Yes, you do. Governance touches all those things and more. Without it, your DAM may bring more chaos than order in the long run. Don’t leave it out or push it to the last minute. A DAM governance structure should be top of mind from the start of your DAM journey.

What is DAM governance?

As you’re already aware — and hopefully didn’t learn the hard way — a DAM doesn’t run itself. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it system.

In the context of a DAM, governance is the practice of maintaining and evolving standards, policies and best practices. It encompasses the people, processes and technology involved with digital asset management at your company. 

Governance documentation defines the information, guidelines and policies that provide stability and keep your DAM running smoothly for the long term. This framework will prevent your DAM from turning into a junk drawer as your business and the system evolve, and stakeholders and end-users change commitments and flow in and out of your company. 

Documented governance policies support risk management and ensure ongoing alignment with your overall business goals. DAM governance also includes continually collaborating with stakeholders to manage, change and adapt your system to your organization’s needs. It establishes and maintains communication between all relevant stakeholders for sustained DAM success.

Where do I start?

Many of the questions you’re addressing during the set-up and launch of your DAM are the same questions you need to focus on when defining your governance policies. Multi-task! Save yourself from having to revisit those questions later by defining and documenting the answers from the start. 

Your governance documentation will be a living document that needs regular review and updating as your business and its priorities evolve. Like the DAM, it isn’t “set it and forget it.” You’ll thank yourself later if you remember it throughout your DAM journey rather than wait until a problem arises.

Your governance plan should address the following questions:

• What goes in the DAM?
• Who has access to the DAM? Which areas of content can they see with that access? And what are they allowed to do with the content they can see? 
• What are the required naming conventions?
• Who is applying metadata? What standards and requirements do they have to follow?
• How will versioning be handled?
• What are your licensing and regulatory requirements?
• How are expired assets handled? What is the archiving process?
• Who is responsible for providing training?
• Who is responsible for enforcing and updating the DAM standards and requirements?
• How will changes and updates be communicated to your users?
• What is the reporting process when something goes wrong? Who is responsible for resolving which types of issues (technical, legal, content, etc.).

Does this list seem overwhelming right now? Then start with a basic purpose statement and build from there as you go. Why does your DAM exist? Who is it for, and what goals is it expected to achieve?

Dig deeper: A 12-step guide for implementing a digital asset management system

Keeping the peace: Working with DAM stakeholders

Putting your DAM policies and process requirements on paper is the easy part. Generating buy-in and enforcing those policies and requirements is where the hard work comes in. Your governance documentation has no value if its contents aren’t being implemented and enforced. 

Your DAM is likely an enterprise-level system that must meet the needs of varying and, in some cases, competing divisions and departments within your company. Those departments need to have a voice if your DAM will be successful. 

Don’t forget that you also have stakeholders in business areas that aren’t directly handling the assets flowing in and out of your DAM but have a vested interest in the success and proper management of the system. Your IT and legal teams need a voice alongside your marketing and creative teams. Buy-in from all levels of the organizational chart is critical to your DAM’s success — from leadership to end-users. You must look at the DAM user experience from all angles to get the full picture and provide the best experience. The key to making all this work is communication.

Be thorough when defining the roles and responsibilities of all your stakeholders. Make your expectations for their commitment to the DAM’s success clear. You want active and engaged stakeholders, and if someone isn’t living up to the expectations of their role, you should feel empowered to seek a replacement. 

Be sure you’re referring to roles and not specific personnel names or titles in your documentation. People will leave the company or take on new internal commitments, and org charts will change. When new members are onboarded into the DAM team, having well-defined roles for them will ease the transition. 

Likewise, be conscious of always giving everyone an equal voice. When you have a mix of strong personalities on your team of DAM stakeholders, it can be difficult not to give in to the loudest voice in the room or defer to the stakeholder representing the largest group of end-users.

You may consider instituting a voting policy for major decisions involving the DAM as part of your governance plan to give everyone an equal opportunity to help determine the path forward. Everyone needs to feel heard, or engagement will suffer.

Engaging regularly with your stakeholders from day one of your DAM journey will set the project off on the right foot. Begin holding meetings before your DAM is open to any end-users. Regularly review and address user feedback, assess if changes are needed to your processes and policies and evaluate the potential need for technical upgrades. Getting governance to stick in an already active system is exponentially more difficult. Not impossible, but challenging. 

If you wait to address governance with your users and stakeholders until after the system has launched, most major decisions have been made. Getting everyone involved from the beginning fosters a feeling of ownership for the DAM and encourages ongoing investment in its success. 

As your DAM moves through planning and launch into maintenance, your meeting cadence may become less frequent, but there is never an end. Meetings should continue so that you keep your stakeholders and your users involved. Their value doesn’t decrease once the DAM has rolled out and the governance documentation is written. 

As the DAM evolves and grows, decisions will still need to be made, and they should always remain involved in those decisions. While the existing governance policies will guide future decisions, remember it is a living document. Always have clearly defined channels for stakeholders and end-users to offer feedback and suggestions for changes and improvements to workflows and processes. 

Don’t hide your governance documentation away in a secret location. Make sure it’s easily accessible and open for users to review at any time. Always be open to questions and feedback about the documentation. 

Dig deeper: Here’s why you need a DAM workflow — and how to map it out

I don’t need governance: I have a DAM manager

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that having a dedicated DAM manager role is your governance. Yes, they likely have a degree in library science or DAM management and are certainly well-versed in all the DAM best practices. They talk with users and consider their needs and opinions. So aren’t they ultimately responsible for all the decisions? They know the “right” way to manage a DAM — that’s why you hired them. 

Well, sorry, but no. Having a single system manager unilaterally making all the decisions with no governance policies guiding them isn’t ideal. It’s certainly not the best way to get buy-in and have your users feel a sense of ownership for the system they’re using. And while the DAM manager may know all the best practices, they aren’t using the DAM every day as an end-user from all the different facets of your user base. 

Yes, best practices are best practices for a reason, but they don’t always work for every scenario and situation. You can’t force a best practice if it is not the best solution for your particular users and their business needs. 

The DAM manager will use the governance policies to guide you forward and maintain standards and order, but they’ll also recognize that sometimes you’ll need to be flexible when it comes to best practices. If sometimes being best-practice-adjacent makes the end-users’ lives easier and doesn’t introduce risk or disorder, you have to be willing to give an inch or two. 

Happy DAM users are active DAM users who remain engaged in its long-term success. The success of the DAM depends as much on stakeholder and end-user involvement as it does the DAM Manager’s leadership.

The post How to define your DAM governance structure appeared first on MarTech.

Whether selling to businesses or consumers, buyers need access to various types of product content — emotionally-driven visual assets and objective information. This helps them feel most confident when making buying decisions.

Delivering this experience requires digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) tools.

Join this webinar and learn how to create a 360-degree view of their product content will be best equipped to create experiences that empower their customers across websites, social media, digital ads, packaging, in-store displays, and more.

Register today for “Create Consumer Confidence With a 360-view Content Strategy,” presented by Acquia.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

The post Webinar: The 360-view content strategy you need appeared first on MarTech.

Instead of creating a request in a project management tool then waiting for new versions of an existing image to be uploaded to the MAM, a marketer could create several versions in the DAM within a few moments. This simple change could save many hours. 

Given that the largest percentage of marketers are millennials or Gen Z who’ve worked five years or less, business process concepts may be misunderstood. When asked to describe their day-to-day workflows, some may be unable to explain the term. 

Dig deeper: We’re implementing DAM! Where do I start?

What is a workflow?

A workflow is the path one takes from the beginning of a project to the end. For DAM administrators, it represents all the steps between a request for a new asset and the delivery of its final version. 

Most of us don’t think about the steps we take to perform common tasks, especially the ones we do most often. Could you write down the steps you take between deciding to go to the grocery store and putting purchased goods away in your pantry?

Marketing work boils down to a collection of projects containing tasks that are performed repetitively. While the creative process — inspiration, perspiration and activation — is often difficult for writers, designers and developers to articulate, the work products they deliver are not. 

How to sketch out a workflow

Here’s an example of the workflow for a typical marketing project:

• A project request ideally comes in the form of a brief with detailed instructions about the messaging, look and feel and specific assets required for the project.
• An initial draft for the client, which may be  a single piece or multiple pieces depending upon the complexity of the request. A client might request separate copy and design drafts or a full mockup of the asset(s) with copy and design in place.
• A feedback and revision round in which the client returns comments and edits to the creative team.
• A second draft delivery with subsequent feedback and revision rounds, if necessary, until a final proof can be obtained,
• A final proof process where one or more stakeholders review the final asset(s) and sign off on all changes.
• Delivery of the final asset(s) to the client.
• Completion of the project and migration of final asset(s) to a corporate archive. 

Each of these stages can contain one or more individual tasks, such as:

• Producing graphics.
• Implementing templates.
• Getting brand manager approval of particular items such as logos.
• Editing and proofing of copy.
• Internal Q&A prior to delivering drafts and revisions to clients.
• Legal or other regulatory review of certain aspects of copy or design.
• Other steps within the approval flow to ensure agreement across different operational or organizational departments.

Reviewing a process such as this can help your team map out their own processes. Using these stages as milestones, they can discuss the tasks they perform to move from one stage to the next.

Making a workflow diagram

There are many templates and flowcharts available to assist you with mapping workflow. Some are available in your desktop software, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Keynote. Even a simple list of tasks in Notepad can suffice. For example:

1. Project Request
   1. Assign project lead
   2. Assign copywriter and graphic designer
   3. Assign web developer, if required
   4. Choose & verify templates and brand guides
   5. Write first copy draft
   6. Create three graphic mockups for creative team review

A project management platform such as Adobe Workfront, Confluence, Trello or Asanar, can convert these into forms and templates that automatically populate, assign dates and deadlines and send emails to appropriate project members. 

Setting up workflow tasks in your DAM

Some DAMs have features that will help speed tasks and eliminate speedbumps using automated workflows.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets, for example, has  a proof approval workflow  that sends links to internal or external clients and stakeholders, allowing them to OK proofs without needing access to the DAM.

Once the project management tool is linked to the DAM via API, the DAM will capture and retain all comments, revisions and updates and automatically email a copy or a link  to relevant parties. 

This can eliminate the final step of packaging and migrating final files, because they immediately become a part of the DAM system. This also makes it a simple matter for your team to share updates of works in progress to clients without  countless emails or uploading sensitive documents to clouds outside your firewall. 

DAM workflows boost productivity and efficiency

The steps to get things done mostly reside “in one’s head.” But teams cannot benefit from each other’s creativity and skill without common workflows that save everyone time. 

Once workflows are hammered out, DAM administrators can ask relevant questions about what steps take.

The post Here’s why you need a DAM workflow — and how to map it out appeared first on MarTech.

Digital asset management (DAM) stores and organizes all of an organization’s digital assets — images, PDFs, photographs, audio, video and even virtual reality or other cutting-edge formats.

It is the “single source of truth,” where marketers can find every relevant version of media assets created for the brand. A DAM also adds metadata that can provide information on anything the marketer might want to know before using it. These include things like does the company have perpetual rights to use a photograph, whether the legal team has approved a video, and if an infographic or whitepaper was checked for brand design standard compliance.

How do companies use DAM?

Marketing agencies might leverage DAM technology to maintain consistency across in-house content and creatives developed by partners. B2B businesses might draw on the benefits of a centralized hub for sales collateral and event marketing materials. DAMs are being integrated with other technologies, especially content management systems and digital experience platforms, to unify marketing asset management and distribute digital content directly to the channels where they’re consumed.

Why are so many organizations using DAMs?

First is consumer expectations.

Nearly three quarters of customers expect companies to understand their unique wants and needs — up from two-thirds in 2020, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer. The benefits of this personalization are clear. Companies using more granular personalization experience significant gains in conversions, revenue per visitor and average order value, according to an Incisiv Adobe study.

Second is the expanding number of channels and devices consumers are using.

DAMs make it easier to create and repurpose marketing content according to the different needs of the medium and format. They also support the entire content lifecycle – from upstream creative to downstream delivery. They support work-in-progress for content, speeding asset workflows, reviews and approvals, as well as connecting with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva and Microsoft Office.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to enhance their campaigns with digital assessment management technologies. Here’s what’s inside:

• Capabilities of digital asset management platforms
  • Workflow management
  • File formats and handling
  • Asset conversion, editing and customization
  • Distribution and user permissions management
  • Search and metadata
  • Digital rights and corporate governance management
  • Reports and analytics
  • Data storage and security
  • Integrations

• What are the benefits of using a digital asset management (DAM) system?

Capabilities of digital asset management platforms

Digital asset management platforms have everything from legacy features, like file management, to emerging capabilities due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here is a detailed look.

Workflow management

DAM systems differ in the extent of their workflow management capabilities. Some allow collaboration through @ tagging, while others have more full-fledged project management offerings. This can help marketing teams, along with outside creative resources, communicate about changes while an asset is in development or being updated.

Later, they can allow for approvals to be obtained from brand managers, execs and the legal team, while some systems also facilitate asset distribution. These capabilities may be built into the core platform or offered as an add-on or integration. Most DAMs are SaaS and can be accessed from browsers, but some have developed native apps.

File formats and handling

One area of differentiation is the ability to manage a variety of file formats. Most support common popular video, image and audio formats. However, if your workflow requires the use of a specialized format you need to ensure any system you’re considering can handle it.

Asset conversion, editing and customization

Some platforms allow an asset uploaded in one format to be downloaded or distributed in another — with conversions happening on the fly. Also, some have lightweight editing capabilities within the platform. To be clear, connections with common image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) are typically more useful.

Distribution and user permissions management

The content production supply chain can involve many departments, agencies, freelancers and more. The ability to provide flexible permissions, so the right people have access to the right assets –– and only the right assets –– is very valuable.

Within agencies, in particular, these capabilities can give clients/customers convenient self-service capabilities. It also lets large enterprises maintain a consistent brand message across geographies and verticals, while still letting marketers and salespeople can help themselves to the materials they need.

Search and metadata

One of the most important benefits of a DAM is the ability to find assets after they’ve been created and filed away. Most providers now use artificial intelligence, either proprietary or through a partnership, for image and video recognition and tagging. Vendors are also exploring ways to use AI and machine learning to find insights and automate content transformations based on usage patterns.

Digital rights and corporate governance management

Most marketers license content from individual creators or stock libraries. DAMs can keep track of the specific license terms governing each piece of content, ensuring they’re not used in the wrong market, an unapproved context or after license expiration.

Corporate brand guidelines, as well as timelines associated with particular marketing campaigns, can also typically be managed with DAM functionality.

Reports and analytics

Analytics capabilities allow marketers to trace the return on the investment made in the development of digital media. They can also determine which assets are used most often and in what ways, proividing insights for planning future content creation.

Data storage and security

The majority of DAM providers partner with Amazon Web Services or Google to host their software and their clients’ assets. This means following those companies’ policies for geographical distribution, backups and security protocols. However, some players offer clients a variety of options for data hosting. This is useful for enterprises working with strict data governance regulations.

Integrations

Since a DAM is meant to be the central “single source of truth” repository for all of a brand’s assets, it must integrate well with the rest of your martech stack. Vendors differ greatly in terms of the number and types of integrations they offer. Some are beginning to specialize in serving a specific sector with unique integration needs, such as online retailers using product information management systems.

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

What are the benefits of using a digital asset management system?

Digital asset management systems can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation.

The specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following:

• Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources.
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals.
• Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types.
• More efficient creation and distribution of assets to martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms.
• Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution.

Read next: Does your organization need a digital asset management platform?

The post What is digital asset management and how can it help you? appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

Things to think about before your DAM demo

It’s important to set up demos as close to each other as possible to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

Questions to ask during your DAM vendor demo

The following 20 questions will help gauge if these platforms are right for your organizations.

File types

• What file types do you support, meaning users can view thumbnails and also convert those files into other formats as needed?
• What file types can be uploaded and downloaded, but aren’t officially supported?

Integrations

• Do you offer native, off-the-shelf integrations with third-party systems such as web content management, mobile apps, marketing automation platforms, etc.? If so, which ones?
• Are APIs available? Is access included in the pricing?

Infrastructure and onboarding

• What makes this platform technically unique from all the others?
• How difficult is the platform set up and implementation? How long will it take for us to be up and running on the system?
• How intuitive is the platform user interface? How easy is it for business users to customize the machine learning-based models or settings?
• What is your service reliability guarantee?
• Do you host the content yourself or who do you work with for hosting capabilities?
• How scalable is the platform? How much data can it handle in terms of file size and simultaneous interactions across a wide geographic area?

Pricing and support

• What is pricing based on? What features are included? Are there additional fees (consulting, add-on features, APIs, quotas)?
• What is the minimum contract length? Is there a short-term contract or an “out” clause if things don’t work out?
• Is a free trial or pilot program available?
• Can your platform be white-labeled for agencies or multi-location marketers?
• Who will be the day-to-day contact?
• Who pays if your system/team makes an error?
• What kind of customer support is available? Can I pick up the phone to report problems?

Strategy and product roadmap

• Do you have other clients in my vertical?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are you considering? What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

The post 20 questions to ask digital asset management platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Here are some of the ways a DAM can aid an organization:

• Better communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources. 
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals. 
• Faster conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications.
• Higher efficiency on the front end, in the creation of brand assets, and on the back end, in the distribution of those assets to various martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms. 
• Improved branding consistency to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution. 

While these are all highly desirable capabilities, your organization may not need all of them. Determining if a DAM is right for your organization requires assessing your current asset management system. Here’s a list of questions to help you and your team get started:

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

The post Does your organization need a digital asset management platform? appeared first on MarTech.

Booksy also benefited internally from their digital asset upgrade. It made assets easier to create and access across their growing organization. They now have 19 million users, and over 500 employees.

“It’s really helped us to tie everything together and put everything in one place so it’s easy to find,” said Rebecca Baxter, Booksy’s global marketing coordinator, at The MarTech Conference. “So if marketing teams all over the world are looking for [assets to] support this step of the journey, they can easily find one link to that collection [of assets].”

Dig deeper: What is digital asset management?

Silos, inefficiencies and duplicates

Before implementing the DAM supplied by digital asset management company Bynder, Booksy’s content was less organized, creating inefficiencies and silos.

“We were using Google Drive and we struggled with how to keep version control,” said Baxter. “You find a file on the Google Drive, and you think that’s the most updated version, but it’s really not. There could be duplicate files, duplicate folders, so it’s really hard.”

She added, “The lack of governance made things difficult and people were just assuming that anything they found could be used, but that really wasn’t always the case. So we wanted something where we could really have that version control, really have a good management system so when people are pulling things off of here, we know it’s going to be the most updated version and it’s ready to go live.”

Aligning with product positioning and local promotional materials

The new DAM allowed Booksy to consolidate internal marketing and sales assets for Booksy’s outreach to their small-business customers. Additionally, it made digital marketing assets accessible as part of Booksy’s services to customers.

“We have different stages of our product positioning and it helps us to align our assets to those different steps,” said Baxter.

As Booksy continues to grow, they now have markets in six different countries. Even though they began in Poland, the U.S. is now their biggest market.

“We have tiles that we put on our home page, one for each country that we work with,” Baxter explained. “And that way they can find their country-specific localized materials in one place very easily. It keeps them accountable, making sure that you know they’re using materials that follow our brand guidelines, that they’re the most updated versions and that they’ve been approved by the global teams in order to use in their regional markets.”

Dig deeper: How to build your DAM foundation

Coordinate marketing and sales

The DAM helps Booksy’s marketing team create single folders of the best, most timely assets, which they can share with sales team members. Doing this builds efficiencies and reduces the circulation of the wrong assets, or of duplicates.

“For the sales team, we put collections together for each type of sales material — whether it’s a brochure or a one-pager or a rack card,” said Baxter. “They can easily go to the collection for brochures and find what they’re looking for instead of searching through the hundred sales materials that we have loaded.”

When Booksy is rolling out a new feature for its services, that’s something sales will want to take to Booksy customers. Marketing will place all related assets in a single collection. Those assets could include a video, a sizzle reel or a brochure that describes the new feature.

“The guiding principle really on all of this is collaboration,” Baxter said. “I use collaboration and communication when I’m talking about my job responsibilities, and the way that we manage our assets is definitely part of that. It really helps us to collaborate when we have this one system that we all use, and that we’re thinking on a global level while everyone’s acting locally and doing what they need to do in their own markets.”

Register for The MarTech Conference here.

The post How Booksy used DAM to organize their digital asset production appeared first on MarTech.

You’ve selected your DAM vendor, now where do you go from here? Do you really need an implementation partner?

You may be fortunate enough to have an in-house IT team qualified and ready to guide you through building your DAM, but it’s more likely that you’ll be looking to hire a third-party vendor to guide you through the process and do the heavy lifting on the technical side.

The vendor is only one layer of a strong foundation, and it needs the reinforcement of an implementation partner before you start framing out the full DAM. A good partner will not only help you with the technical aspects of setting up your DAM but will assist you in developing long-term goals for your DAM and mapping the best course of action to accomplish them.

They’ll be your voice in communicating directly with the vendor, handling issues and support tickets, and advocating in your best interest. In part two of this two-part series on building a DAM foundation, we’ll discuss what to look for in an implementation partner.

What do I really need?

Selecting the right implementation partner can be just as, if not more, important than vendor selection. The primary factor in your selection is ensuring they have direct experience with the DAM platform you’ve chosen. Don’t accept anything less. 

You may be told that developers are Developers and code is code, so a competent developer with coding experience can figure out quickly how to work with your chosen platform. But do you really want them to be figuring it out as they go along and learn a new platform on your dime? Would you let a contractor with no experience learn as they go building your house? 

Do not:

• Be tempted by potential cost savings you might get upfront because you won’t actually save anything in the long term.
• Commit to a partner that does not have direct experience with your platform.
• Discount the value of a partner’s existing relationships with people working at your chosen vendor. (These can be very helpful if you are in the unfortunate position of working through a major vendor support issue.)

Go with the easy solution?

The DAM vendor you’ve selected may likely recommend an implementation partner. Know that you’re not obligated to use that specific partner. Certainly, consider them as one of your options, but speak to other partners for comparison.

The vendor-recommended partner may not be a good fit for you for any number of reasons — budget, working style, etc. — so don’t feel pressured to choose them over other options.

Establishing a potential relationship

In your conversations with a potential implementation partner, you want to ensure long-term compatibility. Make sure you’re clearly communicating your needs and wants for the relationship so you’re on the same page. Be sure to cover these points:

• How will you be working? Do you plan to use the agile methodology during your DAM implementation, or does your company use the waterfall approach? Perhaps you’ll actually be using a combination of both agile and waterfall? Does the partner have experience with your chosen approach? Will they be able to work within your framework and timelines?
• Are there specific systems you plan on integrating with your DAM? Is the partner familiar with those systems? Do they have experience with those particular integrations?
• What are you expecting as far as the team roster? In addition to the developer role, who else will be on the implementation team? Do you require a QA resource, or do you plan on doing your own QA (quality assurance) and UAT (user acceptance) testing? Will you need guidance from a metadata and/or taxonomy specialist? What are your expectations for project management? Who will do what, and how many hours a week will they need to be dedicated to your project?
• Do you require assistance from the partner migrating content into the new DAM from existing storage and systems?
• What time zone is the implementation team in? Do you need them to be available for direct contact and meetings during specific hours?

And the most important thing to gauge about a potential implementation partner is how comfortable they are saying “no” to you. Having a partner who happily gives you any and every enhancement you ask for without question is dangerous. 

As I mentioned in the previous article on choosing a DAM vendor, over-customization can be very detrimental to site performance and functionality, and it can prohibit you from completing needed upgrades. Having a partner who will push back and clearly explain risks is invaluable. 

You want a partner who will be honest with you and tell you when a requested enhancement is ill-advised. But in cases where they do tell you no, they should, of course, also be willing to work with you on identifying a different solution that meets the business need without negative effects on your system.

Just like you did when selecting your DAM vendor, you should ask the implementation partner for references, as well as look to locate additional references on your own. Remember, you’re interested in the whole story — the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Finally, when talking with a potential partner, don’t discount how important it is that you should not only be impressed with their knowledge and skills but also simply feel that you’ll enjoy working with them. You’ll spend long hours with this team and working through tough decisions, so they should also match your team personality-wise. It won’t necessarily make the work easier, but it will make it more enjoyable.

Ready to build

Take your time and be confident in your selections of both vendor and implementation partner. Together, they’ll form the foundation upon which you build your DAM. 

The stronger the foundation, the stronger and more successful the DAM. Starting with the sturdiest foundation you can build with a team of proven builders you trust can only save you time and money down the road.

Dig deeper: A 12-step guide for implementing a digital asset management system

The post Implementation partner: The final brick in your DAM foundation appeared first on MarTech.

In the context of DAM, metadata is the link that connects objects, and tags are user-defined elements that mark objects for user findability. While some users think they’re the same, they are not.

Understanding the difference between each element is crucial for setting up and maintaining your DAM.

Aboutness is defined in metadata

The standard definition of metadata is usually “data about data.” To me, the crucial part of that definition is the word “about.” Metadata tells us the “aboutness” of things — information objects — in systems. 

For example, an .mp4 (video) file uploaded to your DAM may be “about” your company’s latest service offering. Other data that describes the “aboutness” of the file might be:

• Which software the video was created in.
• What date and time the file was finalized.
• The campaign for which the video was deployed. 

These particular metadata “data points” are the things a user might think about when looking for the video file at a later date.

Keeping track of such metadata data — or elements, which is the much less confusing way of talking about metadata data — is vital for DAM administrators to make searching a fast, easy, and productive tool for future users. 

Dig deeper: 3 steps to superpower your DAM system

Metadata standards

While there are likely hundreds of elements your company could potentially keep track of, the final list of metadata elements should be kept short and contained. Most of those elements should be automatically extracted by your DAM platform. 

For example, elements such as the height and width, file format, camera make and model, and other technical photo data relating to analog and digital files are generated by camera hardware and extracted when photo files are uploaded. 

Any metadata that can be auto-generated in this way, bypassing manual data entry, is highly desirable. The result is less intervention by DAM administrators and improved technical accuracy. 

How to narrow down metadata elements

When considering what metadata elements to add to your metadata schema, consider what project, marketing, sales, or other management tools users work in. 

A report listing the metadata fields contained in forms the system administrators have built will contain the metadata elements most critical for those end users. These are the elements users will remember and search for, more than the names of individual files. 

Tagging is for users

Beyond the data important for your user groups, individual users often have ways of searching for things that are unique to them. 

For example, when searching for albums in my music software, I tend to forget the album names but remember the album covers. For this reason, I tag my albums with colors or objects found on the covers so that I can find them again. But these are tags that would be meaningless to other music fans. 

But say I am a copywriter who needs to update copy from last year’s holiday campaigns, I have to find last year’s Black Friday copy. Perhaps I have also had to search for Back to School and Memorial Day sale copy in the past. 

I might want to tag such assets with the word “holiday” to find them again when that need rolls around next year. I might use another keyword, like “festive” or “special sales.” 

Either way, my DAM librarian will want to provide a tagging option so users can apply tags to files so they can find assets they frequently use. 

Tags allow this without disturbing the critical metadata that powers the DAM itself. They also provide some level of control over their use of the DAM. 

Tags can ease the burden of learning a new system and any worry over files that have “disappeared” into a large, enterprise-level system so that they can be “found again” with little to no effort. 

Dig deeper: How to build your DAM foundation

Are tags metadata?

Here is where the issue of tags and metadata can get tricky. Tagging is useful for DAM administrators to provide advanced search filtering for common uses. 

In addition, tagging helps DAM admins auto-generate tags onto uploaded assets in commonly searched folders so that they are immediately searchable upon ingest (a fancy librarian’s or archivist’s word for “import”). 

However, the key difference between tags and metadata is that metadata elements should always be standardized.

Standard elements are available in internationally recognized, commonly used and published schemas such as Dublin Core, PREMIS, IPTC, XMP (maintained by Adobe) and others. 

Standard elements allow your asset metadata to easily transfer and be automatically extracted into any other database, information management system, or DAM, should business needs change. 

Depending on the DAM platform, enterprise-specific tags you create may be stored as metadata. For example, the Adobe Experience Manager Assets (AEM Assets) platform can store tags this way, whether deployed in the cloud or on-premises. It can apply enterprise-specific tags to assets that will be ingested into particular folders.

Administrators should be the only users who can create and edit this type of metadata, as they affect the entire system. 

Dig deeper: A 12-step guide for implementing a digital asset management system

Make the most of your DAM system with metadata and tagging

When deployed properly, metadata, tags and smart tags create a highly productive digital asset management system that can quickly return its investment and connect more users to more intellectual property.

They only require a bit of careful tending and pruning to help speed the use and findability of your intellectual property. 

The post Tags vs. metadata in DAM: What’s the difference? appeared first on MarTech.

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