The Vitrue Blog

If you haven't seen the article on Forbes.com featuring the Vitrue SMI, check it out.

Yesterday we spoke with Elizabeth Woyke who afterwards crafted the article "Tina Fey For President!" (Blogs and social-networking sites have spoken: Tina Fey should run for president.) on Forbes.com. The articles is great and shows a unique use of the Vitrue SMI. Elizabeth talks about the rise of the political brands in social media over the past 2 months. Here's a chart that shows more details:

(click to enlarge image)

As the article points out, the Vitrue SMI is an easy way to measure your brand name's social presence; Burger King (84.9), Taco Bell (46.4), Starbucks (281), Apple's iPhone (1,330), Q-tips (1.52), Coke (230), and Pepsi (164). In addition to your overall index score, you should also understand what mediums are affecting it. Take a look at this report comparing Obama and Coke. Looking at the pie charts you will see that 85.8% of Obama's score comes from Micro-Blogs where Coke is more evenly distributed across Micro-Blogs (26.25%), Video Sharing (22.5%) and Social Networks (47.39%).

Do you know your Vitrue SMI? Give it a try now:

Share your score in a comment. Need help improving your scores? Just ask our social media experts.

Measuring your brand's conversations across social media has often been a challenge, if not almost impossible. Well, I'm excited to say that's changing! A team of social media experts here at Vitrue have recently developed a new marketing metric to help marketers, and advertisers gain insight into their brand's conversations.

The Vitrue Social Media Index™ report is an easy to understand measurement of your brand's online conversations. Based on our patent-pending service, index scores are comprised of various online conversations from text-dense micro-blogs to multi-dimensional video sites. The Vitrue SMI score provides a snapshot in time to help make sense of the overwhelming amount of measurable data.

Anyone can use the Viture SMI, by going to http://vitrue.com/smi/. Since the index represents a snapshot, marketers will find it valuable to grab a baseline and comeback to check their index over time. Saving that baseline or any index is easy. Simply enter your email address and the Vitrue SMI will send you a unique URL to your historical report. Don't worry, we won't spam you or sell your email address. Although you might get a response from myself or another social media expert asking for feedback.

Ready to explore? Here's some examples to get you started:
Coke vs. Pepsi
CBS vs. NBC
iPod vs. Zune
Of course you can get your own results at http://vitrue.com/smi/

The Vitrue SMI measures data across popular social networks, video sharing sites, micro-blogs, photo sharing sites and the general blogosphere. Vitrue also offers a more in depth social media analysis to their clients and partners and can help create a Social Share of Voice report.

The Social Share of Voice, shows a brand's weight against their competition or other defined terms. Take a look at these two Social Share of Voice reports. The first compares hybrid automotive brands (Hybrid Autos). The second report compares, the lesser green, truck brands (Truck Brands).
(note: hovering over each bar will show the Social Share of Voice, clicking each bar will take you to the repspective Vitrue SMI report. )

Have you tried the Vitrue SMI? Do you have questions or comments? Drop us a note in the form below and let's start the conversation.

Well, if you're the state of Missouri, a lot. Next week (September 8th) Missouri kicks off their 2nd annual Tour of Missouri International Cycling Race. This year the tour will include an online social community where fans, tourists, teams and Tour personnel can upload and share content. The social network is called Fanzone and is integrated with the Tour's main site. The social community includes photo and video uploading, commenting, member profiles, and member messaging. Mobile upload is also available and obviously important to an event based social experience like the Tour or Missouri.

"We will be providing video cameras to Tour personnel and each of the 15 teams in the race in order to capture behind-the-scenes footage, which is usually never seen by the public. Team footage could include views from caravan vehicles following the race or team strategy sessions," said Steve Brunner, president of KOM Sports, which markets the event. "The partnership with Vitrue has been trailblazing from the beginning. They have been incredible to work and brainstorm with. They've been able to mold the site to the needs of the race."

Oh yeah, I didn't mention the fact that Tour of Missouri's Fanzone is a Vitrue powered site. Read the press release if you want the details...

I'm personally excited about the Tour's combination of event marketing, social media and mobile upload. I can think of numerous events from my past that could have been significantly enhanced with an online social community. This isn't our first time bridging live events to online social communities, and it surely won't be our last.

Are you attending the Tour of Missouri? Have you engaged an online social community built exclusively for a real world event? Want to participate in a dialog about social media strategies? Sound off in the comments below. We're listening!

The Vitrue powered Ben & Jerry's Imagine campaign has gotten plenty of buzz, and rightfully so. Ben & Jerry's hit the sweet spot with a new flavor, a cool social app, and a cause everyone can appreciate. You have seen Ben & Jerry's Imagine haven't you?

So it was of no surprise when I learned that Vitrue is up for the vote on AdWeek's People's Choice Buzz Awards featuring Ben & Jerry's Imagine. You can see our entry and most importantly vote for us at:

http://www.adweekbuzz.com/

Don't forget to checkout Ben & Jerry's Imagine campaign and leave your message of peace. And, while you're feeling chatty, drop us a note in the comments below.  

This past Friday we launched our new company site. Our goals were to simplify the navigation, present our combined offerings (post acquisition), and highlight some of the client work we have done. Take a look around and let us know what you think. Yeah, that's right, our new blog has comments enabled (don't ask, just comment). We are here to participate in the conversation.

BTW, we know the blog looks a little canned, we plan to turn our attention to it next. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think.

The office is filled with energy and excitement this week with the news of the acquisition. Just in case you haven't heard, we acquired UGENmedia. This acquisition is significant and positions us as the leading social media marketing company for blue chip brands. The official press release as well as UGENmedia's web site has the basic details. As a product director at Vitrue, I'd like to dive into one specific area of our new combined strengths.

Right off the bat, our product strategies overlap significantly, as if we were working from the same product requirements. But the best part is HOW we built success over the past years. Vitrue has invested heavily in building a social media platform with a highly customizable HTML/CSS presentation layer. UGENmedia focused on user experience, style and polish, via a significant investment in Flex/Flash technologies. Both presentation options have their pros and cons, and now we can offer the best option or combination to meet our clients needs.

Vitrue's robust platform has a proven track record of delivering brands the tools and technologies they need to safely manage their social media strategy. UGENmedia's rich application interfaces will make it even better. Vitrue will also begin to offer applications that are integrated within the social networks, taking our current viral distribution to a whole new level.

As a product guy, I look at features, and technologies as a color palette to create solutions from. This week our palette just exploded, the ideas are endless and as you can probably tell, we are thrilled!

In addition to products and technologies, probably the most significant is UGENmedia's team. We're all happy to welcome them to Vitrue.

Check out Allen Maurer's piece about Vitrue and Reggie at TechJournal South.

Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue, which helps companies create video-centric social networks around brands, says that working with startups from WebMD to N2 Broadband and Vitrue, he’s learned that perseverance and timing are key virtues.

"Have you ever wanted to make a promotional video or Television Commercial? Do you get tired of seeing the same old commercials over and over? Could you do a better job selling that story?"

This is what Meijer, a Midwest retail supercenter, is asking its consumers to do - create consumer generated ads. Engaging your consumers and letting them guide the messaging of your advertising campaign is a great way to gauge what they believe as the equity of the brand. Consumer generated media is very powerful and if executed correctly, can be very successful. Ensuring safety throughout the promotion is a key factor. Meijer just launched its promotion, so I am going to keep an eye on what their consumers come up with.

Pringles recently ran a contest that was asking its consumers to create "Jingle for Pringles." The Pringles team was curious to see what its consumers thought of the brand and how they would communicate that through a song. As it turned out, the messaging that was being represented in the videos were right in line with Pringles' brand equity.