As a member of the Google Engagement Solutions Developer Program, Wildfire provides quick-to-launch custom YouTube Brand Channel solutions that help brands extend their reach and drive engagement with their core audience.

In addition to being a part of the Google ESDP, Wildfire is also a charter Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, with three Facebook development qualifications, including:

• Pages – Post scheduling and targeting, moderation, permissioning, and other tools to manage Facebook Pages.
• Apps – Services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations – customized or self service.
• Insights – Page and post analysis, benchmarking, KPI tracking, and other tools for measuring performance across Facebook objects.

Wildfire was part of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) program at its inception in 2008, and is now part of Facebook’s recently announced Preferred Marketing Developer Program. The program vets vendors for qualifications in several specialty areas, and Wildfire is among a single-digit handful of developers that earned 3 out of 4 qualifications badges for the launch of the program (out of a total 232 vendors).

Wildfire is part of the inaugural class of LinkedIn Certified Developer Partners too. CDPs receive in-depth training to help them effectively use LinkedIn’s platform products to build custom marketing technology, like Wildfire’s LinkedIn promotions integration. Read more about our integration here.


And don’t forget that Wildfire is by your side on Twitter too, powering your branded marketing initiatives in a tweet-friendly way with Promotions and Messenger functionalities.

Want to learn more about where you can go with Wildfire on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? Contact us, or drop us a note in the comments. We love to hear from you!

The good news is, we’ve run hundreds of successful campaigns for leading brands across all three networks—and we can tell you exactly what works, and what doesn’t. In Part 1 of our Social Advertising webinar series, our experts will explain the creative strategies that get the strongest response on each network.

REGISTER HERE for the free webinar.

Join us to find out:

• Best practices for writing ad copy
• What creative images are most popular with audiences
• The differences in layout and styling between ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• What not to do when advertising on Facebook

REGISTER HERE for the free webinar. If you cannot attend live, not to worry! We’ll be sending all of the materials to registrants in a follow up email, including a recording of the presentation.

With a different look, better tools, and more control over content, brands are trying to express themselves in new ways to increase engagement and win new followers. The experts at Wildfire will fill you in on what’s working, and what isn’t.

Join us for a close look at:

• How Timeline has impacted fan page engagement
• How early adopter brands have learned to optimize content
• How to rethink engagement applications for the new Timeline user flows
• New best practices from some of the savviest marketers on Facebook

Register here to attend, FREE. All registrants will receive a copy of the recorded presentation after the webinar.

With this announcement, Wildfire is the first social marketing platform to enable brands to drive engagement with consumers across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Our video contest promotions are an incredibly popular part of our Social Marketing Suite, and we’ve seen 100% annual growth in the use of video contests over the last two years, as brands leverage the power of contests to engage consumers and inspire user-generated content.

Brands like Dairy Queen, Mercedes-Benz, Sony and Western Union have run successful video contests on Facebook, as have 7,000 other Wildfire video contest clients in the past 12 months. By adding YouTube into the mix of networks brands can use to engage users, Wildfire is offering enterprise and consumer brands the ability to tap into a social environment where users view over 4 billion videos per day.

To learn more about this exciting new integration, view the press release here, or read about it in Adweek here. To find out about how your brand can run its next video contest across Facebook, LinkedIn, microsite, and YouTube, contact us here.

Well, you’d join Wildfire, of course.

Wildfire is pleased to welcome to our team just such a person, Doug Laird. Doug joins Wildfire from business intelligence software company Qliktech, where as VP of Global Marketing he helped grow Qliktech’s annual revenue run-rate from $80 million to $321 million in just three years (juggernaut for sure!). Doug also oversaw marketing strategy during the company’s big IPO in July of 2010; it was one of the top 3 best performing tech IPOs of the prior 2 years.

Not satisfied with this awesome list of professional and business successes, Doug decided to find himself another Silicon Valley software company to take to the next level, and he chose Wildfire because,

“As a long-time technology marketer, I believe that social engagement is the marketing model of the future, and Wildfire is in the best position to capitalize on this trend and serve the market with its volume and velocity model, focused on small and medium-sized businesses with rapid movement into the enterprise. I’ve seen this approach succeed time and again with the world’s top software companies, such as Salesforce.com, and it’s clear to me that Wildfire has the same scalable model that will allow us to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity.

Wildfire is a thought leader that is ushering in the new era of engagement marketing, and I’m excited to join the team at this pivotal point in the company’s history.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Welcome to the team, Doug.  Read the full press release here.

Leave a comment welcoming Doug to the Wildfire team below! We love to hear from you.

Let’s recap the announcements Facebook made and what they mean for your brand:

• Timeline for brands will also be functional in the mobile platform (but will be made available at an unspecified date in 2012)

Implications for brands: Where brands can currently launch mobile-optimized marketing campaigns that users can access from their smart devices, soon users will be able to experience the same exact workflow on their desktop as on their smart phone. The new Timeline format for brands, once available on the mobile network, will enable page managers to curate an identical experience for all users, regardless of how they’re accessing branded content on Facebook. This means a big impact on your brand’s reach, especially as we consider that nearly half of the active Facebook user population interacts with the network from their mobile device.

• Sponsored Stories now appear in the mobile feed as well

Implications for brands: To date, there has been no advertising reach to any Facebook users on mobile devices. In light of the fact that approximately 450 million Facebook users interact with the network using a mobile device, this was an enormous opportunity lost to marketers— until now. Sponsored Story ad units are the only ones being released to mobile Timelines— this means that promoting these “organic word of mouth” advertising units will become a major part of every marketers mission.

In a sense, it’s a bit silly to call 2012 the Year of Mobile because every year since the release of Apple’s ill-fated Newton has been the Year of Mobile. We have always been moving toward computing devices that are smaller, faster, and cheaper. According to research by Morgan Stanley, the number of people who access the Internet primarily from mobile devices will surpass desktop users sometime in 2013.

The shift toward mobile is about to hit social media in a big way. Facebook recently revealed that more than 450 million people use Facebook Mobile on a monthly basis, and more importantly, mobile is outgrowing desktop use 2:1. They have planned a variety of mobile-centric product announcements this year, including Sponsored Stories for Mobile, which will be the one and only advertising channel there.

Marketers who fail to integrate mobile support into their social media plans are in grave danger of being left behind.

Fortunately for Wildfire clients, many of our most popular templates already look great across all viewing platforms. What’s more, we’ve made it a one-step process to design and deploy Facebook page tabs that look beautiful on mobile, tablets, and on the desktop. (See the related press release here). There’s no messing around with multiple content channels and no synchronization issues or duplication of effort between creative teams. All a client has to do is choose a template and supply the creatives; we make sure it looks beautiful wherever it’s viewed.

The linchpin of Wildfire’s mobile platform is the philosophy of responsive design, which employs specific HTML5, CSS, and Javascript technologies to ensure that the same content displays well on devices of any screen size. We believe that campaigns using responsive design will serve to distinguish truly beautiful and content-oriented brands and apps from the merely serviceable.

More advanced clients who want to write their own custom templates can take advantage of our copious documentation, example code, and powerful plug-in framework to quickly build beautiful campaigns that look great whether the customer is viewing on an Android phone or a 27” widescreen.  And our Analytics framework keeps track of mobile statistics separately, so clients can see for themselves the impact mobile users are having on their bottom line. (See the related press release here).

2012 may or may not be the Year of Mobile, but it’s definitely the year mobile becomes a primary channel for the social media experience. Don’t be left behind.

On February 29th Facebook announced the transition of brand pages on Facebook from the previous profile-like format to the new style: Timeline. This major update affects not only the look and feel of brand pages, but their function and best practices for how to use them.

The switch to Timeline is available for all page owners now, but will be automatically pushed to all pages at the end of March. That leaves just one month to understand the changes, optimize the features, and recreate a Facebook marketing strategy for your brand.

There’s a lot to learn, but we’re here to help. Join us this Friday at 10am PST for a free webinar— we’ll take a comprehensive look at every new feature and go through all the changes you need to keep top-of-mind when re-working the Facebook strategy for your brand.

Not your average ads solution
Unlike first-generation ad management solutions – which optimize only for traditional metrics like cost-per-click, fans, or impressions – Wildfire’s solution integrates Adaptly’s technology, which optimizes for maximum social engagement too (i.e. the number of people talking about your brand in some way). Adaptly’s proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s owned channels (like their Facebook page) and earned channels (like their fans’ likes, shares and comments that reach their fans’ friends). Then it analyzes the impact of ads on earned media in real time, and continuously refines ads to reach those fans that are truly interested in interacting with the brand. This drives ongoing engagement – the objective marketers care most about today – at the lowest cost. Our own beta test clients saw an average 49% cost-per-fan reduction.

In other words, where traditional social ad solutions require human intervention— A/B testing, constant monitoring, pausing poorly performing ads and rejigging to make them better— our sophisticated ad optimization algorithm now corrects campaigns in real-time, pulling the duds offline and allocating spend to the high performers…all faster than the fastest human could make it happen.

Yes, social ad management is available on other social marketing platforms, but self-optimizing technology is unavailable from any other vendor. Wildfire is the first social marketing platform to bring this integrated social ad solution to market. This is the future of social advertising, and Wildfire is offering it now.

Not just Facebook
By the way, Facebook is not the only social network that offers big marketing opportunities, and neither should it be your only consideration for ad campaigns. Adaptly is social network agnostic, so you can run your powerfully engaging ad campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn too.

Wildfire is incredibly excited about this unique partnership, and we look forward to offering it to our clients. For additional information, including Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom’s remarks about this big announcement, check out our press release here.  

The TechFellow awards is an annual startup investment program put on by TechCrunch, Founders Fund and NEA. The program goal is to honor technology innovators and celebrate the spirit of innovation in Silicon Valley. A handful of tech moguls including Sean Parker (Facebook), Dave Morin (Path), and Aaron Patzer (Mint.com) ruminated on community nominations for visionaries in the fields of engineering, product design and marketing, general management, and disruptive innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.

Victoria was one of those visionaries! She was named a General Management TechFellow, and now has a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of her choice. Have any input on how it should be invested or in which company? Tell us in the comments, we want to hear what you think!