What sets a good branded social media application a part from a great one are these four main components: Reach, Utility, Contextual Relevance and Engagement. Conde Nast’s latest, “Vanity Fair Hollywood” iPhone application is an excellent example of a social media app that was designed with all those components in mind… resulting in an app that is, indeed, inherently “social”.

Conde Nast partnered up with L’Oreal to create this “awards pool” social gaming tool for their Hollywood flagship magazine, Vanity Fair. But more importantly, they used this opportunity to re-purpose their editorial content into an app that’s not only useful, but newsworthy and therefore, relevant.

According to Vanity Fair, “The app allows you to match wits with your friends, tells you all you need to know about every nominee (yes, even Avatar’s sound mixer extraordinaire Christopher Boyes), and, most importantly, lets you fill out your picks and see how you stack up against the competition, envelope-by-envelope. Thanks to exclusive Vanity Fair content, you’ll be spending Hollywood’s big night bragging digitally about how right you were.”

It’s true that it could have very well been pretty much any brand in the beauty/lifestyle vertical that could have sponsored this very application i.e. “Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone app presented by [insert name here]” but, kudos to L’Oreal for stepping up and sponsoring this app – you rolled the dice, and it paid off.

It’s no secret that brands like L’Oreal are interested to play in this social media space as an early adopter. But by L’Oreal using Vanity Fair as a media partner to make the introduction for them, not only do they get to leverage off the magazine’s built-in audience, they also get to build brand credibility.

This is a great example of brilliant media partnership. If L’Oreal (or any brand) created this app on their own, it would not have worked. The media partnership with Vanity Fair was their “in” (-or, “invite”, rather) to this influencer group.

The utilitarian component combined with the user-friendly interface makes this iPhone app a great example of how a brand and media partnership can come together to create a social media tool with a purpose, successfully.

COST: Free

NAME: Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone app

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

Rock Is Religion spoke with Toronto-based, Yangaroo’s CEO John Heaven about its patented Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS), a secure B2B digital delivery solution for the music and advertising industries. DMDS replaces the physical distribution of audio and video content for music, music videos, and advertising to television, radio, media, retailers and other authorized recipients with more accountable, effective, and far less costly digital delivery of broadcast quality media via the Internet.

Record labels originally know Yangaroo as Musicrypt, before the company changed its name in hopes to generate a broader reach into new markets (television, advertising distribution and film and television production support).

RIR: How does Yangaroo’s technology allow record labels to send their artists’ music directly to radio station personnel over the Internet in broadcast-quality format?

JH: Record labels upload their artists’ broadcast-quality music and music videos and select destinations, which can be radio-station personnel and even television personnel for music videos.  The intended recipients are notified of the files availability and can download them directly into their equipment on site for review and for later broadcast. Music files are protected by biopassword authentication of users, digital watermarking, secure file encryption, and access rights management to prevent piracy.

RIR: Is this a free service?

JH: Receiving broadcast-quality audio and video files via DMDS is free and rates for customers vary according to volume.

RIR: Yangaroo’s tagline is “Better… Faster… Greener” -how so?

JH: DMDS eliminates the environmentally unfriendly and costly practices of producing physical media such as beta tapes or CD’s and printed promotional materials, and shipping them by truck or plane to their intended destinations.  It has been estimated, for example, that per each CD produced and packaged with promotional information about an artist, .7 pounds of fossil fuel are consumed.

RIR: How does this system mutually benefit both the labels and broadcasters?

JH: This system benefits both labels and broadcasters in many ways.  It’s secure, it’s quick, it saves them money, and it allows labels to instantly gauge the interest in their artists’ songs as they can track content accessed from DMDS.

RIR: What made you design this technology?

JH: Our team’s background in the music industry made us realize that the Internet could be used to the benefit of the industry for distributing and receiving music securely, quickly, and cost effectively.  We first went about devising a means to make it more secure, which resulted in our Biometrics Rights Management System, a patented method that combines biometrics with encryption and web-based distribution.  Content owners and distributors with whom we had relationships were quick to adopt this technology not long after we began making it available in 2003.

RIR: Is Yangaroo the only service broadcasters/labels use to send music?

JH: Yangaroo is the proven leader in this field, having first developed DMDS and then, just this past year, enhancing it to provide labels with the ability to transmit television broadcast-quality video files.  We completed our first successful tests of video delivery in the fall, the first video deliveries ever to broadcasters in the U.S. and Canada.

RIR: What are Yangaroo’s plans for 2010?

JH: We will be expanding our television broadcast quality content distribution for television advertising, music videos, award shows and film and TV program production support. This will complement our continuing growth for audio content delivery for record labels, artists and award shows such as the Grammys.

It’s confirmed. Former Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Owen Van Natta is now the newly named CEO of Myspace (who replaced MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe last week). 

Adding to the “new changing of the guard”, The Wall Street Journal confirmed yesterday, Myspace officially announced two new appointments, former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO, and Jason Hirschhorn (former Chief Digital Officer at MTV Networks) as Chief Product Officer.

“I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to build upon the successes of the company’s founders and am eager to work with Owen and Jon and the rest of the incredible management team at MySpace as we enter this exciting new phase in the company’s already revered history,” said Mike Jones in Myspace’s official press release. Jason Hirschhorn continued, “MySpace is one of the most alluring innovations of our time and I am honored to collaborate with Tom Anderson and the rest of the MySpace team to take what is already a stellar product into its next evolution.”

The changes in Myspace likely indicates the desire to be more technically savvy, like its competitor Facebook, which means Myspace won’t be counted out in the social media space just yet.