Google, has acquired four year old Wildfire Interactive, a social media venture for a reported $ 250 Million. The venture was co-founded by New Zealand based entrepreneurs, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard. The wildfire technology was developed in 2008, when Victoria and Alain ran a New Zealand-based adventure travel company, and ended up working on the app, to run their promotion offering free tips to fans. The project gradually evolved into a full fledged product – the Promotion Builder. The venture started signing up clients for their services and of late has been powering social media marketing for over 16000 businesses. Wildfire now offers a complete Social Marketing Suite.
Acquisition by Google, seems to clearly fit into Google’s present strength at online advertising, and its look out for building up a strong presence in the social media dependent advertising market & the marketing ecosystem. The company is reported to have been eying Buddy Media as well, which was subsequently acquired by SalesForce.com last month.
As stated by Victoria and Alain in Wilfire Blog, on the acquisition:
“Today we are about to start a new chapter of our story and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news: Wildfire is joining Google! We truly could not think of a more perfect home for Wildfire. It makes us so happy to know that joining with Google will make it easier for us to realize our vision of changing the way the world markets and enable us to live up to our commitment to make Wildfire an incredible place for our team and our customers.
We believe that over time the combination of Wildfire and Google can lead to a better platform for managing all digital media marketing. For now, we remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers. To this end, Wildfire will operate as usual, and there will be no changes to our service and support for our customers.”
From the Google Official Blog, on the acquisition:
“Businesses around the world—from neighborhood restaurants to major retailers—are embracing social media to share information and forge stronger relationships with their fans and customers. We know because we are one of those businesses—on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Indeed, a social presence can complement all marketing campaigns—search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more.
With this in mind, today we’re happy to share that the Wildfire team will be joining Google. Their co-founders, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, launched their startup just four years ago. Since then, they and their team have built a service that helps businesses like Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify manage their social efforts across numerous social websites. It’s a platform for brands to manage their pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, ads, promotions and more, all in one place.
The ultimate goal is better and fresher content, and more meaningful interactions. People today can make their voices heard in ways that were previously impossible, and Wildfire helps businesses uphold their end of the conversation (or spark a new one).
In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way. We’ve been working towards this end for some time. For example, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites; our Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps; and our DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites. On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come.
With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services. We believe that better content and more seamless solutions will help unlock the full potential of the web for people and businesses.
Posted by Jason Miller, Product Management Director
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Picture Credit: Wildfire Blog