We are extremely embarrassed and sorry to report that we accidentally sent our newsletter today to a number of recipients that had not signed up to receive our newsletter. One of our Campaign Monitor lists that was compiled for a different purpose was inadvertently included in our newsletter mailing. We cannot apologize enough to those who received our newsletter in error, to Campaign Monitor (who is a trusted partner and who is 100% anti-spam) and to our customer base in general. We’ve always been so careful to only ever email businesses that have explicitly signed up to receive correspondence from us and until now we have been very proud to have had an extremely low unsubscribe rate on our newsletter. This mistake is a huge black mark on our record and we are very, very sorry for this.
If your concerns have not been addressed by this blog post or you would like more information about this situation, please don’t hesitate to email or call our founder & CEO personally at victoria@wildfireapp.com or 650 387 4249.
As you may have heard, Facebook recently changed their Promotions Guidelines. We’ve received a lot of questions about this new guidelines so we wanted to highlight what we consider to be the most important aspects. The good news is that the new Facebook Promotions Guidelines do not stop any company, big or small, from using promotions (i.e. contests and sweepstakes) to grow their fan base and to make their fan page more engaging. The Wildfire team has been working hard over the past couple of weeks to adapt our platform so that companies can get the optimal results from their promotions in Facebook while still adhering to Facebook’s new guidelines. Any business or agency that uses our platform can be sure that their promotion is compliant with the Facebook Promotion Guidelines. Here are some ‘highlights’ of the new guidelines and the changes we’ve made:
We were very excited to recently launch our first marketing product for Twitter! Our Twitter sweepstakes solution provides an easy, powerful way to build your Twitter followers and spread the word via Twitter and the best part is that you can have your sweepstakes up and running within minutes. You can also use our solution to simultaneously run a sweepstakes in Twitter, Facebook and on your website. Thanks to our integration with the Twitter API, consumers will automatically become your Twitter follower when they enter your sweepstakes (though you can enable them to ‘opt-out’) and they can also automatically tweet their followers to increase their changes of winning. To reward for creativity and influence, entrants will only increase their chances of winning based on how many of their followers engage with the sweepstakes (not simply on whether or not they choose to tweet about the campaign). Many sweepstakes currently being run on Twitter (e.g. ‘retweet this message to go into the draw to win…”) lack legitimacy because they do not provide a way for entrants to access the Official Rules or provide their contact information (e.g. email address or mailing address) and nor do they provide a way for the company to easily and accurately randomly draw the winners. Our technology provides company with an easy way to run legitimate sweepstakes while also providing the added benefit of building companies’ Twitter followers and spreading the word about their brand.
There has been a lot of big news from Facebook over the past few days and while the reaction from consumers and developers has been mixed, the news for Fan Page owners is exciting! To begin with, the action of ‘becoming a fan’ will now be dramatically more viral because every time someone becomes a fan of your brand a newsfeed will automatically be published (e.g. “Joe became a fan of XYZ Brand”). This means that for every person that fans your Page, potentially hundreds of their friends will be exposed to your brand and many of them may choose to become your fan also. For Fan page owners, this will result in even greater brand exposure and should make it easier to build your fan base. Of course, you still need to give Facebook users a reason to want to become a fan of your brand – that’s where Wildfire’s tools can be so powerful (FYI, last week we launched a campaign for a nationwide gifts company that generated 100K fans in just 4 days!).
We’re excited to announce a partnership with 
Facebook users love sharing content that enables them to express more about their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes and one of the most popular ways to do this is via ’share your favorites’ campaigns (e.g. “
In one of our last posts we gave you tips on how to create engaging, viral campaigns. But creating an engaging campaign is just one piece of the puzzle; equally important is coming up with campaigns that meet your business goals. There are many easy ways you can do this – if your goal is to drive sales, consider combining a coupon with your campaign (e.g. after entrants have entered your sweepstakes, quiz or contest use our coupon solution to provide them with a discount voucher). If your goal is to educate consumers about your products, weave this into your sweepstakes entry process (e.g. Zappos ran a shopping spree sweepstakes with us which required entrants to choose the clothing items they’d want to win from zappos.com and then input the clothing SKU numbers into the sweepstakes entry form). User generated contests are also powerful ways to educate consumers about your brand (e.g. Facebook ran a contest with us that required entrants to submit stories about how Facebook is doing good in their community) and so too are quizzes (e.g. check out the 
We are excited to introduce a new, engaging promotion format: quizzes. No doubt you have seen quizzes showing up in your Facebook newsfeed; they can be highly engaging and viral because they allow for self-expression. While many of the quizzes that show up in the newsfeeds are trivial, when done right they can be both highly viral and highly relevant to brands. For example, if you’re a travel company you could run a quiz that tells users what kind of traveler they are and then present users with some suitable trip suggestions. If you’re a clothing retailer, a ‘what’s your style?’ quiz would be a fun way to spread the word about your company and present users with targeted clothing suggestions. Our quiz format is easy to use and enables you to create fully customized quizzes, upload custom graphics, custom newsfeeds, product information and more. We also enable you to combine quizzes with sweepstakes or coupons, which is a powerful way to create campaigns that are both highly viral (quizzes are a great way to encourage consumers to publish newsfeeds) and generate leads (via sweepstakes) or sales (via coupons). For example, you could run a quiz ‘what kind of bride are you?” and then direct people for the chance to win a dream honeymoon and/or a discount voucher for 20% off wedding invitations.
