Yesterday, Reality Digital, a player in the white-label social media space, announced "Harmony," a new self-service social media/online video sharing platform targeted to small-to-medium sized businesses. SMBs are getting a lot of love recently as more and more technology providers are realizing there's opportunity to serve them (see post on Jivox and Pixel Fish earlier this week for more).

Cynthia Francis, Reality Digital's CEO/co-founder explained to me that Harmony was borne out of interest that smaller prospects were showing for its Opus platform (which powers such projects as the NFL's "Replay Re-Cutter"). However, with its cost of $50K or more per year, Opus was out of reach for many.

Reality Digital was also seeing a lot of SMBs simply using WordPress and YouTube to cobble together a community/video presence. So Harmony's goal was to improve on this, enabling SMBs to go beyond template-only social community building and video sharing. Among the differentiators Cynthia sees for Harmony are full drag-and-drop configuration, 100% branding control and self-service advertising in addition to the core community-building and video tools.

Most big media companies have now embraced social media to one extent or another. The main challenges with these efforts are keeping the community vibrant, safe and engaging. For resource-constrained SMBs, these issues will take on even greater importance. Still, with video so inexpensive to produce and all businesses striving for customer loyalty, it is appealing to give social media a try. Harmony makes it easy for SMBs to dip their toe in and test to see if it is right for them.

What do you think? Post a comment now.