Grow, Engage and Monetize - Wildfire provides the tools

Social Media is quickly moving into a more mature phase with marketers trying to figure out how to grow their brand awareness, engage their customers and monetize their social marketing efforts. 

If you look back just 15 years it’s not so much different from how corporations and marketers embraced the internet, web 1.0 and eCommerce.  There was plenty of skepticism for this thing that was not proven, the playground of computer nerds and hackers and research scientists. As the trendsetters, and influencers began to realize the opportunity, and potential that the web provided, the pressure to justify ROI grew. As it was back in 1997 that pressure exists today from executives of top corporations that want to ensure their marketing dollars allocated to the winning strategies.

Companies like Wildfire have identified this need to measure social media ROI and have developed easy to use tools that make it easy to engage your followers, and track and measure their interaction with your brand. Wildfire is espousing the thought that prior to 2011 social marketing was focused almost exclusively on growth, they predict that moving through 2012 that engagement will be the most buzzed about social phase and will spawn the monetization of social media. They believe that marketers will begin to (just like with web 1.0) begin to measure their ROI "through a more traditional definition: attributable sales and costs."

http://blog.wildfireapp.com/2012/01/13/2012-in-social-media-the-next-generation-of-social-marketing/