets”, you will be automatically switched over. If you have built a custom page, then you’ll have till June 19 to re-build your page to fit the new One Channel specifications. But if you’ve built your custom page with Wildfire, don’t worry! Our pages were built from day one to conform to the One Channel specifications, so they’ll render perfectly in the new format.

The One Channel update is a great step forward for brands to create more customized and tailored experiences for their viewers. At Wildfire, we’re excited to bring our expertise in creating custom social pages to help brands who want to build even further engagement with their YouTube audience, such as through video contests, live streaming or built-in social sharing functionality.

Contact us if you want to learn more about how we can help save you time and money building viral and interactive experiences on your YouTube One Channel page.

March Meme Madness, where only one meme can reign supreme

What do the infamous dancing baby, harlem shake, and rickroll all have in common? They’re all famous internet memes, having been seen across seemingly every screen of every internet user in the world—and likely many times. A meme is an image or video that is passed electronically from one internet user to another, but the ones we all know best are the ones that have an instant appeal and go viral. In March, we celebrate internet memes!

Basketball fans have their March brackets, and we have ours too. Cats vs. dogs, hunks vs. dunks, birds vs. nerds and more. Welcome to Meme Madness. Social wouldn’t be the same without these weird and witty internet sensations—and it’s time to pick your favorites. We’re using our Pages suite tools and templates to launch this month-long competition to pick the greatest meme of them all.

meme1

As part of our 12 Months of Social, all through March we’re using this engaging competition to settle the score amongst our sweet 16 of internet memes. Join the fun every week until we crown a champ on March 29th. Which meme will reign supreme? Your vote will help determine!

meme2

Once you’ve voted, let us know your picks for the winners, use #12mosocial to forecast your picks on Twitter, Google+, or Instagram, or tell us what you think on our Facebook page.

February is for Rockin': Wildfire's 12 Months of Social Spotify Playlist

The eternal opportunity to create engagement between people and companies has always been in music. Before social networks, before the internet even (doesn’t that seem ages ago!), brands sought to connect with consumers by using jingles, diddies, soundtracks, and more— all to make that coveted customer connection. We’re putting music back on the docket with this month’s “12 Months of Social” (#12mosocial) installation: a socially integrated Spotify playlist of the best artists representing at South by Southwest ®!

sxsw

If you’re not headed to SXSW next month, you’ve at least got your eyes (and ears) on it. That’s why we chose February to highlight our Spotify Music Sharing template.

It’s perfect for building branded playlists that can’t wait to go viral. While any songs, or even playlists of song collections, can be added to the template and launched to the brand’s Facebook page and microsites, we themed our collection around the upcoming music festival in Austin, Texas.

Our playlist includes popular SXSW alumni artists and the most anticipated new acts of 2013. Your brand’s playlists can amp up engagement by tapping into themes your own fans love to talk about.

What’s on the calendar for March? Get ready for a little marketing madness! In the meantime, tell us what you think by dropping a note in the comments or by using #12mosocial on Twitter, Google+, or Instagram!

Wildfire's Twelve Months of Social: where great social never stops

The quest for fan and community engagement never stops, so it can sometimes feel difficult to come up with new ideas for clever and compelling social campaigns for your marketing mix.

We understand.

That’s why we’ve committed to a year-long initiative we’re calling “The Twelve Months of Social”— every month we'll showcase a savvy new social idea: a contest or promotion, tips on running social ads, an engaging template (like January’s) that you can customize in minutes, and more. You’ll see how Wildfire keeps its social fresh and flowing, and how you can do it too.

We’ve gone all out— even the “wrapper” for this initiative is a social campaign idea: we’re using the Wildfire Daily Reveal Calendar template (which we’ve only customized the design of in order to launch) to display each new month’s app to check out.

Check out what's new this month (and get ready to rock with Spotify), or contact us to kick off your social campaign today! Tell us what you think of the campaign, too, by using the hashtag #12moSocial on Twitter, Instagram, or Google+!

Case Studies: Scaling Social Business with the Altimeter Group

For large enterprises, managing social across teams, sub-brands, networks, regions, time zones, and languages, takes a great deal of planning and coordination. The Altimeter Group just tackled this topic in a report on how four major brands have created scalable social businesses while successfully engaging consumers: “Case Studies: Scalable Social Business.”

PUMA, a Wildfire client, is one of the brands featured in the report. With limited headcount, PUMA has successfully scaled its social presence across regions, networks and sub-brands. An excerpt from the PUMA section of the report highlights the ways in which the global apparel and footwear company uses Wildfire to do this:

“PUMA first looked to SMMS vendor Wildfire (now a part of Google), primarily to coordinate and schedule posts. Later, it would rely on Wildfire to help with moderation of spam and inappropriate content, language translation, and content targeting, as well as governance across its regional markets. Holmes notes that the regional emphases have had a clear impact. ‘The company has seen engagement grow significantly,’ she says.”

Check out the full, free report “Case Studies: Scalable Social Business” here. Comment below and let us know what you think of how these four enterprises have uniquely approached scaling for social.

Case Studies - Scaling Social Business from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare

The Road to ROI: Four social strategies every brand needs to know in 2013 with Jeremiah Owyang

When done right, social marketing can be a powerful lever not only to influence how consumers think and talk about your brand, but also to amplify your brand presence and message to drive measurable business results and ROI. How can your team strategize to achieve greater success with social media marketing in 2013 than ever before?

Join Wildfire for a live webinar with industry expert Jeremiah Owyang, of the Altimeter Group, to get the top social marketing strategies for:

Alignment: How to sync your social with your business objectives.

Impact: Ways to maximize results by allocating social where and when it makes sense in your marketing plan.

Organization: How to line up your resources the way top social
brands do.

Engagement: Key strategies to strengthen the core of your social success.

How do top brands execute these strategies in real life? Don’t miss your chance to find out. Register now!

[REPORT]: How top brands use technology to power their social media

Download your free white paper here.

If you’re an active social brand, you know how much time and effort it takes to create and maintain a successful social media marketing strategy. Content it took you weeks to brainstorm gets consumed in what seems like just a day, or hours. Fans want to engage in dialogue with your brand all the time, and they get bored when you don’t have new offers, messaging, or promotions available for them. How do big brands scale their social media efforts?

The answer is by using technology. We compiled a report about how top brands scale their social marketing efforts, and the systems they need to help them do it. Download your free copy here. You’ll learn how Mountain Dew, Esurance, Annie’s Homegrown, and the Washington Redskins use social marketing software to generate more content faster with lower costs and better results.

What’s in the paper? How these top brands are able to:

Create content once, then launch it everywhere

Target customers by region and language

Assign secure user roles that turn social into a true team effort

Test, measure, and analyze campaigns in real time

You’ll learn the best way to scale your social and create a nonstop stream of fresh content that will win and engage fans, followers and customers around the web and around the world. Did you enjoy the read? Tell us in the comments, below!

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