Social media marketing firm Wildfire Interactive has expanded its flagship product beyond promotion-building tools to a wider marketing platform.
The company started by offering brand-building tools for sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, coupons and so on that companies could run on their Facebook or Twitter page or their own site. Now Wildfire has expanded that and has launched what it calls its Social Marketing Suite.
The new platform includes a number of features that Wildfire says can help a business to "develop, engage and monetise its fan base via social media". The product now includes a number of additional elements alongside the Promotion Builder aspect, which is Wildfire’s traditional product.
The first new aspect is Page Manager, which enables companies to create fan pages on Facebook Pages and other sites. It offers a template gallery or for a more personal touch companies can build their own using a design toolkit.
Next up is Messenger. This lets companies track what people are saying about their pages. Founder and CEO Victoria Ransom told CBR this wasn’t along the same lines as Radian6, which can listen in to conversations across the web. Instead, she said, it is more like a "social inbox" where you can follow what is being said about a certain promotion or on a company’s Facebook wall.
Messenger also lets companies update their pages.
Finally there is Dashboard, which is the analytical side of things. It lets users track the viral spread of a promotion as well as benchmarking its effectiveness against competitors by using data from over 30 million Facebook and Twitter pages, the company said.
Ransom told CBR that the company does still see some reservations about the value of social media marketing but companies are beginning to come around to the idea.
"We hear from people that they are having a tough time convincing senior management to get excited about it," she said. "They are worried about losing control of their brand and they worry about people saying bad things about them. My response is that people will say something bad anyway; the control battle has been lost. You might as well get into that conversation and have that ability to respond. When brands are genuine and responsive – whether it’s praise or a complaint – they will get a much better reaction from customers."
Wildfire Interactive is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and has recently opened offices in London as it expands internationally. Its clients include Amazon, Ogilvy and Facebook itself, which has also invested in the company.
