Imagine a one stop shop where you could create your own interactive campaign’s regardless of whether you are an ad agency, large corporation or even small business. It would be able to create sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, publish them on your website and seed them to multiple social networks at the same time. They would be able to skin the campaign in any way you wished. You need not be a complete geek to create the campaign. You can easily monitor stats and there is a scaleable pricing model.
Imagine no more. Wildfire is here. It’s creating a lot of buzz and is indeed a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW event.
A truly innovative idea that capitalizes on emerging technologies and turns it into something extremely useful. Competitions, campaigns and promotions tend to be seen by many agencies as ‘dirty work’ as it involves many third parties (coupon providers, mail drops, Social networks tech teams and APIs, hosting providers) and logistical challenges. It seems that Wildfire are taking the donkey work out of this process for us all and joining a lot of the dots. Good luck to them and we’ll certainly keep them in mind for our client’s promotions in the future.
Facebook Open Graph
Just read about and now tried out Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol on our website. This is apparently Zuckerburg’s attempt at putting people and their recommendations at the centre of a semantically linked web, which makes perfect sense.
One of the ways that it works is by letting developers add “Like” buttons to their pages, a bit like the one above, and also on the right hand side of this page, which can then be used by visitors to sites outside of facebook. When someone clicks on the “Like” button, it then appears in their newsfeed, thus driving others to the content.
After all, if your friends like it, you might just be into it as well, and anyway, it might be more relevant than the 365 results that Google returned when you searched for “Trololololoooo”.
The links themselves contain the semantics that the protocol specifies, ranging from the type of content in question, down to things like ISBN numbers and longitude and latitude.
There’s clearly going to be a few people complaining about the fact that you need to be a member of Facebook to get this to work, but I see this as being a very useful tool going forward, especially in advertising, to get more people power behind a campaign.
I Like!