Google acquires social media management company, Wildfire

Wildfire is a social media management software company that was founded four years ago by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard. It has since grown into a 350-strong company serving more than 16,000 businesses including 30 of the top 50 global brands. These clients include Virgin, Cisco, Amazon, Gap, and Skyy Vodka. 

The acquisition slots into Google's efforts to build an integrated and unified digital advertising one-stop shop with the launch of its DoubleClick ad management platform.

"In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way," said Jason Miller, product management director at Google in a blog post. "We’ve been working towards this end for some time." 

Currently, Google Analytics measures the contribution of social sites, Admeld serves ads in Facebook developers' social apps, DoubleClick enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites and Google+ is Google's own social networking platform, explained Miller. 

"With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services," he concluded. 

According to The Wall Street Journal (which also reported the acquisition price), rumours of Wildfire's acquisition had been afloat ever since its two main rivals, Buddy Media and Vitrue were acquired by Salesforce and Oracle, respectively.