Google Acquires Wildfire Social Marketing Platform

It has been announced that Google is to acquire Wildfire Interactive, a startup company that specializes in promotional marketing on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter,  Google+, among others.

Following this addition to Google's portfolio can be easily deduced that Google is preparing and embracing social media marketing as a highly rewarding offering to its users and advertisers. The niche offering from Wildfire is that it offers users the ability to promote content across a wide variety of social networking sites from a single central platform. It can be envisaged that from the current offering of Google analytics and DoubleClick, it may not be the complete full circle in terms of metrics and advertising to users, with this new acquisition it will allow Google to speed up new capabilities with far reaching solutions where marketing advertisers and viral strategists can better plan, deploy and measure campaigns across a wider dynamic spectrum of web activity. Currently Wildfire users are able to publish content simultaneously in many places which can include content as status messages, also administer owner pages, run advertising custom campaigns with performance metrics on a multitude of social sites from a single central dashboard.

Wildfire customers include Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify, and this shows how attractive the platform is which in turn Google wishes to benefit by also incorporating these highly profitable customers.

These news follows on that other multinational companies have also recently been acquiring social media marketing startups.  The examples are Salesforce where it recently acquired Buddy Media. Furthermore,  Oracle has also been active by entering to social business game.

IBM Plays The Social Software Business Game

The social business technology has seen quite a lot of activity in the recent weeks, these include Microsoft purchasing Yammer, and along these lines it was noted that Salesforce purchased Buddy Media, furthermore Oracle decided to purchase Vitrue, subsequently it was also purchased Involver.

Now enters IBM,  has now further embraced its social deeply in its business, with new social product offers which include IBM Customer Experience and Intranet Experience Suites.  IBM states that "The new software suite will help employees engage across business units and access information from a variety of sources including external and internal news feeds."

The IBM VP of social software (Jeff Schick), stated “From digital marketing and mobile commerce to websites and social media, marketers are inundated - often paralyzed - by data amassed from consumers via searches, purchase histories, and social media commentary. Combine that with in-store traffic data, call center conversations and supplier updates, and marketers confront a daily deluge of data waiting to be sifted for nuggets of intelligence...We intend to help them to see this as an opportunity, to learn to become entrepreneurial rather than gatekeepers. Many of them are waking up to the risk of being sidelined; they see the writing on the wall.”

It appears that the IT giants are now fully embracing the new social business technology, as a result it can be anticipated many new creative and innovative solutions which should rival many traditional social media technology companies and their offerings. It does however, make sense that the giants of IT join the game as they only have to gain and little to lose, we would argue that they are a few years later, nevertheless they have the resources to quickly catch up and integrate solutions with a development social mind.