Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued) vs. Shorthand

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

Shorthand is ideally suited to visual stories where you have a good number of images and/or embeds or video to include. It is well-suited to long-form stories, where you wish to keep the readers' attention longer than usual. It can help to differentiate particularly important or intriguing stories from others on your website - and for this reason, it could be used as a premium content tool, perhaps for subscribers. It can also be used to showcase stories about awards you've organised, giving them special treatment. It is less suited to breaking news, or very time-sensitive news stories, as it can take some time to prepare, post or update shorthand stories. And it doesn't work well for stories with strong accompanying imagery

Incentivized

• Facebook tab implementation. Allows you to easily create and produce functioning social tabs on your brands FB page.
• Add voting, sweepstakes, poll functionality to your website. Easily implement these campaigns to increase user engagement and TOS.

• Enabling visual storytelling with multiple pictures
• Embedding rich media within a story, including video
• Engaging readers for longer than average dwell times
• Making it easy to create striking article design without coding experience

Incentivized

• More customization - Would like to have the ability to edit more without coding.

• Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
• Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
• Adding additional section templates could speed up design
• More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful

Incentivized

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

I have never known it to be down during my use of it. All you require is an internet connection to log in and you can use it on multiple devices. Adding ease of accessibility, there are simple ways to log in. I've also never known a Shorthand story to go down once live on our site.

Incentivized

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

Due to the integration with our content management software, there is a short delay on our site while it loads, which may cause some readers to drift away. However, I've seen other sites where it instantly loads articles, so I believe this to be down to the content management software behind our site more than Shorthand itself. Once that brief initial period is over, it doesn't require additional loading time.

Incentivized

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

Incentivized

As a web-based service, it is easy for users to log into from anywhere. Content can easily be shared, as you can set up teams that enable access to each other's work as required. And content can be reviewed by others before publication using the sharing function. You can also view how an article will look on different devices.

Incentivized

• As with any social media management tool, there is a savings on labor hours (rather than doing the manual work)
• Aggregating all content into one system creates efficiencies for content teams

Incentivized

• Helped us create one of our top 10 most-read and most-shared stories in the last year
• Enabled us to elevate key pieces of content, boosting dwell time on our site
• But can also be time-consuming to adopt for some stories, meaning you need to choose well what stories really deserve the investment in time
• Boosted collaboration between teams via its ability to share, including offering the chance for others to preview content prior to publication

Incentivized