Facebook Is Your Life

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.

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!

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 ®!

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