Social media is on the rise and many businesses are created or at least properly positioned to ride the wave.
One of the greatest examples is perhaps Zynga, a company that develops games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (think Farmville, Mafia Wars). It was founded in July 2007, and today, just four years later, the company is believed to worth more than $5 billion.
The Internet isn’t running short of such stories…
Another company, Wildfire Interactive, has smartly integrated branded interactive campaigns like sweepstakes, contests and give-aways with the viral features of the social web to create engaging campaigns. It isn’t a advertising agency. Rather, the company builds easy-to-use apps for marketers to leverage social media‘s viral-ness.
Highlighting its success, today, the company serves big name clients such as Zappos, Pepsi and Universal Studios and is a 2 times winner of the FBfund Award. You probably imagined that the creators of Wildfire Interactive are marketing geeks, coding day in and out. Never judge a book by its cover; you’re in for a surprise.
“Ms. Ransom and her co-founder, Alain Chuard, don’t come from a programming background but were early players in Facebook marketing. Before founding Wildfire, they both worked at investment banks and started an adventure-travel company called Access Travel.
“We were inspired by our own personal need,” Ms. Ransom said. “We have a travel company and were thinking, ‘How are we going to promote this?’” They brought in software developers and eventually expanded into making sweepstakes for other companies that were then moving in to Facebook.”
Continue reading on The Wall Street Journal.
