Wildfire Turns One!

Published on August 10, 2010 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

People say “Time flies when you’re having fun.” And they’re right.

One year ago this week Wildfire came out of private development and into public beta. We opened our doors to the world, and it has been an amazing ride ever since.

One year ago there were five people huddled around one desk, sharing an office with the great folks at the FBfund. Over the year, Wildfire’s suite of applications grew, and so did it’s headcount. We grew into our first office, and within 6 months found ourselves having outgrown it. When the walls seemed to be busting out of their seams, we split the team and moved the overflow into another space on the same block. The time it took for us to outgrow that space was much shorter than the first–within a month we were packing a u-Haul and moving to downtown Palo Alto, giddy as schoolchildren to move down into the center of the startup tornado, where all the cool Silicon Valley startups live.

In one year Wildfire went from 5 full time employees to 40. By the end of this calendar year there will be many more. With each added body, our team is enriched with more intelligence, more enthusiasm, more engagement, and more tenacity. With each addition, we become even better.

In one year we raised a round of funding, acquired tens of thousands of customers (including hundreds of major brands), reached many millions of consumers, grew to over 12,000 Facebook fans, and leveled up from 6-packs on Friday evenings to our own office kegerator. We are thrilled.

And you know what else? We couldn’t have done it without you. And several others. Thank you very much to everybody taking the time to read this post– your support, kind feedback, comments, and questions let us know that you are enthusiastic about and supportive of our growth.

As for the “several others,” there are many:
Thank you so much to everybody at Facebook for their continued support and friendship; to Harrison Miller, Andy Collins and the rest of the team at Summit for their enthusiasm and attention; to Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, and Gary Vaynerchuk for digging our product and wanting to be involved in our first round of funding; to Yee Lee, Hiten Shah, Om Malik, Sebastien de Halleux, Ro Choy, Javier Olivan, Matt Monahan, Joe Beninato and many others for your invaluable advice and support; to the entire Wildfire team here and abroad for being the best team in the world; and most of all, to our clients for appreciating our product and spreading the word!

Here’s a virtual toast to an even better year to come! And better yet, if you’re in the Bay Area, come to our roof this Friday, August 13th for a proper birthday party!!

A Toast! To a Great Second Year, and Many More!

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Facebook Fan Page Tab Width Change Announced

Published on August 6, 2010 in News & Updates. 17 Comments

Several months ago we posted an article about upcoming Facebook design changes to Fan Page tab widths. While Facebook made the announcement that it was planning to change the tab width to 520 pixels from the previous (and current) 760 pixels back in October 2009, the official change date has just been announced: the week of August 23rd, 2010.

The official statement from Facebook can be seen below:

“We announced plans last October to remove application boxes and application info sections as well as reduce the width of application tabs to optimize for the new profile and Facebook Pages format. We will be moving forward with these changes the week of August 23, and want to help you understand what to expect.
Based on feedback from developers, we have committed to the following plans to ensure a smooth transition:

  • Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the “Boxes” tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.
  • Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook. We’ll share more of our plans for the roadmap in the coming weeks.

To read our post about this change, which explains the differences in the design and how it will look for your fan page, click here.

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NEW WILDFIRE PRODUCT: Group Deal

Published on July 29, 2010 in Improvements and News & Updates. 10 Comments

Overview
We’re excited to launch Group Deals, the first social buying application for Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Connect! With a Group Deal any business, whether it’s a large brand, an agency or a small or medium sized business, can easily and cost-effectively sell their product or service in a socially engaging way on Facebook or on their website. You may have heard of the awesome success of companies like Groupon that make buying fun and social. Now with the launch of our Group Deals format companies of all sizes can create their own Groupon-like deal within minutes and publish it on their fan page and/or their website. Group deals are the ideal way to make buying both fun and social!
How it Works
For those of you who don’t know what a Group Deal is here’s how it works:
  1. Your company offers its Facebook fans a special deal on a product or service at an awesome price – but the deal only activates if enough people commit to buy the deal (e.g. “get a appetizer, entre and desert for $15 if 50 people commit to buy this deal”)
  2. Consumers commit to the deal by providing their contact information and their credit card details (we collect this via PayPal).
  3. If the minimum number of consumers commit to the deal before the deadline, the deal activates and consumers’ credit cards are charged. We automatically email the consumers with instructions for redeeming their deal. If the minimum number is not reached, consumers’ cards are not charged and we email them to let them know the deal is off.
Wildfire takes care of the entire process of running a group deal – all you need to do is define the value of your deal, the minimum number of buyers required and the duration of the campaign!

Top 7 Reasons to run a Group Deal

  1. It’s a great way to make selling to social network users fun, social and engaging
  2. It’s a powerful way to encourage word of mouth spread about your company’s product or service
  3. It’s a great tool for selling old stock or unsold inventory
  4. It encourages regular engagement with a company’s Facebook Fan Page or Website (e.g. by offering regular weekly group deals)
  5. It’s easy to set-up – campaigns can be live within minutes
  6. It’s highly affordable and scalable
  7. It’s secure through PayPal’s verification process

Note on Fraud & Security
We’ve partnered with PayPal to provide a secure and scalable solution for your company to run financial transactions and for consumers to buy Group Deals from companies that are PayPal verified. This way there is minimal risk that consumers will engage in fraudulent transactions and your business can be assured that funds we’ll be collected.
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Wildfire is Hiring!

Published on July 29, 2010 in Good Times. 0 Comments

Why work at Wildfire?
 Wildfire wants to create a collection of solutions that take the hassle, marketing degree, and technical training out of implementing a marketing strategy for your brand or company (no matter how large or how small it is). Our team is still on the small side, which means it feels more like joining a new family than worrying about remembering your 10-digit long unique employee ID number. We’ve enjoyed some great success since launching our product to the public, but with great success come greater expectations, which will require quite a few talented additions to our already pretty awesome team. We are on the lookout for folks with inquisitive minds, witty demeanors, the motivation to volunteer their brains to tasks outside their “job description,” and head diameters that are friendly to the wearing of very many hats.

Read about and apply for our open positions on the jobs page here.

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The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing: an Altimeter Report

Published on July 28, 2010 in Tips & Tricks. 0 Comments

Altimeter, a leading research and advisory firm in the technology space, just published a great report on Facebook Page marketing. While doing their research, they reached out to some of the industries leading experts on social media, Facebook marketing, and disruptive marketing technologies— one of these contributors was Wildfire! It was great to be able to add some of our knowledge about the social media marketing space to this great collection of research. Check it out below– the guidance you will find in this study is the freshest on the market, it is an excellent source to add to your knowledge base!’

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

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How to Create Top Performing Promos for your Fan Page (PART 1)

Published on July 25, 2010 in Tips & Tricks. 20 Comments

When it comes to building engaged fans and followers on Facebook or Twitter, promotions like contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways should be #1 on your priority list. According to Jupiter, a market research company, brands that run contests have twice as many fans as those that don’t. According to Razorfish’s FEED study, by far the biggest reason that consumers fan or follow companies is to access deals and exclusive offers. But how can you maximize the success of your Facebook and Twitter promotions? Check out Part 1 of our two-part blog post detailing the top tips we’ve learned from observing the tens of thousands of promotions that have been run via the Wildfire social media marketing platform.

TIP # 1: MAKE IT SOCIAL
 The power of Facebook and Twitter is that they enable users to share your brand with their friends. So to really make the most of Facebook and Twitter, you should look for ways to make your promotions inherently social. For example:
● If you’re running a user generated contest be sure to allow the public to vote. Entrants will contact all their friends to encourage them to vote and thus help spread the word about your brand.
● If you are running a sweepstakes, make it social by offering a Group Prize (e.g. “concert tickets for you and your 5 best friends”) and ask entrants to invite the 5 friends they’d want to share the prize with or offer a Referral Prize (e.g. award a prize not only to the winner but also to the person who referred the winner).

Check out an example of a currently running Group Deal that’s highly social,the W Scottsdale Group Deal– a certain number of people are needed to get the deal, so if a user wants to purchase the deal, he will want to share it with friends to reach the deal tipping point!

TIP # 2: KEEP IT SIMPLE & EASY

In our experience, the simpler and easier you make it for consumers to engage with your promotion, the better your results will be. For example, if you’re running a sweepstakes, don’t ask for any more information from users than you need – the shorter the entry form or the less steps required to engage, the more people will enter. If you’re looking to collect user generated content, ask for things that consumers have readily available like vacation, pet, hobby or family photos. And if you run a video contest, be aware that these get far fewer entries than photo contests because of the effort required to create and upload a video. On the flip side, generating a few great video entries may serve your goals better than receiving hundreds or thousands of photo entries – especially if your goal is to create customer generated content that you can use in your marketing materials.
Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.

Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.

TIP # 3: TAP INTO PASSIONATE COMMUNITIES
 We’ve found that campaigns that tap into people’s passions and interests play a greater role in determining the success of a campaign than do factors like the value of a prize or even, in many cases, the size of an advertising budget. Campaigns that involve pets, children, charities, hobbies (e.g. surfing), music, and other interests are consistently among the most successful we see. For example, we had a non-profit run a pet-related photo contest that got over 10,000 photo submissions in one week with no advertising budget and a tattoo parlor that got thousands of submissions to their ‘best tattoo contest’ with limited marketing. Target your ads to your specific demographic for best results.

The P90X promotion generated hundreds of entries from people passionate about working out and staying fit.

TIP # 4: COMMUNICATE!
 Once your promotion is up and running, don’t forget to publicize it to your existing fans, followers and newsletter subscribers on a regular basis. At a minimum, message your fans once when you launch the promotion, once during the middle of the promotion and once a few days before it ends. For highly successful tips to ensure that your fan updates get maximum exposure, click here: http://bit.ly/bOYnE8

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Facebook Changes Permissions Protocol

Published on July 7, 2010 in News & Updates. 2 Comments

At the Wildfire offices, we put a lot of emphasis on sharing knowledge amongst ourselves and with our users. As such, we wanted to let you know of a Facebook change happening that will impact the flow of user actions within your current or upcoming campaigns. Facebook will be switching to a new permissions protocol on their platform starting on Wednesday, June 30th. The new permissions protocol has required all third-party developers such as Wildfire to modify their applications according to the new standard, which will also completely change Wildfire’s current permissions system.

Our development team has worked very hard to adapt the Wildfire platform for these changes, and we have succeeded. We fully expect the transition to go smoothly and not result in any outages or downtime. However, the Facebook change will slightly alter the user experience of the Wildfire promotion application in the following way:

Now when a user clicks from the Facebook fan page tab to a Wildfire campaign they will see a new Facebook permissions dialogue box asking the user to allow the application access to particular elements of the user’s profile information (see image below). Once users have already allowed the application they will not need to allow it again for future Wildfire promotions of the same campaign type (Promotions or Sweepstakes for example).

If a user chooses to not allow the application, we do have the ability to automatically redirect the user off Facebook to a microsite version of the promotion hosted by Wildfire. The microsite version looks nearly identical and provides the same experience for a user to enter and participate in your promotion. It allows for the user to use their login information to connect using Facebook Connect, which enables users to “Like” a fan page, post news feed stories, and directly invite friends, just as if they were on Facebook itself – but if the user logs in with Facebook Connect, here too they will need to allow the application permission to access their profiles. If the user chooses to decline a second time, they can still enter the promotion providing the campaign doesn’t require the user to Like the fan page. The user will also not be able to post a news feed post or invite Facebook friends.

If you have any questions about these changes you can always feel free to call us at (888) 274-0929, we would be happy to help. We will continue to keep all of our customers notified if changes occur with any features or within Facebook. As always, thank you for being an enthusiastic Wildfire customer!

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Hiccup

Published on June 30, 2010 in News & Updates. 0 Comments

Hey there,

Wildfire Interactive is constantly making enhancements to our platform of applications– we never want to stop making it better. Unfortunately, every once in a blue moon, technical efforts to improve some part of the system can cause unintended hiccups in other parts of the system.

While making a few enhancements to our platform last night, several emails may have been sent from our system by mistake.

If you believe you’ve received any messages from us today by mistake, please disregard them. We apologize for the confusion.

To remove yourself from future emails, please go to http://www.wildfireapp.com/dashboard/accounts/user_profile.

Feel free to email (info@wildfireapp.com) or call us (888-274-0929) if you have other questions or concerns.

Thank you for your patience and for being a Wildfire customer!

Cheers,
The Wildfire Team

Thank You!

Published on June 24, 2010 in Good Times. 0 Comments

Wildfire HQ is abuzz– this morning, going through our fan page and responding to people’s comments and questions, we noticed that we have 10,999 fans! Hopefully, by the time this post is live, we’ll have 11,000! It seems to be that…you like us! You really like us!

Our team could not be happier to serve you– every interaction we have with a friend, a fan, a user, helps us to gauge the impact our product is having on social media, internet marketing, and the business of understanding and engaging a user base.

Keep ‘em coming, guys! If you promise to keep checking in and dropping us a line now and then, we’ll promise to keep rolling out new and exciting features to add to our product lineup, making it easier for your business or brand to engage with and grow its user base!

Screenshot of facebook fan page with 10,999 fans

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Wildfire Gets New Digs!

Published on June 21, 2010 in Good Times. 2 Comments

Wildfire new addressHere at Wildfire, we’ve been lucky to enjoy ongoing success with our products– it’s been very humbling and extremely exciting to see our services covered in the media and shouted out by our fans and loyal customers. To that end, we’ve also been experiencing some growth! Our team has been steadily expanding, and we have outgrown our office!

We’re excited to share with you the news about our brand new headquarters, located in downtown Palo Alto, where all the cool web kids are. We’ll be moving to 167 Hamilton Ave, to occupy two floors and take over the roof! Our plans are grand– we will now have conference rooms with doors, and our shopping list includes a kegerator, so that the team can enjoy cold brew on Fridays after work, on the roof.

The office space we’re occupying will have room for many new desks– that’s because we’re still hiring for several open positions. If you are looking for a new job with a fast-paced, social-media-focused tech startup, check out our open positions here. Come join us, we’ve been looking for you!

New Office

Whatdya think? There are doors!