Reality Digital: Social Media and SaaS are Thriving

By Barb Mosher | Published Nov 5, 2008

Reality Digital Growth and Expansion Across the Ocean

If you need more evidence that social media and SaaS are thriving despite these tough economic times, Reality Digital can provide it.

The SaaS social media platform provider has announced that due to the growth of the web video and social media market, they have had to make big changes to their company — sales, marketing, distribution, product development, and a brand spanking new office in the U.K.

Yes, it sounds like it has been a good year for Reality Digital. Earlier in the year they had received venture capital funding of over US $6.3 million. This money is being put to good use as the company doubles it employee base across US offices in New York, LA, and San Francisco and opens a new U.K. office.

The key to Reality Digital's success we found, when interviewing CEO Cynthia Francis in May, is that their platform is strong in its support of user generated content. The fact that the backbone of their platform is a digital asset management solution doesn't hurt either.

In many different surveys and research studies user generated content is critical to the success of a social media solution:

Juniper Research: The value of the UGC market will rise to more than US $7.3 billion by 2013, with social networking comprising the largest revenue generating segment by 2009

Pew Internet & American Life Project: 48% of Internet users have been to video sharing sites like YouTube and the daily traffic to these types of sites has doubled in the past year

All this to prove to companies that they need these types of solutions to reach out to their customer base and optimize their brand's identity.

A New Office in the U.K. for Reality Digital

It's not enough just to open a new office, you need someone to run it. For Reality Digital's new U.K. office, they hired Robert Edward Proctor as director of EMEA. Proctor will help Reality Digital develop their London presence in addition to leading the European sales effort.

Proctor brings over 20 years of experience in new media and e-commerce development for both Web and mobile platforms. Along with a stint running his own company, he worked in top positions for companies such as Adify Corp. and Onecall Technologies.

In the next 6-12 months a data center and engineering team will be set up in the U.K under Proctor's guidance.

The Strength of Social Media

Opus is the name of Reality Digital's 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. They have some pretty big name clients using their platform.

Their story is just one of many that continues to prove that SaaS solutions continue to hold strong and social media is something that companies will continue to leverage to reach out to their customers.