Archive for the 'News & Updates' Category

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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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

How to Make Sure your Promotion is Within Facebook’s Guidelines

Published on June 2, 2010 in News & Updates. 21 Comments

A common question that we hear from our customers is: “How do I make sure my campaign is playing within the rules of Facebook Promotional Guidelines?”. We wrote a blog post about the new Facebook promotions guidelines when they came out in November but we want to use this new post to further clarify Facebook’s policy and how Wildfire can ensure that your contest or sweepstakes is always Facebook friendly.

While the full text for Facebook’s promotional guidelines can be found here, there is one point which is important to underline and understand. The guidelines state that you cannot “administer” a contest or sweepstakes on Facebook without Facebook’s written consent but you can “publicize” a promotion without approval. “Administering” refers to the collection of user data (e.g. when a user fills out an entry form) and/or the drawing or notifying of winners. “Publicizing” your promotion means that you display and promote your promotion within Facebook (e.g. on your Fan Page) but you do not collect user data or draw/notify winners within Facebook.

A promotion can thus be handled in two ways. Anybody can “publicize” their promotion within Facebok e.g. by displaying it on their Fan Page, promoting it via status updates, or by inviting friends to participate. However, only companies that obtain approval from their Facebook sales rep can have their promotions run entirely within Facebook. If you do not have a dedicated Facebook representative, a portion of your promotion (i.e. the collecting of user data and drawing/notifying of winners) needs to occur outside of Facebook.

You can create a fun, compelling, interactive sweepstakes or contest and have it live right in your Facebook Fan Page, which is completely fine within Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines. However, when the user goes to submit their information (which is called “administration” in the guidelines) without prior Facebook approval this step will occur outside of Facebook, in a microsite the user will be automatically and seamlessly guided to. This is a service Wildfire provides for all sweepstakes and contests automatically!

If you run a promotion via Wildfire we automatically solve this problem for you. We enable you to easily add a sweepstakes or contest to your Facebook fan page (without needing Facebook approval) but at the point that an entrant needs to submit their personal data (via the sweepstakes or contest entry form) he is auto-redirected to a microsite outside of Facebook where he leaves all of his data submissions. In terms of design, this site looks identical to your promotion design in Facebook, so the movement between sites is seamless and the user will usually not notice that he has momentarily been taken outside of Facebook. Finally, when he is done submitting his data and clicks “Submit,” he will be seamlessly re-directed by Wildfire right back into your Fan Page on Facebook.

This is just one of the ways that we ensure that your promotions are Facebook-compliant. In addition to this, we also automatically include in your promotion the appropriate disclaimers and footnotes required by Facebook, we automatically exclude language that’s disallowed by Facebook and we guide you to ensure that you are not offering a forbidden prize. For more details about Facebook’s promotions guidelines and how we help to guide you, check out our previous post:http://help.wildfireapp.com/faqs/frequently-asked-questions/facebook-promotions-guidelines-explanation

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Wildfire Case Study Library is Live!

Published on May 18, 2010 in Improvements and News & Updates. 0 Comments

Here at Wildfire, we love to share with you our tips for running successful promotions and recommend best practices that we have found that worked well for some of our clients in the past. In line with this effort to communicate some great ways to consider adding social media marketing promotions into your marketing strategies, we have created a new case study library on our website!

In the library, you can find a collection of case studies separated by industry vertical. The cases we chose for this initial batch are a mix of varied pricing plans, industries, promotion types, and calls to action. They have one thing in common, however– they all succeeded in achieving the varied internal goals that were set, by running promotions that were intriguing to their users. For example, in the library under the Retail vertical, you will find the story of what online clothing retailer HauteLook did with a Wildfire coupon promotion that yielded a 250% ROI on the cost of the campaign. Also, under Food and Beverage, you can read about the Edible Arrangements giveaway promotion that resulted in a double digit percentage increase in sales from the year prior.

We will be growing and adding to the library constantly, so check back from time to time. We also welcome case study suggestions– did you have a great experience running a promotion with Wildfire?  Send us an email with some details about your success story and we might make it a case study of its own, displayed on our website and featured to our audience of 50,000+ newsletter subscribers! We look forward to reading your submissions.

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Wildfire receives $4.04M in Series A funding!!!

Published on April 26, 2010 in News & Updates. 6 Comments

Hey everyone! We’re very excited to announce that we’ve received $4.04M in Series A funding from Summit Partners and a group of angel investors including Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk. For more information about the deal please read the press release below:

Wildfire Interactive Receives Growth Equity Investment from Summit Partners
Minority investment in industry-leading social media marketing company to fund continued growth
April 26, 2010
PALO ALTO, CA—Wildfire Interactive, Inc. (www.wildfireapp.com), a leading provider of social media marketing software, announced today that it has received a minority investment led by growth equity investor Summit Partners and joined by a group of angel investors including Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk.The investment will be used to fund Wildfire’s organic growth initiatives and continued development of the company’s social media marketing platform.
Founded in 2008, Wildfire offers a dynamic, self-service marketing platform that enables organizations to engage users and build followings on social networks and company websites. The software allows corporations, small businesses, marketing agencies, bloggers and non-profits to create their own branded social media marketing campaigns—such as sweepstakes, user-generated contests, quizzes, coupons and incentive-based surveys—and publish them simultaneously on their website and various social networks. The company currently serves thousands of customers, including Pepsi, Facebook, Sony, AT&T, Unilever, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, LiveNation, Edelman Digital, Victoria Secret and Subway, and has powered tens of thousands of social media marketing campaigns. Wildfire is growing rapidly, and after a small investment by the fbFund in 2009, achieved profitability early on in its life.
Victoria Ransom, Cofounder and CEO of Wildfire, said, “Wildfire is a privately financed company that reached profitability just a few months after inception, so the decision to raise outside capital was an important strategic move for us. Teaming up with Summit Partners will provide our company with additional support as we rapidly expand our product offering and enhance our already valuable service to customers.” Alain Chuard, Cofounder and Head of Product Management, added, “We’re very excited to add Summit Partners to our roster of world-class investors, which also includes the fbFund. Without Facebook, we would not be where we are today. With access to Summit’s strategic guidance, global network of contacts and long history of partnering with growing software companies, we look forward to taking our company to the next level.”
“At Summit Partners, we’ve been making growth equity investments in software companies for more than 25 years. We are seeing large-scale, increasing demand for social media marketing solutions, and Wildfire is ideally positioned to become a market leader,” said Harrison Miller, a Managing Director with Summit Partners who will join the Wildfire Board of Directors. “We have been extremely impressed by Wildfire’s track record, exceptional management team and list of marquee customers. We look forward to working with this terrific organization to achieve even greater success.”
About Wildfire Interactive, Inc.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Wildfire Interactive, Inc. (www.wildfireapp.com) is a technology company that’s dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes leverage the marketing power of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Wildfire’s patent-pending technology platform allows corporations, small businesses, agencies, bloggers and non-profits to easily create their own attractive, branded social media marketing campaigns—for example, sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes, and virtual gift campaigns—and publish them simultaneously on Facebook fan pages, on company websites (integrated with Facebook Connect) and on Twitter. Intuitive, streamlined and affordable, Wildfire’s platform is simple enough for even the least tech-savvy business manager to use, and flexible enough to suit the needs of the most creative marketer or advertising agency. Wildfire is a two-time winner of the Facebook Fund and was runner-up in the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards in 2010.
About Summit Partners
Summit Partners (www.summitpartners.com) is a growth equity investor that provides private equity and venture capital to rapidly growing companies. Founded in 1984, Summit has raised more than $11 billion in capital and has provided growth equity, recapitalization and management buyout financing to more than 300 growing companies across a range of industries and geographies. Summit Partners seeks outstanding management teams that have built their companies to market leadership. Summit’s notable software and Internet investments include AvePoint, Hyperion Software, Jamba!, McAfee, Postini, RightNow Technologies, NetWitness, SafeBoot, Tiny Prints, and Vente-Privee.com.
In the United States of America, Summit Partners operates as an SEC-registered investment advisor. In the United Kingdom, this document is issued by Summit Partners Limited, a firm authorized and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Summit Partners Limited is a limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 4141197, and its registered office is at 20–22 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4JS, UK. This document is intended solely to provide information regarding Summit Partners’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies.

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What is the Value of a Facebook Fan?

Published on April 19, 2010 in News & Updates. 11 Comments

Have you ever wondered what the value of a Facebook Fan is? You’re not alone.  An article which appeared on AdWeek last week has provided a calculation of its own.

The featured study showed that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year. By this calculation then, each fan is worth approximately $3.60 of equivalent media, or what you would be spending on traditional advertising to expect to generate the same marketing outcome. At Wildfire we’ve seen many customers use our campaigns to build their fan bases for under $1 per fan and in some cases for just a few cents per fan. So for these clients the return on investment can be huge!

To obtain these numbers, Facebook data from a collection of large and small brand Fan Pages was analyzed, with a combined 41 million fans, and showed that on average marketers who post twice a day are able to achieve monthly impressions of around 1.5 times their number of fans (i.e. 60 million monthly impressions yielded from a fan base of 41 million fans). An “impression” is the equivalent of one ad view and accordingly to the study an impression using paid advertising generally costs around $5 per 1000 impressions. So according to the calculations in the study, a fan page owner that has 10,000 fans and posts content to their page twice a day can expect that they’ll receive around $36,000 in ‘advertising’ value from these fans. In other words, if this fan page owner were to try to achieve the same level of exposure for her brand during the year, she’d have to spend around $36,000. Of course, not all fan pages are made equal – some achieve much higher engagement levels than others (the study found that some fan pages achieved 3.6 impressions per fan per month and others just 0.44 impressions per fan) but nevertheless the potential exists for fan bases to be highly valuable.

Of course, this study only measures impressions. Wildfire clients achieve far more than just impressions from the campaigns they run with us – they grow their fan bases, newsletter lists, Twitter followers, website impressions and even drive store visits and sales via coupons and giveaways. So for our customers, the value they get from a Wildfire campaign could well exceed the potential $3.60 value of a fan cited in the the AdWeek article.

So what does this mean for you? Well, for starters it means that all the time and effort you’re putting into building your fan base can have a quantifiable return (and a pretty significant one to boot!). It also means that the more regularly you update your fans, the more impressions you’ll likely be achieving and thus the greater the value of your fans. Of course, this can be a double-edged sword because if you ’spam’ your fans with content that is not relevant or compelling they’ll likely opt-out of your activity streams, thus reducing your overall impressions over time. Finally, it means that the more you can do to engage your fans beyond just impressions – for example, have them sign up for your mailing list, refer your brand to friends, claim coupons etc, the greater their value will grow. Fortunately, Wildfire’s campaigns are designed to help you achieve all these goals – sweepstakes, contests, giveaways and coupons have been shown to be one of the most effective ways to not only grow a fan base but to keep them engaged and to keep them ‘looking out’ for your brands content.


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Upcoming Facebook Fan Page Tab Design Changes

Published on March 22, 2010 in News & Updates. 22 Comments

We wanted to inform you about some upcoming changes to the way campaigns are rendered on Facebook Fan pages. Facebook has announced several changes to the look and function of Fan pages, one of which can affect the way campaigns are displayed within your fan page. Fan Page tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (current) to 520 pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design. This change has been scheduled for Early 2010, but more specific timing details have not yet been announced. We will certainly post an update once the official dates have been released.

What follows is a pictorial explanation of the expected changes.

What it currently looks like to run a promotion on a Facebook Fan page from Tab View.

Pictured below is the same promotion running in the new Fan page Tab View format, at 520 pixels wide. The header  banner has been adjusted to fit the width of this display, and it can  be seen that some of the details and pictures within the banner are no longer visible past this point. To make sure users see everything you want to show them, we suggest that in the creation of your custom 760 pixel header banners, to leave the banner past the 520 pixel mark without any messages or pictures.

This change only affects the Tab view. When the user enters deeper into the page, like to view the rules, or to submit their entry, they are directed into canvas view, which has not changed in appearance, and remains at the full 760 pixels wide. For this reason, we are not changing the upload specifications of the Header Banner in the Wildfire Promotion Builder tool, and keeping the upload width specification at 760 pixels.

Screenshot of canvas view

What this means for your campaign:

Because the width of the tab display is decreased to 520 pixels, the display of the header banner will be affected. Uploaded header banners which are 760 x 100 pixels will be cut off by the display at the 520 pixel mark. This is a design change that our developers are working on adapting the Wildfire tool to. However, in order to adapt to these display differences rapidly, we recommend that any custom header banners uploaded to the Wildfire Promotion Builder tool be adaptable to both sizes. In other words, you should still upload a 760 x 100 pixel header banner image, but design your image so that if 240 pixels are not displayable off the right side, none of the message is lost.

Our developers have already adjusted the Promotion Builder tool so that the rest of the characteristics of your promotion will not be affected by the Facebook display changes.

As always, we value your feedback and welcome your comments. Feel free to email us at any time if you encounter questions while setting up your promotion.

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PRODUCT NEWS: New Turnkey Sweepstakes Prize and Rules Solution

Published on March 17, 2010 in Improvements and News & Updates. 1 Comment

We are really excited to announce some great news! Wildfire is joining forces with Publishers Clearing House (PCH) in a new and exclusive partnership that will greatly enhance sweepstakes promotions. By combining the power of Wildfire’s Promotion Builder with PCH’s newly released API, PCH Boost, Wildfire users can create online sweepstakes promotions within minutes and without the need to draft rules or fulfill prizes. Choosing to use the new PCH Boost option when building out your sweepstakes means you can easily offer your fans and users winnings of up to $100,000 without having to deal with the administration, high costs, legal issues and logistics associated with managing sweepstakes and awarding prize money.

What’s even better, the PCH Boost sweepstakes option will be available for no added cost to a regular Wildfire sweepstakes promotion through June 15, 2010! This means that for the next three months, you can provide your user base the ability to enter to win their dream house, or car, or something equally awesome, at no cost over a regular sweepstakes where otherwise you would need to provide a prize and create the legal documentation on your own.

Wildfire Promotion Builder has already helped thousands of companies to run sweepstakes on Facebook, Microsites, and company websites, but while our technology provided a solution for building and launching sweepstakes, our users still had to take care of their own rules drafting and prize fulfillment. By choosing to use the new PCH Boost option, campaign administrators can make the entire process of managing a sweepstakes campaign much easier, enabling a quicker and more streamlined way for our users to build their Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers and an active customer database.

The option to use PCH Boost is now available right in the Wildfire Campaign Builder Wizard. By selecting this option, you can choose from a range of prizes to offer your user base, and rules will automatically be supplied to suit this prize. The drawing of winners and mailing out of prizes will also be taken care of for you, so all you need to do is promote the sweepstakes and collect your entries!

Screenshot of PCH Boost option on Wizard

The PCH Boost option allows your sweepstakes to be integrated into already existing Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, which allows you to generate buzz among your fans and users with the potential for a huge winning prize like $100,000 towards a dream car, but without you having to provide the huge prize or work out the often complicated legal terms and conditions. Once you choose to participate in the PCH option right from within the Wildfire Sweepstakes Builder Wizard you can use the drop down menus to choose from available options for prize winnings and display themes. When users enter these sweepstakes from your Facebook Fan Page or Microsite, they are entered into existing PCH Sweepstakes for those prizes while you get the benefit of building up your fan base and increasing engagement with your brand!

For a step-by-step tutorial of how to use the new sweepstakes turnkey rules and prize fulfillment with PCH Boost, check out the guide here.

The PCH Boost enabled sweepstakes includes choices of PCH supplied headers and banners that compliment the sweepstakes prize you chose for your campaign. The sweepstakes runs right inside of your Facebook Fan Page or Microsite just like all sweepstakes created with the Wildfire tool.

Screenshot of Fbook Boost page

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