Posted April 26, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Wildfire Interactive has received $4.04MM in Series A funding lead by Summit Partners. Additional investors include Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk. CEO Victoria Ransom tells WebProNews, “To our knowledge, we are the first fbFund company to raise a multi-million dollar round.” fbFund is a $10M seed fund and joint venture partially run by Facebook. Wildfire is a company that offers social media marketing technology to businesses, to help them create branded campaigns like sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes, and virtual gift campaigns, and publish them simultaneously to Facebook pages, company websites (integrated with Facebook), and on Twitter. The company recently sparked some buzz with its “Facebook-safe” sweepstakes service for those who “run a business and know the value of promotional campaigns on Facebook but have been stopped by the logistics, legal aspects and costs,” as All Facebook’s Raj Dash puts it . “The timing couldn’t be better – we founded Wildfire around the time of the last f8 and now here we are just a few days after the 2010 f8 reaching another big milestone for our company!” Ransom says of the funding. Wildfire Founders Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard “Since the last f8, we launched an easy-to-use social media marketing platform for brands, agencies and small businesses, reached profitability within 1 month of launching our product and won the fbFund twice,” she adds. “We serve thousands of companies and have powered tens of thousands of social media marketing campaigns. With today’s investment from Summit we’re confident that we’ll be able to reach new heights.” Now that Facebook is taking over the web, one would have to imagine that services such as those provided by Wildfire will be increasingly in demand.
Tags: aydin-senkut, Gary Vaynerchuk, gift campaigns, Interactive, knowledge, media marketing, ransom, Review and Story, serve-thousands, sweepstakes contests, time
Posted April 20, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click WebProNews has been producing online videos for years now, but we recently started doing the real-time live video thing, so this subject hits close to home for us. We quickly learned that the difference between live and produced videos is quite great. While at SXSW last month, we spoke with Wayne Sutton who spoke on a panel about real-time video blogging. In the first part of the video (this is the produced version of a video we did stream live at the time), Sutton discusses geo-location for business opportunities, which is a great subject in itself, but the video stuff begins around the 2:40 mark. More WebProNews Videos Following are a combination of tips from Wayne in the above clip and some of our own. 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging 1. It’s less about quality, and more about opportunity Quality is good, and it’s certainly worth focusing on and improving upon when possible, but the fact of the matter is that live streaming gives you opportunities to break stories or get exclusive coverage you may otherwise not be able to get. At times this may be at the cost of other production elements. The on-the-fly approach doesn’t always give you time to include aspects you might otherwise include. That said, you can always go back and look at your coverage and analyze how it looks. Look for things you can do better and address them next time if possible. This leads us to the 2nd tip. 2. Improve Upon the quality of what you can control.
Tags: business opportunities, fact of the matter, fly, geo, intro and outro, intros, production elements, quality, real time, real time video, Review and Story, time, tips, video, Videos
Posted April 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click I probably don’t have to tell you that time is valuable, but is this something you are considering when it comes to your customers’ time? If you run an e-commerce business, you have to consider that consumers want to spend as little time on your site as possible. That’s not to say that they don’t want to buy from you. They just want to be able to do so quickly, and the more time you make them spend on the buying process, the less likely they are to actually buy from you
Tags: amp design, book, buying, competition, consumers, conversions, design, eley, live coverage, marketing, number, online marketing, shopping, time
Posted April 7, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Since its inception, one of the biggest knocks against Twitter has been that it’s been hard to figure out what to use it for. As time has gone by, this has become much more clear to a great many people, but you can rest assured, there are still plenty out there who have a hard time justifying its use. Others, particularly in the business world feel like they need to be using it, but still have a hard time finding ways in which it can be most effective and beneficial to their specific needs. What Twitter apps make Twitter more useful to you? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends… here . Twitter’s usefulness more often than not, becomes much more apparent when you find that app that frames it in a way that makes sense to your life or your business (or both). There are at least 10,000 Ways to Use Twitter. OneForty is a directory of Twitter apps, that’s been around since last year, when we first discussed it with founder Laura Fitton. Last month at SXSW in Austin, we dropped by Fitton’s party (which featured some fantastic beer, I must say) and talked with her about the site, and the vast array of Twitter tools that are constantly being developed. At the time, Fitton said OneForty was up to about 2,500 Twitter apps, and that they’ve found “evidence” of 7,500 apps more. So that’s about 10,000 apps out there providing ways to use Twitter, if this is accurate. There’s got to be some useful ones (might I suggest our own Twellow – the Yellow Pages for Twitter). Currently, the site claims, “2,624 Twitter tools that make Twitter more useful for your business, career or life.” The directory has 23 main app categories from Advertising , Analytics , Blogging Tools , Business , Email , and Search , to Mobile , Shopping , Productivity , News , Networking , and Monitoring (there are plenty of other more fun ones as well, like Games , Music , and Multimedia ). Any business evaluating their social media strategy, and Twitter strategy in particular, would probably do well to take some time and do some Twitter app exploration. It’s entirely possible that there are apps out there that will have a profound impact on how your business interacts with Twitter, and could potentially have a significant impact on your online strategy as a whole. OneForty is not the only Twitter directory out there, but it’s certainly a good place to start exploring. What Twitter apps do you use for your business? Share your favorites here .
Tags: business, OneForty, Review and Story, Social Networks, time, tools, Twitter, twitter apps, yellow-pages
Posted April 6, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Less than a week ago, the former president of Bebo joined Facebook, and now, AOL’s admitted that the social network it bought for $850 million has been beaten by Mark Zuckerberg’s leviathan.
Tags: bebo, buyers-or-costs, competitive, decision making process, executive-vice, Facebook, former president, Mark Zuckerberg, possible-buyers, president, price, the-competitive, time, time and money