From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom’s Wildfire Journey (Part 5)

Sramana: Does Wildfire have good capabilities for small businesses, or is it out of reach for them?

Victoria Ransom: We have the campaign capability that can be operated at 99 cents a day. We also have a small business option for our platform that is in the low hundreds for a month. We have small businesses using that product successfully. We have had a lot of nonprofits use Wildfire. The key to being successful in social is being able to tap into things people are passionate about. The more you can tap into things people feel good about, the more they are willing to share.

Sramana: What is the assumption in terms of whom you are reaching out to? Your technology is the management infrastructure. When it comes to trying to reach your potential consumers, where does the audience base come from?

Victoria Ransom: Wildfire is great at helping you build an audience, engage with the audience, build loyalty with that audience, and eventually sell to that audience. In order to grow that audience in the first place, you still have to drive initial traffic there. That is why Wildfire is so good to use in conjunction with Facebook. Running Facebook ads in conjunction with a Wildfire campaign is a great way to kick start your audience. You can also use your newsletter base or your website.

If you are running something outside of a social network we essentially run an iframe so they can embed a line of code. As long as you have the ability to take that code and embed it into an HTML newsletter, we can support it.

Sramana: Let’s take 1M/1M as a case study. We charge a $1,000 annual membership fee for the incubator. Our audience are entrepreneurs around the world. We have a substantial presence online with a very active blog. My Facebook profile has about 3,000 subscribers and my newsletter subscribers number close to 25,000. How would we use Wildfire?

Victoria Ransom: You could use the campaigns piece of Wildfire to grow that audience more. You could generate a lot of engagement around a business plan contest. If the end result of that is funding, free subscriptions, or something of that nature, then there would be enough incentive to get a lot of interaction. You could also offer everyone who engages with that campaign a 10% discount off their membership. You would then get people to come in and vote for the best business model.

Sramana: Talk to me about the viral expansion. We have a community that is more than 100,000 people. How would we expand that audience to 500,000 with Wildfire?

Victoria Ransom: You have to engage them some way. Let’s say you get people to do the elevator pitch option we discussed earlier. If the winner was based on 50% user judging and 50% of your evaluation, then all the people who enter would go out and promote their plans on Facebook. Any time you provide an incentive for people to share the site with their friends, you are off to a great start.

You can assume that most people on Facebook have around 150 friends. The potential reach you could get from that would be significant. The key is for you to have a call to action for all those people when they come to vote. Drive them to something that would allow them to subscribe. That engages the viral effect of the business.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From New Zealand to Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom's Wildfire Journey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7