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Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford is bringing social media to the brand experience

It seems only appropriate that a social media company with a mission to “empower brands to engage with consumers —effectively and safely” would be headquartered here in Atlanta.

After all, Atlanta is home to the biggest and best-known brand in the world -- Coca-Cola. But where Coca-Cola has roots more than a century deep in the traditional marketing and advertising worlds, Vitrue (Vitrue blog) was founded in 2006 to help companies address the major shift in the way consumers now interact with brands.

As they state in their Company overview:

“Consumers are now willing to engage in a dialogue with companies that vigorously pursue them. The reason for this shift? Social media. In order to thrive in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, savvy businesses know they must unlock the full potential of social media.”

And for this reason, I selected Vitrue as my first profile on Atlanta-based companies who are choosing to embrace social media as a business model or principal marketing strategy.

I am interested in the challenges and opportunities that social media companies outside Silicon Valley face. In many parts of the country, the reality has not caught up with the hype. There is still a lot of concern and unfamiliarity out there.

Still, Atlanta is home to numerous companies who are building businesses that are taking advantage of new ways of communicating and interacting with their customers.

“From the start I didn't say I wanted to get into social media. Vitrue was a story about brands not technology." To help clarify, Bradford described his Company as a "YouTube for brands.”

As much a technology company as a branding company, Vitrue is working with clients around the country to leverage the power of social media.

Bradford has an impressive track record. With a grounding at the Miller Brewer Company, he served as Chief Marketing Officer at WebMD, which later became one of the world's leading Internet destinations with over 38 million unique visitors a month. Bradford also served as President and CEO of N2 Broadband, the leading provider of open-platform, on-demand entertainment solutions.

Bradford’s success has led to funding for Vitrue from General Catalyst Partners and later from Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner Broadcasting.

With plenty of experience with technology and launching brands, Bradford sees “the future of the web is video and short length pieces.”

Not only is the format and forms of distribution changing, so is the relationship with consumers.

“More and more brands are co-creating content. Winners understand this; the losers don’t. Basically you have to give up control to get control. Let brands take advantage of the passion. Every brand needs a place or a community.”

In their book Groundswell, authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write that companies don’t control the brand. This new relationship creates a dynamic that fosters deeper engagement. But with this new ownership arrangement comes unpredictability and uncertainty.

Through platforms like YouTube and Myspace, consumers are recontextualizing the brand experience in ways that advertisers can't possibly anticipate. (Yes, advertisers welcome when consumers post videos that profess their love for a product, but not when that same video is placed among other videos that advertisers find offensive.)

Brands are expensive investments. Many still think that they should not be left in the hands of the consumer. So how do you permit authenticity and deeper engagement without losing total control?

Bradford thinks he has come up with a solution. It's about brand safety.

Vitrue has engineered a technology platform built with their customers’ diverse social networking needs in mind. Its modular design provides the flexibility to keep ahead of a rapidly changing social media market. Vitrue can add features and functionality without disrupting service.

Their platform has enabled brands like Chic-fil-A for example to help consumers connect with each other through online social networking and user-generated video. Vitrue can create and host a mircosite for their clients. Unlike on YouTube, the brand experience stays on their clients’ sites and remains more contained. Customers can post video to a company site and also syndicate it to their personal site. Conversely, visitors to a personal site can be redirected to a company site.

There is still community, still authenticity, but the client has a higher comfort level with a company sponsored social media application.

For its efforts, Vitrue was named to Business 2.0's "Next Net" Top 25 in 2007.

Technorati Tags: Reggie Bradford; Vitrue; Brand; Brand Safety; Charlene Li; Josh Bernoff; Groundswell;

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