Reality Digital: User Participation Key to Social Media Marketing

Organizations today understand that a key focus of their marketing activities must be in the social media arena. If they are really smart, they also recognize that user participation is key to successful social media marketing. And what do users like to contribute? Text, video, audio and all the rating, tagging and commenting that goes along with it.

Who better to help these organizations support their social media marketing activities than SaaS User Participation Platform provider Reality Digital? This is a company that not only has the technical experience to create a social media platform with a strong Digital Asset Management backbone, but also has the marketing savvy to understand the key to social media marketing is a combination of user generated and professionally published content.

CMSWire had an opportunity to talk with Reality Digital CEO Cynthia Francis about her company and the service they offer, and about social media marketing in general.

Reality Digital’s Story

Reality Digital was founded in 2003 by several people, including Cynthia Francis, who have over 15 years experience in consulting, media creation applications and building Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.

The other two co-founders Randy St. Jean and Ed Klein and new member Mitchell Linden, make up the management team of this 15 employee company based in San Francisco.

The goal in creating Reality Digital was to take their DAM experience and offer a lightweight workgroup solution via SaaS. What they built was a white label social media platform that organizations can use to store, manage and monetize rich media content that is a combination of user generated and professional produced material.

They call the hosted platform “Opus”. With over 75 customer sites, the likes of which include CBS, itv.com, MLB, Hook.Tv, Travel Channel and MTV, Reality Digital has the capability to extend and enrich websites via rich media.

Reality Digital Opus

Opus is a white label social media platform offered as a service to organizations. There are two ways it can be used. The first is by building the site and having the organization’s website point to it on the Reality Digital hosted environment and the second is to pull the content into the organization’s website directly via an API.

Hook.tv is an example of a site that pulls their content from Reality Digital directly into their own site:

Hook.tv

And here’s an example where Reality Digital did all the development and the organization just points to Reality Digital.

Yourtrip.travelchannel.com

Consumer Features

One of the most basic premises of the Opus platform is that consumers can create and upload their own content to a site and have it sit alongside professionally developed material. This is a social media service, so the features include the ability to:

• Create a personal profile and subscribe to feeds on favorite content
• Upload video, audio or pictures from just about any device (DV camera, camera, mobile device, web cam or computer).
• Review and publish any of the above and games, documents and Flash animations
• Tag content, create topics and set permissions on who can view their media
• View content on a branded Flash player
• Share content via email or by sharing their personal URL
• Rate content, write blogs, hang out in forums
• Embed the player into a web page that can then be used in other websites or blogs

Business Functionality
So maybe you are wondering why an organization wouldn’t just use one of those free sites out there instead of spending the money on Reality Digital’s solution. Part of the answer is found within the functionality provided to the business to monitor and manage the activities on their community.

Reality Digital: User Participation Key to Social Media Marketing

\n\nOrganizations today understand that a key focus of their marketing activities must be in the social media arena. If they are really smart, they also recognize that user participation is key to successful social media marketing. And what do users like to contribute? Text, video, audio and all the rating, tagging and commenting that goes along with it.\n\nWho better to help these organizations support their social media marketing activities than SaaS User Participation Platform provider Reality Digital? This is a company that not only has the technical experience to create a social media platform with a strong Digital Asset Management backbone, but also has the marketing savvy to understand the key to social media marketing is a combination of user generated and professionally published content.\n\n\n\n

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