HTC’s high-end efforts have garnered plenty of love lately (and rightfully so, I think), but devices like the once-mysterious HTC Golf prove that the company isn’t through churning out lower-tier handsets.
The Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Golf’s existence was first revealed a few months ago when a not-terribly-great picture taken with its five-megapixel rear camera started making the rounds, but no one had any idea what the actual device would look like. Naturally, Team PocketNow did their thing and managed to get their hands on what they claim is the first press image of the device. → Read More
On March 1st Facebook let the world feast its eyes on Timeline for Pages, and tomorrow after a month of voluntary migration it will force all Pages to switch to the redesign. But don’t worry, it doesn’t significantly impact the rate of new Page Likes, and 95% of Pages who’ve switched have seen more Likes of their posts and people talking about them according to a study that social marketing platform Wildfire gave TechCrunch an early look at. Only megabrands with over 10 million Likes have seen reduced engagement, but this was in part due to a lull following press exposure during the Timeline launch. Note that these are early results and it will take a while for the exact impact of Timeline to be clear. We’ll be following up as data emerges.
There’s more good news for smaller Pages. A study shared with us by enterprise marketing platform Hearsay Social shows local business Pages with fewer fans get 5x more exposure in the news feed, and 8x more of the fans reached will engage with a post. That means big brands with lots of local branches can get 40x the engagement by having a Page for each store. → Read More
Through the hard-fought battle to represent the world’s brands, social marketing platform Wildfire has stayed quiet. But today, it revealed to TechCrunch that it has 13,000 paying customers, more than any company in the space, and has grown from 7 to 300 employees since the start of 2010, making it as big as industry giant Buddy Media. It’s now ranked in the top 1% on the Glass Door chart of best places to work, and we estimate its 2011 revenues were between $35 and $45 million.
While 13,000 customers sounds impressive, many of those are low-paying monthly campaign clients, not big SaaS deals like other platforms close. To shift more to its lucrative full social media marketing suite, Wildfire has just hired a new CMO Doug Laird, formerly of QlikTech, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle. [Update: I've just discovered that Wildfire secretly closed a $10 million Series B round late last year. The round came from existing investors, so it could have included Summit Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, or Gary Vaynerchuk. This is the first time this funding has been written about.] → Read More
Back in January 2010, a small FBfund company called Wildfire was making a name for itself by helping brands and businesses launch viral campaigns — sweepstakes, contests, and the like — on Twitter and Facebook. It had around eight employees.
Fast forward to today: Wildfire now has a team of over 120, and it’s raking in money from a host of top brands and companies (as well as many smaller ones). And now, they’re upping the ante: in addition to the viral campaign builder that has been their core product to date, Wildfire is now offering what it’s calling a ‘Social Marketing Suite’ — which CEO Victoria Ransom says makes Wildfire a one-stop shop for all of your online marketing needs.
So what exactly does the new suite entail? The first new product is the Page Manager, which is meant to help businesses craft Facebook Pages that look good and can be frequently updated. There are several templates and support for custom designs, and support for multiple tabs. → Read More
For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. Wildfire, a service that helps companies run contests and social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, and email, is launching a new tool that looks to do the same for social media presences — in other words, it lets you visualize who has the most Twitter and Facebook followers, and how quickly they’ve grown over time. You can access the new monitor at http://monitor.wildfireapp.com.
The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don’t want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter ‘Wal-Mart’, and it will show you Wal-Mart’s Twitter and Facebook accounts). → Read More
Nearly every company has a social media presence these days, right? And, naturally, tech companies execute best. Although perhaps not.
A somewhat self-serving study by PR and marketing agency Wildfire, which analysed the social media activity of the 2009 Deloitte Fast Tech 50, found that 90% of the UK tech companies featured had a presence on two or more social networks but the majority fail to actually use social media in a social way. Instead, far too many brands are treating the likes of Twitter and Facebook as a traditional marketing channel.
Staggeringly (or maybe not), while 74% of companies operated an official Twitter account, 43% of brands had never replied to a single tweet. Overall, the study found that 57% used Twitter solely for one-way marketing activity. → Read More
Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, we saw the launch of Appbistro, a marketplace for Facebook tab applications that help companies and brands flesh out their Facebook Pages. Developers like it because it gives them an easy way to charge for their applications using Appbistro’s payments system (previously there wasn’t an easy way to charge for Facebook apps). And today, Appbistro is announcing that it’s landed a deal to distribute Facebook apps from a significant new partner: Wildfire Interactive.
Wildfire offers a platform for running marketing campaigns simultaneously on Twitter and Facebook. The company was part of Facebook’s fbFund twice, and has many large clients including Pepsi, Red Bull, Victoria’s Secret, plenty of small businesses, and everything in between. → Read More
Wildfire, a platform for building viral marketing campaigns, has received $4 million in Series A funding led by Summit Partners with additional investors, including Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk, participating in the round.
Wildfire’s platform makes it relatively easy for marketers to create attractive, branded social media marketing campaigns (e.g. sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes, virtual gift campaigns and more) and to simultaneously publish them on Facebook fan pages, on company websites (integrated with Facebook Connect) and on Twitter. → Read More
If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a tweet that asked you to retweet something (usually a link to a spammy-looking site) for the chance to enter a contest. Of course, these are typically bogus, leading many people to simply ignore them. And that poses a problem to the companies who really are trying to run sweepstakes on Twitter, who can have a hard time proving their legitimacy. Wildfire, a platform for building viral marketing campaigns, is looking to help: the company has just launched support for sweepstakes on Twitter, allowing brands to now manage campaigns across their websites, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously.
Wildfire hasn’t been around very long, but it’s already accomplished quite a bit: it won last year’s fbFund, and has built up a very impressive roster of clients, including Pepsi, Sony, CNN, Universal, AT&T, VIctoria’s Secret and even Facebook itself, which has used the service for multiple campaigns. But until now, it hasn’t been available for Twitter. → Read More
Facebook fbFund winner Wildfire is launching the private beta of its web application, The Wildfire Promotion Builder, which allows companies to create their own branded interactive promotions, including contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways. Using Facebook Connect combined with the power of the application, companies can simultaneously publish promotion campaigns on the designated “promotions tab” on the company’s Facebook page and on the company’s website (campaigns can also be simultaneously run on MySpace, Bebo, and other standalone websites).
Wildfire is giving out beta invites for the first 500 Techcrunch readers who sign up here. To be eligible, TechCrunch readers should write “Techcrunch” in the “How did you hear about us?” field at the bottom of the form. → Read More
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