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Reggie Bradford, Chief Executive Officer, Vitrue

Founder and CEO Reggie Bradford brings nearly two decades of experience as an industry pioneer, having blazed a successful path for technology companies under his leadership. With funding from General Catalyst Partners and later from Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner Broadcasting-Bradford founded Vitrue in 2006 to help brands and consumers connect more meaningfully with each other through online social networking and user-generated video. The company currently boasts a growing roster of customers that represent some of the world’s leading media companies and consumer brands. Most recently, Vitrue was named to Business 2.0’s “Next Net” Top 25 for 2007.

Bradford’s leadership experience spans 16 years in the consumer packaged goods, Internet and television industries. Prior to Vitrue, he was President and a member of the board at TANDBERG Television, an organization of more than 400 employees and over $100 million in revenues. In his 14-month tenure, he led the company to a 40% annual growth rate, successfully integrated two major acquisitions and led the global repositioning of the re-launched brand.

Bradford also served as President and CEO of N2 Broadband, the leading provider of open-platform, on-demand entertainment solutions. During his tenure, N2 Broadband grew annual revenues from less than $1 million to more than $35 million in just under five years. The company, which achieved cash-flow profitability during the same period, boasts a customer roster that includes the world’s top 10 cable operators and the world’s leading entertainment companies Bradford was named one of Television Week’s “10 to Watch” for 2005.

Prior to joining N2 Broadband, Bradford served as Chief Marketing Officer at WebMD from 1998 to 2000. During his tenure there, the company grew from 40 to 4,000 employees and received more than $2 billion in funding. While at WebMD, Reggie was instrumental in defining interactivity on the Web as an early pioneer of social communities. WebMD later became one of the world’s leading Internet destinations with over 38 million unique visitors a month. He previously held various marketing and management positions with Miller Brewing Company, a subsidiary of Phillip Morris.

Bradford received a BBA in Finance from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Emory University. He and his wife Holly have five children.

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Safely Building Your Brand on UGC

Written on
April 24th 2008
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by Reggie Bradford  |
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web20_small.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE – News flash: the much-hyped Web 2.0 is here. When it arrived may still be up for debate but for the savvy company and interactive marketer, the discussion that’s really worth having is what to do with it now that it’s here. How can companies effectively engage their consumers on a playing field they no longer control, yet maintain the integrity of their brand? Having consumers at the center of the digital universe requires a huge shift in the way marketing is done and, so far, there are far more questions than answers.

Today, we know our customers are no longer happy simply being spoken to – they want to have a voice. If denied, they’ll easily find a brand, service or product that is more than happy to engage them in dialogue.

But how do you open up to their opinions and thoughts on your brand and still protect the brand’s integrity? And don’t forget that you have to do more than just listen. There needs to be authenticity in the experience.

A simple UGC video needs to be anchored to something larger to give it meaning and context. A video making the e-mail rounds or widowed on a video-sharing site doesn’t extend the dialogue to the benefit of either the consumer or the brand.

There needs to be a place where the brand and community can respond to one another and create an authentic experience that truly harnesses the power of social media through a two-way communication channel. As it happens, social media is uniquely adept at making this happen.

But, before you jump into the social media pool with both feet, I’d like to share three easy tips for companies looking to truly materialize the promise of user-generated content in creating an authentic dialogue and a worthwhile customer experience that furthers the consumer’s need to be heard and the brand’s desire for a deeper, more meaningful connection.

Tip One: Define Brand Safety and Establish Review and Approve Protocols

Brand safety is crucial for any organization engaging in UGC. With the amount of time and resources spent on building your brand, it is imperative that you take every precaution to protect its value. Your social media environment needs to emulate the brand and extend its value, not riddle it with offensive materials and copyrighted content. Many of the first UGC campaigns backfired because people took things to extremes and brand-damaging content was ultimately released to the masses … inadvertently at the behest of the brands themselves.

An open dialogue is the goal of tapping into user-generated content, but it cannot come at the price of your reputation. An important first question to consider is what is our threshold for content?

It is ultimately the brand’s responsibility to set the tone and take steps to ensure the rules of engagement are being met. Developing a system for content approval is a simple way to ensure that your site is providing an on-brand experience for your audience.

Can your site be reactive — allowing content to be posted unapproved with off-topic or damaging material removed after the fact, or is a more proactive stance required? Does legal need to review the materials to ensure copyrighted material isn’t being used? Have brand managers cleared content to ensure it is keeping with the spirit of the brand and the promotion? Is that everyone?

The goal here isn’t to bog things down with process and time delays but, instead, to create a streamlined process that allows the consumer an experience keeping with the brand’s promise. Over time your community will grow and thrive and become its own police force – telling you what they feel is “off-brand” by flagging inappropriate content. A powerful testament to how engaged people become when given an outlet.

Open dialogue and authenticity with the consumer is certainly the goal, but it is important to remember amidst the excitement of generating a buzz-worthy campaign that these things cannot happen at the price of your brand’s integrity. Determining what is appropriate and what is not after being faced with the latter peppered throughout your promotion may already have compromised the brand. It is the company’s job to set the tone and guidelines for what is appropriate and this has to happen before everything else.

Tip Two: Own Your Content, Shape the Experience and Engage with Everyone

As companies first experimented with user-generated content, it made perfect sense to use established online video sharing sites for their campaigns and promotions. The audience numbers are certainly there. But, unfortunately, with third-party sites you don’t own the very content you are inspiring brand advocates to create in your company’s name.

Today, thankfully, the tools, technologies and expertise exist for companies to host their own promotions, campaigns and communities while maintaining a high level of control over the brand experience. The problem: what is the point of spending resources to create a promotion if no one visits? It is, admittedly, a balancing act and experience shows the most successful campaigns use the best of both worlds: the virulence and audiences of third-party video sharing sites and social media outreach along with the safety and complete brand immersion of a company-authored site.

There is a great need to engage in Web 2.0 and create a seamless and “safe” experience that’s entertaining and participatory. One way we have discovered to get the most out of both is by incorporating a watermark on all approved videos or photos that are uploaded to the community. By placing a watermark of your brand innocuously in each video or photo, the material, wherever it ends up in its viral distribution lifecycle, is immediately recognized as an endorsed or approved consumer asset.

Clicking on the watermark brings the viewer back to the original community so they can fully engage and participate. From the brand’s perspective, you are essentially having your cake and eating it too. Through a powerful tool like watermarking, your campaign can move from one social network to another, live on third-party video or photo sharing sites, be emailed through anyone’s list of contacts and still retain the stamp of approval and an active link back to your brand’s site.

That way, you’ve truly capturing the best of both worlds without sacrificing brand safety or ease of distribution. The content is yours, approved, brand-safe and free to travel the entire Web to further endorse the product.

Tracking and analyzing the content is also a key ingredient to a successful initiative. Ensuring you have the means to not only syndicate, but track viral movement is critical when proving the true power of user-generated content for your brand.

Ask yourself why you are spending resources to drive people looking for an experience with your brand away from your site? With each person being pulled to your site through the watermark, your branded environment becomes that much richer — and your customers develop a library of resources for you to repurpose, catalogue and draw inspiration and meaningful data from.

The bottom line is this is your brand, your story and your customer. Why would you turn that over completely to another party when the technology and resources are out there for you to play both sides to your benefit?



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Reader Comments.

can you provide some example of sites doing a good job of ‘watermarking’?

Posted by carrie | 1:17 pm on April 24, 2008.

finally, a piece in ADotas that doesn’t ring of empty news with a few well-turned, if hackneyed phrases. congratulations.

Posted by blazing saddlesores | 7:34 pm on April 24, 2008.

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