Social Media Platform

The definition of user generated content is rapidly evolving from "look what I made", to complex collaborations developing between users, artists, and publishers. The notion of sampling, collaborating and remixing content in the high-end studio has now reached the mobile handset. Check out a cool new initiative straddling the music, mobile and social media spaces.

Moderati, a mobile content provider, created a great iPhone music application named "Romplr™" that enables users to mix beat samples from popular music artists. Hip-Hop star, Soulja Boy (@souljaboyromplr on Twitter) and San Francisco Bay Area upstarts, LMFAO, have already lent several of their hit tracks at the time of launch to be remixed on Romplr by music fans.

Romplr.com
We worked with Moderati to develop a complimentary interactive music community called "Romplr.com" (www.romplr.com), powered by our Opus social media platform, where users can vote, comment and post their remixes. The application also allows users to share community content with friends and family over email or other social networks including Facebook. This is a great example of how to extend the life of user generated content and extend the reach of a community.

Dealing With Digital Rights Management
This initiative posed several challenges around DRM and copyright protection. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, concern for any sort of implementation like this is the need to protect the integrity of artists' music or proprietary media assets. With any licensed music or digital assets (e.g. video), DRM and copyright protection are of paramount importance.

Fortunately, our rich experience in digital asset management, along with our experience working with other major brands and their proprietary content including the MLB, NFL, MTV, and Travel Channel among others, helped us work past these hurdles and establish a workflow system that enables Moderati to manage the relationship between the DRM file and the user, making DRM-sensitive streaming a reality. We satisfied the copyright concerns of Soulja Boy and the Universal Music Group by developing a system to protect their digital rights management agreements and preventing their music from being compromised in any way.

So far, the response has been great and we'd love to get your thoughts on the app, so head on over to the iTunes App Store, download the app (there are four versions, including Romplr Lite, the free version) and share your thoughts. Happy mixing!

1. Social media branding doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg
   While the big brands are spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on new social media advertising campaigns, you don't need to. These large campaigns usually consists of multiple, complex components and ad buys. The audience you're trying to reach is probably a much smaller or more local demographic and you just simply won't spend as much per eyeball. You can keep yours simpler.
   
   There are free social media solutions like setting up a Facebook Page (formerly known as a Facebook Fan Page), a Twitter account to microblog updates about your company and its products, and a company blog using one of the many free blog platforms out there. If you're looking for something more sophisticated that combines many of the more popular features in online social networking sites, for a reasonable cost, you can check out a self-service, white-label social media platform like Reality Digital's Harmony product.
   
   Costs you may incur include manpower and time to manage these initiatives. But even then, you aren't seeing the massive traffic that a big consumer brand like Pepsi might see, so an hour a day or every week could very well suffice, depending on your goals.
    
2. There are multiple ways to implement social media branding
   Facebook. Twitter. Corporate blog. Online community. Social media contest. Where do you start and which ones do you implement? The answer is different for every small business. What you should be concerned with is determining what tools are relevant to your audience and how they will help you achieve your business goals. If you implement one and it fails, try something different. Consider a multi-program approach. Social media is not a magic bullet (at least not yet) and it takes time and patience to see results, as does all your other marketing activities. Try and try again.
    
3. Identify WHY you want social media
   Above all, you must know why you're implementing social media into your marketing mix and how it maps back to your business goals. You wouldn't invest in a piece of new equipment if you didn't know why you needed it, would you? It's not just the cool factor. Social media branding should serve a purpose, whether that's to listen more closely to customers and provide a forum for dialogue, build awareness for your company and product, increase product sales, improve site traffic or countless other reasons. Once you know why you want social media, you'll have a much easier time justifying its cost, if any, and integrating it into your business.

• Extends campaign reach and increases community membership
• Syndicates brand or community's content to a larger public social network and extends its life
• Encourages viral distribution of content and return traffic
• Increases audience for and engagement with branded content
• Driving eyeballs and turning more page views for incremental ad revenue (if monetizing via advertising of course)

Congratulations to everyone at Reality Digital! We brought home the 2009 Red Herring 100 Award last night and are thrilled to be recognized as one of promising startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation.

As a social media company, we are dedicated to helping businesses drive brand recognition, increase engagement and generate revenue through white label social media solutions. Whether you're looking for a stable and scalable online video platform, or the latest social networking features for your existing site, or a white label social media platform to build a branded online community, or robust UGC moderation tools and ROI analytics, Reality Digital can meet your needs.

Our white label social media software is used by leading global companies in multiple industries including media, entertainment, publishing, sports, travel and retail. Visit www.realitydigital.com for more details and ask to speak with a Reality Digital representative today.

The current trend is to downsize, hoard the cash in the bank, watch and wait for better times.   But read the fine print, during the black out period you run the risk of losing market presence and your consumer. 

Downsizing is prudent practice during this climate, but don't forget that this is also primetime for new opportunities. For some it’s a time for reinvention, and for others it is the time to do more with less. Doing more with less does not translate to doing nothing.

It means being creative with resources, tapping into your inner ‘Old Mother in the Shoe’. With all those mouths to feed, she had to stretch her gold coins. In our current downsizing climate, it’s about doing more with less. Today that means being creative in some fantastical way, reaching more of your consumers in your particular niche market with a stronger message and presence. 

The question is HOW DO I DO THIS?

Traditional brand advertising utilizes static media channels, and while it was once effective, the reach and the ROI for traditional brand advertising isn’t what it used to be.     It’s one-way static messaging to the end consumer.  It continues to leverage vertical professional services of advertising agencies - creative, research and production - to develop “campaigns”, and ad budgets for mass-market placement.  Consumers are much more sophisticated now, and have openly embraced the new media. They are engaged and communicating back.

Consumers spend less and less time in traditional mediums, they are consuming media through the phones, the internet, and staying connected via social media vehicles. Insert the ‘Social media’ variable into the traditional one-way brand advertising and the traditional media messaging campaign is lopsided.  In part, it threatens the tried and true advertising methodologies because it leverages “crowd sourcing” to test marketing and advertising concepts more quickly and cheaply.

This was once accomplished through costly targeted trials and not nearly as effective as running a contest or campaign on a Social Media platform.   Think about the ’25 Things About Me’ that spread like wild fires across Facebook. It is certainly something to think about when you are pondering your marketing strategy for the remainder of 2009, keeping in mind the mantra, ‘doing more with less’.

By adding Social Media Marketing to the campaigns, this enables Corporations to see results faster and for much less than traditional brand advertising.  Measuring the ‘value’ of corporate social media (marketing) efforts is not an exact science, the rules are being written daily, but don’t let that detour your from dipping in.

Jeremiah Owyang and Rodney Rumford from Forrester have some innovative suggestions on ‘how-tos’ and analyzing how social media efforts make a difference in a corporate marketing strategy. For example, they suggest moving beyond traditional marketing metrics that measure quantitative data like page views and clickthroughs–essentially traffic. Instead, they suggest that measuring “engagement” and focus on these key areas:                                              

• Involvement: are customers present
• Interaction: are customers taking action
• Intimacy: what is their sentiment or affinity
• Influence: are customers talking about it

It’s a lot of noise to digest process and formulate a marketing strategy.  The good news is that even though there is not an exact formula on getting it ‘just right’ social media marketing is effective, and it’s working.