It’s Time for a Reality Check

I am excited to tell you about the launch of a new Social Media Club program called Reality Check. This will be our coordinated effort to get past the hype on several key issues to Social Media professionals by connecting across several of the different cities with active local Social Media Club groups, and exploring the practical, real world usage of key technologies and activities.

While some might see it as an event sponsorship, others might see it as a mini-site, others might see it as an online advertising buy, still others might see it as a video blog and hopefully more of you will see this as the forest and not the trees since all those things are true.

From my perspective, it is a foundational element of the future of marketing, which is a focused ‘market conversation’ around a topic of mutual interest between a given community/market and a sponsor/advertiser. Broadly, it falls under a practice area I am calling Market Engagement Optimization (MEO) which I will be writing about more later this week [teaser]. While some may call this a ’sponsored conversation’, I call it a market conversation because it is about the market more so then the sponsor.

The simple idea behind a market conversation is that there is a question of interest to market participants that is ‘underwritten’ by a sponsor, which we have framed under the guise of doing a reality check on our industry, something we feel is sorely needed. In this case, we are working with Real Player SP to do a reality check on portable video. How are people really using portable video, how would they like to be using portable video both personally and professionally?

In addition to sponsoring several local Social Media Club events around the world, their sponsorship has underwritten a videographer in each city, allowed us to hire Roxanne Darling (from Barefeet Studios and also Beachwalks with Rox) as the Executive Producer and enabled us to launch a new site focused on the Reality Check. We are providing Real Player SP with broad sponsorship of our digital media from our newsletter, to our member badge/widget, to the local events, to inclusion in all promotion for Reality Check and of course, on the site and videos we produce.

This sort of holistic integration of online-offline efforts is what I personally see as one of the best ways to get a corporate entity engaged in issues that matter to the community while respecting the community and its members.  Rather then focusing on pushing their products, they are a part of the conversation and in this case enabling it to happen in a more organized, professional manner.  They are actively participating by enabling this discussion to happen, but also by listening and contributing. In fact, RealTweeter and Real Networks Blogger Lacy Kemp is heading to many of the events herself and even CEO Rob Glaser is engaged after attending the Seattle Social Media Club meeting recently.

While Social Media Club gets funds it needs to enable the local and the international conversations at the core of our community, Real Player SP gets increased awareness, consideration for their new product (which I personally think is really cool and useful), research on a core issue that matters to them, a chance to humanize the brand (key to MEO) and a chance to show that they are not only engaged and listening, but taking different actions because of it.

How it works: we take 15 minutes out of the meetings in selected cities to discuss the same questions, reaching beyond our own world view to see how people from all around the country and all around the world think about a given topic. This is recorded on video and distributed on Reality Check, where participants from different cities can discover the similar and different perspective of others. We then use the Reality Check blog to gather new insights and discuss the topic together.

We previously did a network sponsorship of local Social Media Club events with H&R Block that was focused on them delivering tax advice in the month leading up to April 15 (our tax due date in the US). Reality Check takes this network event sponsorship idea to the next level.

Ultimately, I feel this is one of the best ways we have so far to connect our members and explore a topic together. So I invite you to join this month’s Reality Check, and let us know how you use portable video and how you would like to use portable video both personally and professionally.

BTW – Future Reality Check’s are planned for blogging, social networking, podcasting and even Twitter. If you are interested in participating in a Reality Check around your market, please contact us.