Adam T. Sutton

2.0 Campaigns for Any Budget

December 22nd, 2008

When a budget gets cut, experimental marketing dollars are often the first to go. Management cannot afford to dabble in unproven strategies. They want to focus on predictable, reliable tactics.

What a bore, right? You’ve been reading about social networks and viral marketing all year–and now you can’t get the budget to test them. Fear not, help is here.

Free viral campaigns on social networks

Wildfire, an online app that creates branded promotions for social networks, is offering free trials for basic plans until Jan. 31, 2009. You need to fill out a form on the site to request an invitation.

It’s not at all hard to get an invite,” says Victoria Ransom, CEO and Founder, Wildfire Interactive. “We’re just restricting how many invites we give out each week. Based on current sign-up volume, a company that requests an invite today should receive it within the next two to three weeks.”

Wildfire helps you build a viral campaign and disseminate it on Facebook, Bebo and your website. It compiles all the data into one downloadable file. Compatibility with MySpace, Hi5 and Orkut will be available in January, Ransom said. The site emphasizes prize-based campaigns like contests and sweepstakes, as they tend to get viral traction on social networks.

Free social features on your website

Google, Facebook and MySpace have made it more affordable to add social features to your site via Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace OpenID. The services can add features to your site that let users:

– Sign in to their 3rd party accounts

– Interact with their 3rd party friends on your site

– Share your content with friends from other social networks

I won’t claim to understand all the differences between the three, but I will say that Google’s explanation is the most straightforward with simple instructions and examples (see above link). If you’re interested, have your resident coder take a look at the options and talk about which, if any, could work for your audience.

Adam T. Sutton

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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  1. Dale Underwood
    January 25th, 2009 at 11:01 | #1

    I’m not sure “predictable, reliable tactics” are either these days. Anyone who thinks social networking and viral marketing are experimental will certainly go the way of the dinosaurs. However, marketing’s challenge is a long standing one; being able to quantify results in terms business people understand.

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