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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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Features

Social Media and Agencies: Tools for Success

Written on
August 20th 2008
Author
by Reggie Bradford  |
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socialnetworking_revvs_small.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — As brands move their marketing activities online to include user-generated content and community-based social networking sites, marketers are quickly realizing that it takes a partnership approach to achieve success in the constantly changing Web 2.0 environment. The key to a successful social media initiative is finding the right partners throughout all aspects of a company and its supporting agencies.

Advertising, PR and other marketing agencies not only have to contend with incorporating a new practice into their business model but they also have to keep up with a rapidly changing technology that requires capital-intensive investments. It makes sense to seek out partners, both marketing and technology, who are dedicated to infusing your initiative with both brand strategy, the latest technology, strongest available platform and technical expertise to safely navigate your brand through the World Wide Web.

Because social media provides marketers the unparalleled ability to let consumers engage and interact with their brands, working with partners to select the appropriate medium to engage consumers in conversation takes careful planning and strategy. Decisions about how to have conversations with your consumers, is key to creating forums for meaningful interaction and robust online communities. For some brands, a Flash driven rich-media site might work well while for others a more text-based site might be more appropriate. Whatever your social medium is, it should have features with high functionality and create addictive user experiences, with the ultimate goal of engaging and entertaining.

Agencies need tool kits to harness the power of social media. They should concentrate on taking their creative expertise and brand strategy know-how and applying it to the medium, and then focus their efforts on understanding the canvas that social media provides. Agencies can then direct their attention to the kinds of campaigns they can develop to engage and entertain their consumers. How should social media and the interactivity it brings help shape their creative process? It’s a new, great frontier, with cool, cutting-edge possibilities to break through the clutter, and allow their creative processes to be truly original.

The implementation – the technology work horse – needed to power the experience should be given to technology companies that agencies turn to as trusted vendors and strategic experts. The space is complicated and brands need resources whose sole purpose is to navigate complexities for them. Effective technology partnerships will bring the tools the agencies need to the table.

If you are serving a solution up to your client, make sure you consider the following checklist of critical factors:

• Brand Protection – Ensuring the brand can protect content being posted, guaranteeing that it lives up to your brand promise, that it is appropriate, and that it does not infringe on copyright issues.

• Content Ownership – Make sure the brand owns and can re-purpose the valuable consumer-generated assets being uploaded.

• Brand Experience – Be sure the solution is highly brand-able and emulates your brand down to the smallest detail, such as a rating icon.

• Viral Distribution – Ensure your consumers’ experiences can be easily shared and generate the maximum buzz for your brand, both organically and authentically.

• Metrics – Be sure you have powerful reporting tools to help your clients define their Key Performance Indicators (KPI), to not only define but also measure the success of this new medium.

• Rapid Deployment – Make sure you have a technology solution that is easily deployable. The creative process can lead to changes and last minute initiatives. Agencies should embrace a technology provider that has a platform to enable ease of upgrade of new features and functionality that will always bring the latest social features they can champion to their clients.

• System stability – Be sure your partner’s track record is solid. Nothing is worse than a site being slow or, worse yet, down due to surges in activity.

A platform-based technology company can ensure your social media program is able to be meet agencies’ unique demands. Providing solutions from a platform allows for quick execution and launch, in a matter of weeks not months. Also a platform-based approach allows for constant innovation – upgrading new functionality is easier as it is built upon and ever-evolving foundation. When working in partnership, future agency needs can shape the product’s roadmap of the platform’s design. Platforms are built for scale and can handle large levels of user-interactivity and have the technology backbone in place to ensure optimal performance.

Collaboration among agencies, technology companies, and the brands they represent is vital to the success of a social media initiative. Having a trusted strategic technology partner ensures that agencies have the back-end details covered, allowing them to concentrate on the creative content, together developing a successful new media program that has high traffic and, most importantly, an asset that accurately reflects their client.



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Reader Comments.

Here’s the best part about Social Networking. We’re still inventing it. It can be what we want it to be.

Essentially, up until now, we’ve inherited established marketing tools and communications techniques.

What’s going on right now in Social Networking is like inventing the Wheel all over again.

It’s empowering.

Posted by Brian Olson | 12:07 pm on August 20, 2008.

Hi, Reggie,
I found your article very interesting with your 7 key points to success but one is missing to me is the launching strategy in order to create traffic neccessary for reaching the critical traffic mass.
Would you have some insights on this first traffic creation as advertising is not a real option for social media launching?

TX

Frank

Posted by Frank CISAR | 9:52 am on August 25, 2008.

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