Wildfire is going to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media Conference and Festival! And we won’t just be eating famous Austin barbecue and meeting new folks from all over the country (although we do hope there will be a lot of that). We’re going to be competing for the ultimate honor of winning the Micosoft Bizspark Accelerator competition to take home the prize of the 2010 Most Innovative Web Technology! Victoria, Alain, and Curtis will be at the conference, so if you want to meet them there to finally see their pretty mugs in person, send over an email to any one of them at [their firstname][at]wildfireapp[dot]com.
Wildfire was chosen as one of the 32 finalists to battle it out on stage during the 2 day Bizspark Accelerator contest. We will be demonstrating our product among a group of some of the most innovative minds and teams in technology today. Needless to say, we are so excited. On Day 2, the judges will have narrowed the selections down to the top 12 companies, and at the end of another day of pitching and demos, the winner will be announced. (Cross your fingers for us!) If you want to tune in on the action, the entire competition will be streamed live through the Accelerator site at SXSW.com, here! The rest of the team will certainly be keeping up with us from the office.
Our CEO Victoria will also be sitting on a panel, talking about Experimental Design and User Interfaces, so if you are at the conference, stop by there and say hey afterwards!
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.
We’re excited to announce a partnership with 
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.
We’re excited to have moved into a new office! It’s nothing fancy but very functional – perfect for a lean start-up. If you’re ever in Palo Alto and feel like stopping by, our 
Do you need help setting up your Wildfire campaign? You can now reach us instantly from your Wildfire account.
