Should we hire a marketing firm to spearhead our Startup Go-Live Campaign?

One approach is the 37 signals "hollywood" type launch - They wrote about this approach in their "getting real" book on chapter 13 (can read the book here). With these foundational things in place, do other promotions that drive desired site activities. Example: create a portfolio, make a trade, etc.

Also make sure that the current "pre-launch" site is crystal clear about what the product is, what "hair on fire" type of benefit it provides to the intended target audience, and what costs (if any) they are going to fork over to be a member. First impressions matter.

EDIT - adding in a response to "hire firm or someone with good ideas?".

My quick answer: hire an advertising agency when you've got your product offering down. I think there is a huge difference between the go-live goal and the ultimate goal - explosion of users. It's a rare thing to launch a site, do one promotion round and receive tons of traction. More likely is a launch event, several iterations of the core offering so you get the value proposition right, and with evolution comes social exposure & growth of customers. Doing an all out social assault when you're not 100% sure of your product seems a money sink and a good way to burn publicity. Would rather spend that money on reaching out to current participants, getting honest feedback, making changes, and publicly posting your progress.

It sounds like what you need is an advertising agency, and ideally one that specializes (or at least has experience) in your niche. My company (Inedo Media) is just that, but our focus is probably different than what you need: we help software companies engage and sell their products to software developers.

An advertising agency's scope goes a lot further than simply placing ads ("media buying"). They are your outside point of view and should work hand-in-hand with you to do market research, strategy, messaging/positioning, creatives, and placement... whether that's for social media, direct mail, banner advertising, or anything else. As we put it... it's your job to build and sell a quality product; it's your agency's job to have your product stand from the competition and deliver qualified visitors to you.

A quick google search for (your niche) + (advertising agency) will turn up plenty of results (and some folks might even give you some recommendations), but what's critical is to learn how to evaluate an agency. But to do that, first consider how an agency will work with you.

1. Budget. You've already identified what your marketing budget is, which is a great start. This puts you far out of the range of the "big boys" and keeps you focused on smaller, niche agencies (like ours).

2. Goals. What specifically do you want to see happen? Be the next Facebook is everyone's dream, but you need some specifics. Your budget - and the full disclosure of relevant information - will let the agency tell you if your goals are reasonable with your budget.

3. Commitment. This is where you sign on the dotted line. If you expect (or get) anything free beyond this, remember that you get what you pay for.

4. Research. What do things look like now? What is your current sales process? What is the best way to accomplish these marketing goals? What problems are these targets facing?

5. Messaging. Based on research, how do we communicate to our targets? What will help us stand out?

6. Creatives. Everything from websites to mailers to newsetters to print and banner ads. Writing, design, etc.

7. Placement. How do we deliver this message? Social media? Websites? Magazines?

8. Assessment. How can we evaluate the marketing mid-stream and after-the-fact to continually improve and accelerate performance?

Though some agencies will have a different language and a different number of steps, the process is near universal. If there is no process (i.e., they simply follow your direction), then don't even bother. The key things to look for are:

• exlusivity - may seem obvious, but they should not be working or work with a direct competitor
• people and personality - you are hiring an agency, and you will need to work with them hand-in-hand; ideally, you should get along with them
• experience and expertise - especially in your niche
• creative - they need to make you stand out; has their past work demonstrated that they did that?

'Viral' tends to mean - big results at small expense. More specifically, the dream is that you make a one-time investment in the site or/and some related materials - and this snowballs as people are motivated to spread it around.

That's a great dream, and when it works it's fantastic; definitely you should look for outside help on this. You want high creativity and you want experience for the best chance of results.

And you need to be aware that there's no viral magic bullet. Lots of people have that same dream and never realise it. So budget-wise, I'd be looking to leave plenty in the kitty for conventional marketing activities - the kind of thing where you can be reasonably sure that $X will get you Y visitors.

You could certainly weave into that some internal work. I really like http://www.deviantart.com/ as a place to find talented young digital artists. OK, it can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack, but commissioning (say) 2-3 people whose work you've seen to come up with something exciting can be a whole lot better as an experience than running a contest. You can do this with YouTube as well, but what I like about devart is that you generally get some insight into how people handle constructive criticism and their level of commitment and sustained creativity.