Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, announced that over 13,000 paying customers are using its Social Marketing Suite, making it the largest social media marketing platform in the world. The Wildfire Platform has powered over 200,000 social marketing campaigns. More than half of the world’s Top 50 Most Valuable Brands, including Facebook itself, use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences across the mobile and social web.
In 2011, Wildfire experienced explosive growth. Its revenues grew by 300 percent, while maintaining strong margins, and expanded the team to over 300 employees worldwide by March of 2012. With new offices in London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore, the company also grew its international business by 500 percent, with more than 24 percent of the company’s revenue now coming from outside the U.S.
In 2011, Wildfire was named one of the Top 50 Best Startups by TiE and was also ranked as one of the Top 250 Global Private Companies by AlwaysOn.
The company’s growth has been fueled in large part by the exceptional results brands achieve with Wildfire, which has led to significant repeat business and strong organic customer growth. On average, Wildfire customers gain a 3x increase in fan growth rate while working with Wildfire. With 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011, Wildfire is adding mid- and enterprise-level customers at a faster rate than any direct competitor.
Employee satisfaction and retention rates have also contributed to the company’s growth in today’s competitive tech hiring climate: in 2011 and 2012, Wildfire was named one of the Top 10 Best Places To Work by the San Francisco Business Times, and is currently ranked in the top 1% of best places to work in the U.S. by Glassdoor.com.
New technology innovations have also played a substantial role in the company’s growth over the past year. In July of 2011, the company introduced its Social Marketing Suite, integrating best-of-breed social promotion software, robust page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics into one complete platform. In early 2012, the company expanded its offerings to include mobile Facebook marketing, and most recently, through partnership with Adaptly, Wildfire integrated ad buying and ad optimization capabilities into its Social Marketing Suite, enabling organizations to drive greater return on their paid, owned and earned media.
Wildfire co-founders Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom (Click Image To Enlarge)
Last month, co-founder and CEO Victoria Ransom was named a TechFellow by the Founders Fund, NEA and TechCrunch, for outstanding technology leadership and innovation.
Victoria Ransom, co-founder and CEO of Wildfire says.
“Social media has evolved from a stand-alone channel to one that permeates every marketing program. As brands continue to integrate social into all their marketing programs, they will need sophisticated, enterprise-grade software like Wildfire’s to successfully manage and optimize every customer interaction. With our continued technology innovation, our strong customer base and our outstanding team, Wildfire is extremely well-positioned to further scale the business in the coming years.”
Wildfire Interactive CEO Victoria Ransom interviewed by Bloomberg TV in London about the social media marketing company and its quick and successful growth.
COMMENTARY:
Wildfire Background
Wildfire is the second profitable company co-founded by Alain Chuard and Victoria Ransom, who were long-time friends before becoming romantic partners. In 2010, they sold the adventure travel company they started a decade ago, now called Access Adventure Travel, after building it into a multimillion dollar business.
The sale allowed them to focus full-time on Wildfire, which got its start in the summer of 2008 after Ransom and Chuard beat 600 other entrants to win a $250,000 first prize from the Facebook Fund, the social network's investment vehicle. In 2009, Facebook made an equity investment of another $100,000 in Wildfire, which has raised a total of $4.1 million dollars from the venture capital firm Summit Partners and angel investors, such as Jeff Clavier, who also owns a piece of Groupon. Most of that money is still in the bank, CEO Ransom says, because the company has been “consistently cash flow positive on a quarterly basis.”
So what's the secret of their business success?
According to one of their backers, Ransom and Chuard have complementary skills.
Andrew Collins, a partner at Summit Partners, a venture capital firm with $11 billion under management and offices in London, Boston and Palo Alto, Calif. says.
"They play well off each other's strengths. Victoria is a gifted leader and business mind, while Alain has a wonderful vision for product."
Ransom sets the company's strategic direction, runs operations and has been its chief fundraiser and public face, all while building a reputation as a leader in social-media marketing. She is the one who can rally a team around a common vision and "figure out any problem you throw at her," says Chuard, who's in charge of product design and development for Wildfire.
Ransom says about Alain.
"His strength is a good intuition for product and a good eye for what [software] design is best for customers. With us, it's very clear who's doing what day to day."
In some ways, the two are an unlikely pair.
Chuard, who speaks four languages, was raised in Switzerland, part of an entrepreneurial family that saw both his father and uncle run successful businesses. Ransom, meanwhile, was raised on a New Zealand farm in the small village of Scott's Ferry.
They met at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., when Chuard, who was a professional snowboarder for several years, agreed to teach Ransom the winter sport. After starting off as friends at college, they never lost touch and have been romantically involved for more than a decade. But after moving to New York together, they found themselves working, unhappily, as financial analysts at rival New York investment banks.
Ransom says.
"We weren't passionate about it and were trying to decide what to do with the rest of our lives."
But then the pair noticed the startup founders who came in to pitch to their banks did have passion for their work. So they quit their jobs and followed their passion for adventure by founding a company that let them travel the world teaching clients things like surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking.
When they needed Internet-based software to help run the business, Chuard, who majored in math and economics, designed and developed it. That application helped earn each of them spots in the entrepreneurial internship program at Highland Capital Partners in Boston, where Ransom had moved to earn a master's of business administration from Harvard.
The "aha" moment for Wildfire Interactive came when the pair wanted to run a sweepstakes campaign for adventure travelers on Facebook, but were disappointed in the software offerings available. So Chuard, who had earned his MBA from Stanford, created one called Promotion Builder.
So how do Ransom and Chuard balance their personal and professional lives in the ultra-competitive world of Silicon Valley Internet startups?
The couple says that while business is part of their relationship, their relationship isn't part of the business.
Ransom says.
"When we're at work, no one would even know we're engaged. It's not relevant. When we do disagree, we take it offline."
She thinks it's easier to have a partner who understands the 24/7 nature of running a startup, although Wildfire’s rapid growth has put their marriage plans on hold.
“Someone who doesn’t know what that’s like might feel neglected.”
Hitting the slopes or the surf together in their precious spare time also helps, according to Chuard.
He says.
"It's a good thing we have so many other interests in common."
What is Wildfire?
Wildfire Products
Wildfire Offers Five Different Products:
Promotion Builder - Build and track powerful custom promotions across multiple social networks. Grow and engage your audience on Facebook, Twitter and more.
- Grow and engage your audience. It's a fact: promotions build fans and followers and drive sales. Run best-in-class campaigns to build and engage your audience.
- Track powerful analytics. Access real-time metrics. Analyze user behavior, aggregate demographic profiles and viral campaign information.
- Customize Branding & Design. Receive complete branding control and advanced design capabilities to push your campaign to the next level.
Page Manager - Easily create custom social pages with our design toolkit. Efficiently manage content across multiple networks and your own website.
- Build better Facebook or Twitter pages. Choose from several templates. Add your custom content and have your page up and running in on your Facebook tab, website or mobile site in minutes.
- Drive Engagement. Spark conversation and engagement among your fans and followers with social plugins, shareable stores, galleries, promotions and more.
- Maintain Total Control. Manage content publishing rights with Wildfire's sophisticated permissioning, and control which users see your content with advanced audience targeting.
Messenger - View, manage and moderate messaging across all of your social properties. Target messages by geography and demographics, and schedule them to post any time.
- Message Anywhere, Anytime. Schedule targeted, custom messages to post to one or all of your social properties now or later.
- Target Your Global Audience. Target messages to specific languages and locations so your fans receive personalized messages every time.
- Engage With Every Post. Compose and publish interative media-rich posts to all of your fan pages in one simple interface.
Analytics - Track audience growth and engagement across all of your social properties. Find out who your brand ambassadors are.
- See How You Stack Up. Identify exactly where you should focus to outperform your competitors and industry as a whole.
- Get Your Message Right. Use per-post engagement analytics to test your messaging and select the messages with the highest conversion.
- Interactive, Powerful Reports. Get real-time results for all your social efforts, plus easy-to-understand indicators of ROI.
Monitor - Use the Wildfire Social Media Monitor to glean insights about the growth of your social media fanbase on the leading social networks. With daily tracking, you have visibility into growth trends small and large.
- Track Your Competitors. No company is an island. Gauge your social media success against others in your industry by comparing your follower bases across the leading social networks. Quickly find out if you're gaining traction or leaving your competitors in the dust.
- Receive Alerts. Whether you're just starting out or already an expert in social media, Wildfire's alert system will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that's relevant to your social presence.
- Scout The Leaderboards. Find out which social properties are leading the pack from among the millions we track every day. Browse the top Facebook pages based on number of Likes or Checkins, and check out the top Twitter users based on number ofFollowers, Following or Tweets.
Plans & Pricing
Promotion Builder pricing is as follows:
Click Image To Enlarge
Social Marketing Suite (Call Wildfire for pricing). Here is a summary of the Social Marketing Suite:
- Complete Social Marketing Solution - Promotions, page management, ads, messaging and advanced analytics.
- Subscription - Unlimited social campaigns for one monthly fee.
- Dedicated Social Strategy Team - All clients receive a team of experienced social strategists to set, measure and achieve their social marketing goals.
Wildfire sure looks like a startup that is really on a role and has developed a suite of solutions for managing entire social media campaigns across multiple social networks. When will they have their IPO?
Courtesy of an article dated March 23, 2012 appearing in Ad Operations Online and an article dated June 29, 2011 appearing in Entrepreneur.com
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