Wildfire Social Media Marketing Blog

Wildfire to Rock Out at SXSW this Week

Maya — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:23:43 +0000

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!

TIPS & TRICKS: Keep your Fans and Users Coming Back for More

Maya — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:23:05 +0000

If you’ve ever tried reaching out to your fan base or users on the web through any social media channel, you know how hard it can be to get their attention. It’s even harder holding on to that attention once you’ve gotten it. One strategy that has proven itself to be highly effective within the social web is developing a routine. A routine is anything that can be established according to a schedule, and just like we all have our individual (and sometimes completely wacky) morning routines that we feel lost without, establishing some scheduled marketing elements can not only help to ensure that you keep on top of your social marketing activities but it can also help to increase your audience’s trust and engagement because they become used to the routine and expect that on certain days, they will be interacting with your brand, like on “Fashion Fridays” or Monday giveaways.

A great example of this type of routine promotional effort can be found on the Facebook Fan page of Swell.com. Swell is an online-only retailer of clothing, gear, and other products for the surf industry. Every Wednesday, they use Wildfire’s Social Media Marketing Platform to put out a sweepstakes called “Win it Wednesday!” where they give away cool but relatively inexpensive prizes such as a cute dress by Billabong or a trendy pair of board shorts. Swell’s Facebook fan base, which is at over 4,500 people as of this blog post, has become used to this weekly routine, which Swell has been running for several months. Based on the steady fan growth that Swell has experienced as well as the comments that fans are posting on Swell’s wall, “Win it Wednesdays” is proving to be a hit with fans and a highly effective strategy for Swell.

Your creativity is the limit on the type of outreach you could consider to run on a scheduled basis. It could be that the first of every month you giveaway a gift card, or every Friday you put up a new coupon to your store. You could be like Swell and set up your own Wednesday win-it, based on the product or service you are marketing.

Social media marketing outreach done around a routine doesn’t need to be a big, complicated affair. We can see from the successful example at Swell, if you can promise your users that once a week, if they come back to your page and check in, there might be something awesome waiting for them (like those really cute sunglasses) you might be surprised with just how many of your fans begin to make their own routines of visiting and interacting with your Fan Page around the promotions you’ve created for them.

FEATURED CAMPAIGN: Wildfire Powers the Perfect Kill with EA Games

Maya — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:33:11 +0000

It’s not often we get to write blog titles like the one above, at least without worrying what everyone might think about our sanity, but we’re particularly enthusiastic about the Deadspace 2 “Design a Kill” promotion being run by EA Games on it’s Deadspace Facebook Fan Page. EA is encouraging Deadspace 2 fans to submit their visions of a perfect kill sequence between two Deadspace characters for a chance to win the chosen idea and it’s creator’s face built into and featured in the Deadspace 2 video game when it comes out later this year.

EA Games created the promotion using our essay, photo, and video submission contest campaign tools. Users can choose any format to submit their ideas in, and when the submissions get narrowed down by EA to a select group of finalists, the Facebook Deadspace community will be able to vote on the ultimate winner of the perfect kill prize. Allowing for a variety of submission formats means that EA has cast a very wide net to their fans, allowing all users to choose how engaged they want to be in the contest– if creating and editing a video seemed too difficult to one, maybe submitting a set of pictures was more appealing, or even entering a written script might be the favorite method of a group of users to enter the contest. The more options that are provided, the more people EA can expect to engage. After all, imagine how cool would it be to have your face in a video game! (We suppose it would matter if you were the one killing or being killed, huh?) Check out the contest live here, where you can submit for your chance to win through March 26th.

FEATURED CAMPAIGN: President Obama uses Wildfire, Promotes Foreign Relations!

Maya — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:24:52 +0000

Here at Wildfire headquarters, we get to see a lot of campaigns that are pretty fun and compelling which we are excited to be a part of. This campaign falls into the fun and compelling category for sure, but it even goes a step further, by promoting foreign relations between the U.S. and Indonesia!

The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta is using Wildfire to run a promotion on their Facebook Fan Page to excite Indonesian fans about President Obama’s upcoming visit to the country. Users can pick their favorite cultural foods and clothing items to suggest the President sample and wear while he is visiting and then enter a sweepstakes to win tickets to attend one of the events. The campaign, pictured below, is in Indonesian, but all the cool pictures of traditional Indonesian food and colorful batik (the Indonesian word for the famous traditional fabric of their culture) makes us wish we were visiting Indonesia so that we could sample all of those goodies too!

Now we’re even more optimistic: if Wildfire can be used to promote foreign relations, what can’t it be used for? The campaign was even featured on the Facebook Platform newsfeed! (We think it’s really because everyone is super curious about what a Durian fruit smells like.

NEW: Multiple ‘Become a Fan’ Feature

Maya — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:01:35 +0000

We have added a great new feature to the Wildfire Social Media Marketing platform that we wanted to share with you:

Feature Overview

With our White Label solution, promotions that are created can now require that a user become a fan of multiple Facebook fan pages before being able to enter in a promotion! Our application is the only brand marketing application on Facebook that provides the ability to mandate that users become a fan of multiple Facebook Fan Pages within one promotion. This feature is ideal for any campaigns that have co-branding between different promotion administrators or those involving a company brand as endorsed by a celebrity, athlete, or another brand. For example, the Phoenix Suns and Right Guard are using this feature with their current quiz and sweepstakes promotion. See it here through March 15!

The Right Guard and Phoenix Suns co-branded campaign is a sweepstakes to win a trip to see the basketball team play.

When a user is attempting to enter the sweepstakes, the entry form page clearly stipulates that users must become fans of both Right Guard and The Phoenix Suns in order to be eligible to enter.

As a user clicks to enter the Sweepstakes, he is shown the two Fan page buttons, and told he has to be a fan of each page in order to be eligible.

Additionally, when white label promotions are configured to mandate Fan Page sign-up, the feature works like a gatekeeper, locking the user out of official entry to the promotion unless they are confirmed by the tool to be a fan of the Facebook page in question. Below, we can see the reminder screen barring the user from entering the Phoenix Suns Right Guard Sweepstakes, telling the user that he “need[s] to be a fan” to be eligible to win.”

Even if the user attempts to enter the sweepstakes without first being a fan of each page, his entry form is not processed and he is displayed a screen which reminds him that he must first be a fan of each Facebook fan page to enter.

Our application provides a more seamless user experience when it comes to acquiring Facebook fans. We display the ‘Become a Fan’ feature naturally into the user flow whereas most other apps force consumers to become a fan of their page before the user can even access the application to see what becoming a fan would offer them. In this way, the barrier to access and engage with our campaigns is much lower than with other apps that force users to become fans upfront.

There is no limit on the amount of Fan Pages that can now be added at one time, so co-branding and reaping all the fan base benefits has never been easier!

What Time is it? Engaging with your User Base on a Timeline

Maya — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:52:35 +0000

Keeping users engaged on a rolling basis with timely material, however simple or just plain fun the timely acknowledgement is, is a way to keep their eyes on your brand’s radar. Providing outreach on a timeline, such as a holiday themed contest, or a rolling weekly “Fab Friday” vote for best dressed actor, is also a way to integrate an element of almost-real-time connectivity to your conversations with your fans.

For example, TV shows which reveal relative dates when the actors were taping (such as reality series’), whether they lag behind real life for 2 months or 2 days, nevertheless serve to connect us to the media in a way which we were not connected before. It literally exposes a dimension, time, to the viewer that allows him to incorporate the show into his realities, think about it in relation to the timeline of his life, and provides a sticky factor to his viewing that is different from the audaciousness of some hit game show or the latest love triangle (or quadrangle) on a daily soap opera. It’s a connector, when usually making a connection to your viewer is a tough science to understand.

Keeping in touch and in time with your fans, then, can be a similarly interactive experience. For example, on Valentine’s Day of this year, Facebook released a study on it’s daily blog that Facebook researchers had composed which analyzed how relationship status impacted user happiness. Read it here, it’s pretty interesting! While the results weren’t altogether unexpected (people in relationships seemed happier, at least insofar as they used more instances of “happy” words in their status updates) the resulting feedback has been generally positive, and plentiful. That particular blog post received 70 comments from Facebook users who read the blog directly at the site, and 124 “likes.” When the story was printed up on Mashable, the headline was retweeted over 1,000 times as of this blogpost, and shared through Facebook connect 700 times.

Think about the many ways at your disposal to run different sorts of promotional campaigns that are time relevant– a vote on who the top Olympians at Vancouver are? The upcoming arrival of Spring and the chance to win a “Spring Fling” package of goodies? Even Easter and the inevitable question of which holiday themed Peeps reign supreme?

You can direct all of these time-relevant promotions at your fan base with Wildfire– our quick and easy to manage promotion builder can be used to launch engaging promotional campaigns on Facebook or Twitter in all sorts of fun flavors, including sweepstakes, quizzes, contests, coupons and even virtual gifts!

We Sincerely Apologize for the Unintentional Emails Today!

Alain Chuard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:20:55 +0000

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.

Navigating the new Facebook Promotions Guidelines

Alain Chuard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:52:17 +0000

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:

Publicizing vs. Administering

The big distinction that Facebook makes in their new policy is between ‘publicizing‘ and ‘administering‘ a promotion on Facebook. ‘Publicizing‘ a promotion means that you promote, advertise or reference a promotion in Facebook, but you do not collect entries or draw or notify winners in Facebook. ‘Administering‘ a promotion means you both publicize it, collect entries and draw/notify winners in Facebook.

Publicizing a Promo DOES NOT REQUIRE Facebook Approval

All companies/organizations can ‘publicize’ promotions in Facebook without needing any special permission. Wildfire provides you with the ultimate solution for doing this – using our application you can easily create a promotion that displays on your Facebook fan page, you can require entrants to become a fan to access your promotion and you can spread the word by enabling entrants to publish newsfeeds. We also enable you to easily collect entries, draw winners and notify entrants, but this all happens outside of Facebook so that you do not need to seek special permission from Facebook. As always, our solution enables you to have a promotion up and running in Facebook within minutes.

Administering a Promo REQUIRES Facebook Approval

For those companies wishing to both ‘publicize’ AND ‘adminster’ their promotion in Facebook, it is now necessary to check in with your Facebook sales rep to get approval and to have your rules reviewed. Wildfire can manage this process on your behalf and if you do not have a Facebook sales rep we can help you to get one. Just drop us a line at sales@wildfireapp.com or give us a call at 1-888-274-0929 and we’ll help you through this process. Please note that eligibility for a Facebook sales rep does depend on your level of spending on Facebook advertising so not all companies will be eligible to get a rep. We recommend that smaller companies use our solution to publicize their promotion in Facebook and administer it outside of Facebook, thus avoiding the need to get permission from a Facebook sales rep.

Promos Can Only Be Run Through a Facebook App (like Wildfire)

Another important change is that companies can no longer administer a promotion in Facebook without using an application, such as that provided by Wildfire. In the past many companies have run promotions by telling entrants to post a comment on the company’s fan page wall, upload a photo to the company’s Facebook album or click the ‘become a fan’ button to enter. Such promotions are no longer allowed and must be run using an application. Wildfire’s contests and sweepstakes application which enables entrants to submit photos/videos/text, vote, complete an entry form, invite friends and collect entries provides a compliant way for companies to run a variety of different promotions.

Special Facebook Restrictions

Certain promotions can no longer be publicized or administered in Facebook; these include:

promotions that are open to under 18 year olds (Wildfire’s promotions platform automatically excludes under 18 years olds if you’re running your promotion in Facebook)
promotions that are open to citizens of Belgium, Norway, Sweden or India or countries that are embargoed by the US (Wildfire’s promotions platform automatically excludes these nations)
promotions that promote: gambling, tobacco, dairy, firearms, prescription drugs, or gasoline (Wildfire’s promotions platform automatically reminds companies of this restriction)
promotions that offer any of the following prizes: alcohol, tobacco, dairy, firearms of prescription drugs (Wildfire’s promotions platform automatically reminds companies of this restriction)
sweepstakes that condition entry upon the purchase of a product, completion of a lengthy task or other form of consideration

Special Language Required

Facebook’s new guidelines require that you include certain language on your entry form that makes clear to entrants that the promotion is not sponsored or endorsed by Facebook. Wildfire promotions platform automatically includes this language for you.

Facebook Promo Guidelines only apply to Sweepstakes & Contests

Facebook’s Promotions policy only applies to sweepstakes and contests. The other formats that we offer (i.e. coupons, quizzes, virtual gifts, giveaways, ‘top favorites’, trivia and sign-up forms) are not affected by Facebook’s Promotions policy and nor, of course, are our solutions for Twitter and websites.

If you have any questions about the Facebook Promotions Guidelines or the changes we have made to our platform so that you can easily comply with the new changes, please dont hesitate to contact us at info@wildfireapp.com or call 1-888-274-0929.

NOMINATE WILDFIRE: ‘The Crunchies’ Awards!

Alain Chuard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:51:31 +0000

Nominations for the 2009 Crunchies Awards are now open and we’d be super grateful if you’d consider nominating Wildfire for the “Best Bootstrapped StartUp” category. The Crunchies are described as the ‘Oscars’ for the tech world and are hosted annually by TechCrunch, Gigaom and Venture Beat. If you think Wildfire is worthy of being included among the best bootstrapped companies of 2009, please click on the link below to nominate us. Thanks, in advance, for your support!

Nominate us here: http://bit.ly/1KcIFs

NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH: Sweepstakes for Twitter

Alain Chuard — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:39:51 +0000

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.