Facebook Is Your Life

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

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).

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

[REPORT] Why Social Marketing will Deliver a Positive ROI for your Brand

While most marketing channels have standardized methods for calculating ROI or value, other channels, like social media, can be harder to quantify. We compiled this report to help you better understand how social media delivers on real business objectives, and how to get the most value, and highest ROI, from your social marketing efforts.

[Download your free white paper here.]

According to a series of recent studies, “earned media,” which is the unpaid publicity created by users about your brand, is the unique benefit of social media marketing. It delivers incredibly high value to brands because it is based on a trusted recommendation between friends, and social marketing makes it possible for your brand to seed the creation of this media...at scale.

In fact, a recent study conducted by Facebook and ComScore determined that exposure to earned media had significant positive impact on purchasing behavior:

• Starbucks fans and friends of fans demonstrated a 38% lift in purchase behavior within 4 weeks of exposure to earned media

• Target fans and friends of fans were 19% more likely to purchase in Target in the four weeks following exposure

The facts are simple: the more earned media your brand generates through engaging with fans and followers in social media, the higher your ROI will be. Within this paper, we discuss the three- phase social media cycle for brands. We’ll focus on how to unlock the potential of earned media, extended reach, and higher conversions in social. We’ll also review the unique approaches six brands have taken to reaching a common outcome of positive ROI in social.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY HERE.

Wildfire Announces YouTube Brand Channel Management Solution

With more than 800 million unique monthly users, YouTube is the world’s second largest social network and the perfect channel to expose your brand’s video content and connect with an engaged audience. Video has a lasting impact, which makes it one of the most viral and engaging forms of branded content. Video enables you to tell your story and showcase your products and services to convert viewers into fans and customers.

YouTube isn't simply a platform for advertising and promotional campaigns; it's also a permanent home for your brand. A YouTube Brand Channel is the place to feature your brand and serve up custom, interactive content that reaches users who help it spread virally.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve extended our integration with YouTube’s platform to our best-in-class Page Manager application. This announcement comes a few months after we launched our turnkey YouTube video contest capability in March. By offering both Brand Channel management and a video contest application, we now provide the most complete social marketing solution for YouTube available in the marketplace. Read on to learn about how we’re celebrating this feat: by offering our clients a huge deal!

Our product’s latest capability allows you to design, publish and update custom content on your YouTube Brand Channel quickly and easily. Unlike the default tabs on your Brand Channel, the custom tab powered by Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite gives you complete control over your channel’s layout, branding, content, and social sharing to provide visitors with a deeply engaging experience. Wildfire’s solution includes the following advanced capabilities:

Fully-customizable pre-built templates that can be easily updated with fresh content

Interactive plugins that maximize audience engagement

Full integration with all major social networks

Dedicated support throughout specifications, design, build and implementation process

Actionable insights on views, visits and plugin engagement

We specifically design our templates and plugins to optimize social engagement and provide you with an avenue to tell your brand’s story and build a loyal audience of supporters. As an expert on Facebook and other social networks, our software also helps you integrate your YouTube presence with your overall marketing strategy, tap into the virality of other platforms, and drive traffic to your Brand Channel. YouTube Brand Channel content powered by Wildfire can also be mobile-optimized to extend the reach of your marketing campaigns to users visiting on their smartphone or tablet.

How can you utilize our Brand Channel management solution to improve your YouTube marketing strategy? Join us for a live webinar on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 10:00 am PDT/2:00 pm EDT. Wildfire’s Director of Product Management, Tom Rikert, will share best practices and winning strategies for YouTube marketing. You can register for the webinar here.

To show how excited we are about today’s announcement and celebrate the fact that we deliver the most comprehensive social marketing solution for YouTube, we’re offering a huge discount to clients who want to take advantage of our Brand Channel management capabilities. Until June 30th, we’re offering all full-service Brand Channel templates at a two-for-one rate. So if you’re using Wildfire’s talented creative team to build a custom YouTube template for your Brand Channel, we’ll throw in a second template absolutely free. Call us today at 1-888-274-0929 x. 1 to find learn more about this exclusive, limited-time offer!

3 Ways Marketers Can Win with Mobile Social Media Marketing

In the latest count, nearly 488 million users access Facebook using a mobile device. That's over 50% of the total 901 million users on the massive social network. What does that mean for brands? Facebook has planned a variety of mobile-centric products, including new advertising initiatives we've yet to see as well as the recent addition of Sponsored Stories to the mobile ecosystem.

These game-changing mobile usage trends mean that marketers need to get serious about mobile, and fast. Here are three new ways you can build mobile into your Facebook marketing plan.

1. Mobile-Optimize All Your Content.

The introduction of Timeline to the mobile Facebook ecosystem brought with it a host of opportunities for marketers. When you consider that brand pages on Facebook Mobile have had almost no functionality — custom apps haven’t worked without a complicated hack-job, tabs haven’t translated, etc. — it seems possible that Timeline for brands was launched specifically to enable brands’ mobile Facebook capabilities.

While Timeline for brands currently does not enable interaction with custom apps (created for the fan page), custom apps can be built to be mobile friendly. Where now users can access mobile-friendly custom apps just through specific links (not through the mobile Timeline) we will likely see a future update that enables the functionality.

Since nearly half of Facebook users access the site through a mobile device, your brand’s reach could effectively double if you mobile-optimize your social content. And because users will soon be able to experience the same workflow on their desktops as their smartphones, page managers will now be able to curate an identical experience for all users, regardless of viewing device.

Whether you’re building engagement applications in-house or with a social marketing software vendor, make sure the applications are seamlessly viewable across all platforms and devices. Ideally, you’ll be able to design once and deploy anywhere. That way, you’ll avoid messy synchronization issues, duplication of effort between creative teams, and working around multiple content channels.

Applications that use a “responsive design” framework are gaining popularity. The framework employs specific HTML5, CSS and Javascript technologies to ensure that the same content displays well on devices of any screen size. In the context of Facebook mobile pages, apps built within this framework can morph Facebook page tabs — for mobile, tablets and desktops — with one build.

2. Integrate Sponsored Stories Into Your Marketing.

Until early 2012, there had been no way to advertise to Facebook users on mobile devices. This has been an enormous lost opportunity for marketers — until now. Now, Sponsored Stories premium ad units appear in users’ news feeds (a huge announcement on its own), but also in mobile news feeds. Considering the many users who access Facebook from a mobile device, marketers now have a big opportunity to embed sponsored advertisements within mobile feeds. The challenge is how to make this work with your existing Facebook marketing program.

The most effective way to integrate Sponsored Stories into your marketing is to work them into an editorial calendar. Since Sponsored Stories stem from the activities of users on your brand’s Page, create a calendar of activities that translate well to the Sponsored Story format. For example, a local retail store could plan its weekly status updates, featuring in-store specials and colorful coupons as Sponsored Stories. Just make sure to use eye-catching images to help your promoted posts attract attention.

3. Use Facebook Mobile to Fuel Offline Campaigns.

Mobile-optimized social campaign marketing can also be used to enhance consumers’ in-store experiences. In fact, according to comScore, 36% of the U.S. smartphone population used their phones to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011. And Nielsen states that, by the end of 2011, nearly one in five smartphone users scanned product barcodes, and nearly one in eight compared prices while in a store.

There is a lot of room for creating social campaigns with seamless mobile components, such as unique codes for scanning, in addition to more traditional social campaign approaches like promotions and exclusive content.

When planning online and offline campaigns, include in-store signage. This is crucial to the success of a mobile campaign, and is a key driver of participation. Many brands will advertise promotions on their Pages, designed to drive activity in-store, but do not replicate this messaging in the store. Unfortunately, this misses the in-store consumers who haven’t interacted on your fan page beforehand. Capture their interest socially first, then reinforce your message in-store to create a deeper, longer-term connection with the consumer.

The next thing to keep in mind is simplicity, which is the key to a successful social-to-in-store campaign. That multi-step scavenger hunt, which extends from your Page all the way into the shelves of your store may sound like a creative idea, but it will most certainly narrow engagement. Keep the proposition simple so users can easily get involved.

For example, Sprinkles Cupcakes consistently posts messages to its Page, encouraging fans to check in daily for a “secret word.” Fans who discover the secret word on Sprinkles’ Facebook Timeline can whisper it, in-store, to get a free cupcake. Sprinkles’ approach yields continuous check-ins on its Page, where other marketing messages appear alongside the secret word.

Marketers cannot ignore the staggering growth of users who access the Internet and social networks via mobile. Get mobile right and you’ve effectively doubled your social network reach. Start by mobile-optimizing your content, testing mobile Sponsored Stories, and linking mobile to your in-store campaigns. And please, share more mobile marketing strategies in the comments below.

(These tips were originally published in a contributed post to Mashable.)