February is for Rockin': Wildfire's 12 Months of Social Spotify Playlist

The eternal opportunity to create engagement between people and companies has always been in music. Before social networks, before the internet even (doesn’t that seem ages ago!), brands sought to connect with consumers by using jingles, diddies, soundtracks, and more— all to make that coveted customer connection. We’re putting music back on the docket with this month’s “12 Months of Social” (#12mosocial) installation: a socially integrated Spotify playlist of the best artists representing at South by Southwest ®!







If you’re not headed to SXSW next month, you’ve at least got your eyes (and ears) on it. That’s why we chose February to highlight our Spotify Music Sharing template.



It’s perfect for building branded playlists that can’t wait to go viral. While any songs, or even playlists of song collections, can be added to the template and launched to the brand’s Facebook page and microsites, we themed our collection around the upcoming music festival in Austin, Texas.



Our playlist includes popular SXSW alumni artists and the most anticipated new acts of 2013. Your brand’s playlists can amp up engagement by tapping into themes your own fans love to talk about.



What’s on the calendar for March? Get ready for a little marketing madness! In the meantime, tell us what you think by dropping a note in the comments or by using #12mosocial on Twitter, Google+, or Instagram!

Case Studies: Scaling Social Business with the Altimeter Group

For large enterprises, managing social across teams, sub-brands, networks, regions, time zones, and languages, takes a great deal of planning and coordination. The Altimeter Group just tackled this topic in a report on how four major brands have created scalable social businesses while successfully engaging consumers: “Case Studies: Scalable Social Business.”


PUMA, a Wildfire client, is one of the brands featured in the report. With limited headcount, PUMA has successfully scaled its social presence across regions, networks and sub-brands. An excerpt from the PUMA section of the report highlights the ways in which the global apparel and footwear company uses Wildfire to do this:

“PUMA first looked to SMMS vendor Wildfire (now a part of Google), primarily to coordinate and schedule posts. Later, it would rely on Wildfire to help with moderation of spam and inappropriate content, language translation, and content targeting, as well as governance across its regional markets. Holmes notes that the regional emphases have had a clear impact. ‘The company has seen engagement grow significantly,’ she says.”

Check out the full, free report “Case Studies: Scalable Social Business” here. Comment below and let us know what you think of how these four enterprises have uniquely approached scaling for social.

Case Studies - Scaling Social Business from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare

Holiday Facebook Marketing Tip: Launch an Advent Calendar!

At Wildfire, we are always hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest and most compelling choice of interactive pages to offer users. We have over 100 different options, including apps that are optimized for mobile, and every type of rich media.  Last year, we introduced a countdown format “Advent Calendar” template, and it’s back for the holidays! The advent calendar template lets clients create a calendar with any number of days (up to 31), while programming each day to unlock a special treat, message, gift, or prize.

Wildfire’s Pages application, one of the tools in our social marketing Suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. When a user clicks on a day to reveal its secret contents, he or she will see one of two things: if the day has been unlocked, the user will see a box appear with the revealed content; if the day has not been unlocked, the user will see a box with a reminder to come back again later when the content is unlocked.

We launched our own “social media education advent calendar” on the Wildfire Facebook page so you can see the advent template in action. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on Day 1:





The advent calendar can be launched at any time of year (countdown to Valentines anyone?), and easily customized to the theme of your choice using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines, or you can publish it entirely “out of the box” as we’ve done above.

How creative can you get with your customizable social media advent calendar? The sky is the limit! Tell us what you would put behind each day in the comments below— we love to hear from you!

[WEBINAR] 7 Things Every Marketer Needs to be Doing on LinkedIn

With over 161 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. And it’s also an amazing place for innovative marketers to connect with their audience. We asked 2 experts on the professional social network to join us for a live webinar on August 30th, and you're invited!

Register to attend, and you'll learn:

• The inside scoop on LinkedIn advertising best practices—so you can drive excellent marketing results


• A clear understanding of LinkedIn’s free and paid features—so you can grow your brand’s presence on the site


• Valuable insight into LinkedIn’s hypertargeting capabilities—so you can pinpoint your audience by title, geography, industry, company or other characteristics

Lana Khavinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, and Brian Carter, social media consultant and author of the new book LinkedIn for Business, will share best practices and success secrets from some of the top advertisers, marketers, and salespeople on LinkedIn.

Are you coming? Tell us in the comments, and feel free to drop in any questions you'd like to have answered, we'll make sure they get onto the list!