Some discounts are still available to attend this Conference.
Before the conference, the moderator will be crowdsourcing some questions for this panel discussion from the DAM Community in advance. We will be taking questions from the audience that day as well.
Later on, there will be a blog post to answer the question…
In the past few years, I have been asked a lot of questions by people…
“Who are you doing this for?”
“Who really reads this stuff?”
“What is in it for you?”
“Why do you do all this for free?”
“Why do you care so much?”
I wanted to take the opportunity to explore these questions and explain…
A few years ago, when I started working with Digital Asset Management (DAM), there were a few conferences, a few books, an expensive journal and experts who knew what they were talking about. All those still exist, but now DAM is growing.
Who are you doing this for?
It all started when I was frustrated and had very few people to discuss DAM with (how many of you can relate to this?). I learned about DAM myself, I volunteered to work on DAM, but in the past, found it difficult to communicate with people who knew little or nothing about DAM. I learned how to explain why DAM is important. I also wondered why I could not find much on the first-hand experience with DAM explained, specifically in the user and administrator perspective of Digital Asset Management. I knew I was not the only person with this question. So, out of frustration, I started blogging about DAM.
After my second blog post, I was contacted by people who could relate to what I wrote about and they love/hate my blog to this day. I was even offered to be paid to blog for them. The day I drafted my first blog post, I decided early on that my blog was for everyone to share openly and learn about DAM in the user and administrator perspective. I do not talk about using DAM product X or DAM vendor Y, but rather I stay vendor agnostic. In order to stay vendor agnostic, I would not take money from DAM vendors (and I still don’t). If you have read my blog posts before, you will note I hold very little back and I am very open about what I talk about.
Who really reads this stuff?
Literally, thousands of people all over the world read my blog posts every month. My blog is aggregated on other sites which also get a lot of traffic. Some of my posts are more popular than others. Content is king. I deliver a fair amount of content in many of my blog posts. There are other DAM bloggers as well. I happily list them on blog roll when I find out about them. Sharing the experience is good. DAM is all about sharing. I know most people read about DAM during weekdays (I don’t blame them), so that is when I normally schedule new posts to appear. DAM users, potential DAM users, DAM vendors and even DAM analysts tell me they read my blog regularly.
What is in it for you?
When I have the energy, time and a DAM related idea to write about, I blog about it. I do this on my spare time. Blogging is a hobby. DAM is my career. Due to the popularity of my blog posts, I am invited to speak and moderate at conferences around the United States. When I go to events, I get to meet like-minded people…eager to share experiences and best practices about DAM. If I have a DAM idea to blog about, but don’t have the time to blog about it, I make a quick audio recording with a speech-to-text app which sends me an email with what I said, so I can revisit it later when I do have the time.
Why do you do all this for free?
To this day, I am not paid to present at conferences nor to blog. Yes, that is correct. I did not charge the people I mentored on a monthly basis either. I get motivated by helping others understand the subject. If someone really wanted me to consult for their organization, they could ask me directly. For the most part, I write in general terms about DAM. My generosity of information pays a multitude of dividends. People have told me and written that I happen to be one of the top bloggers in the field of Digital Asset Management. I do not believe this is by accident. How do you communicate you are experienced and knowledgeable about a subject such as DAM? hint: you genuinely share that knowledge by blogging about it. People read and hear about it. People recognize what you write makes sense. People learn and benefit from what is shared. And you repeat this often.)
My goal was write and share 52 blog posts per year. Done.
Why do you care so much?
Yes, someone actually asked me all these questions. I love this question so much, it inspired me to write this specific blog post. Why should I care so much? Why should anyone care about the DAM community? Not only will you learn first hand you are not alone in thinking about and using DAM, you will become part of a group of people who want to learn, get/give feedback and share experiences. It can be a career. It is for me and many others. You will soon find out I am not the only one. These days, it does not matter where you are geographically located because you can be a member of the DAM Community in person and/or online. What matters is whether you are willing to learn and share your interest in Digital Asset Management to not only survive, but thrive with DAM.
Let us know when you are ready for consulting on Digital Asset Management for your business.
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution can be used for preliminary research even before considering other external sources/vendors to acquire new assets or before creating new assets. You may already have what you need internally, so it may be worth looking inside your own organization first. A DAM should be able to provide users with “for placement only” (FPO) assets for consideration in a project. These FPO assets could be watermarked by the DAM to easily discern between a lower quality FPO asset (which can not be published as is) and the approved asset for use in a project with the proper rights cleared. Provided you have a fair number of assets for a project with enough metadata to find what you have on hand in a DAM, searching the DAM first may yield less research time for a project.
Realistically, once you acquire and/or create new assets, you may want to add them to the DAM in a timely manner so others may find them as well. This makes it easier to reference and use these assets again whenever they fits the need of a project.
DAM users can create a DAM lightbox (or special collection) of specific assets found in the DAM for a particular project which could be shared and collaborated over with other DAM users, regardless of geographic location. These digital light boxes could even be created and edited before meetings to discuss the project to streamline the process.
If you are worried you may be using the same assets too frequently across various projects, a report from the DAM can list of the number of downloads of assets or even a specific asset.
If you want to maintain brand consistency, you could store your organization’s logos in the DAM so the same, current set is easily searched, distributed and used from a single source (the DAM) rather than fragmenting distribution along with your brand.
How do you use DAM to assist with preliminary research?
Let us say you already have an established DAM solution within your organization. You have a metadata schema. You have assets with metadata in the DAM. You have established workflows using the DAM for your business needs. You know the DAM is being used by people in the organization.
Now how can you measure the progress of the DAM? This can be done in several ways:
How many active DAM users do you have?
How many departments or groups in your organization use the DAM? Who does not? Why not?
Who are the most active groups or users?
How many assets are being uploaded (imported) to the DAM? Each day? Each week? Each month? Each year?
How many assets are metatagged (i.e. applying metadata to assets either before or after upload to the DAM) per hour? per day? per week?
How many assets are being downloaded from the DAM? Each day? Each week? Each month? Each year?
What type of asset is the most popular download from the DAM? Photographs? Graphics? Video? (You do use the DAM for more than one type of asset, right?)
When does the activity in the DAM peak? What time of the day? What is most active month of the year? Do you know why this period is so active? There is usually a business need being resolved.
Where are the most active DAM users located geographically? If you can locate them, congratulate them on being the most active DAM users and find out why they are the most active DAM users. They probably did not even know this themselves. More on this topic later.
When you selected the DAM solution, did it come with a reporting feature? Can you generate reports directly from the DAM to answer these questions listed above? Hopefully, the DAM did come with this feature so it should not be too hard to filter reports generated from the DAM and yield these answers to give you measurable results. Just as people may file weekly reports, they may have ways to measure their progress. If these ways to measure progress are consistent, you can gather metrics (not the metric system, but rather quantifiable measurements) to report on the progress of the DAM regularly to stakeholders. Once the DAM has been used for a while, many people are amazed by what information is generated by these reports. Surprisingly, many people at first do not realize the extent of the DAM activity which these reports expose, even when it is increased by:
Do you reward the reuse of assets in the DAM? Consider annual recognition or even awarding the most active users and “re-users” (people who have appropriately reused the most number of assets in a year) from the DAM. Give them company-wide recognition. Why would you embarrass employees like that? This recognition may not sound like a big deal at first (even to the employee), but:
Using the DAM, theysaved the organization measurable amounts of money every time they reused or re-purposed an asset from the DAM because:
They spent less time looking for the needed asset compared to other places the asset might be hiding within the organization. This frees up employee time to accomplish more and/or produce better results.
They did not have to create nor acquire (buy) that asset again because they found it again in one centralized location (the DAM).
This is one of the easiest way to get more user adoption. (How could others get an award and/or recognition for simply using a business solution as intended?)
This is a plus on the employees’ record for their annual performance review when it comes time for a bonus and/or raise. It shows that person uses company resources to benefit their projects and the organization as a whole by saving time and money in the use, reuse and repurposing of assets from the DAM. This fact can be highlighted even more so if they regularly contribute new assets to the DAM.
This may peak the interest of the rest of company who may not have heard of the DAM before. (What can the DAM do for them?)
When you find the individuals who are most active users of the DAM, ask them:
Why they use the DAM so much
For any best practices they have been using to achieve their results
What they would like to see improved. This could be valuable feedback for future improvements.
To have them tell their story as a DAM user so everyone could learn from them on how and why they use the DAM. That has great value in encouraging even more user adoption or more departments getting on board with the idea of the DAM solution. Every organization with digital assets needs a DAM, but that DAM becomes even more valuable to everyone who uses it as soon as the organization shares assets across departments and throughout the organization.
Another DAM Blog 