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Waving, not drowning in exponential times. It’s time for DAM standards.

DAM News Staff

No, this is not another fanboy posting about Googlewave, although I am a fan and can see the massive potential of this new tool to become a disruptive force in personal asset management, there’s a long way to go, but the kernel of change has once again been set by THEtech media company. 😉

No, what I want to talk about is the management, consumption and re-purposing of content. And as today is digitalassetmanagement.org.uk second birthday (thanks, I could not have done it without you 🙂 and, as tradition dictates, we have a new look and feel (I hope you like?). In fact we have a new platform, but more on that later.

We launched this blog two years ago in response to widespread bewilderment around the subject of DAM,attempting to explain all the aconyms, services and workflows which are now crucial to today’s successful business strategies: so many acronyms, not enough clarity.

The new marketing ecosystem poster graphically demonstrates why Digital Asset Management and today’s marketing challenges are so DAM connected.

Keeping to the theme of waving, last Friday I watched a very funny youtube clip ofGoogle Wave Cinema:Pulp Fiction At the time only 96 other people had seen it. Today at 9.29 am GMT the clip has already garnered 267,639 views, 1,836 ratings and 319 comments. No doubt by the end of its first week it will reach over a million views. It took about 5 hours to edit the movie, 2 hours to rehearse the actual action, and 15 minutes of recording. You could tell immediately that it would go viral, it had all the elements – funny, shocking, cool and very informative:

7 hours and 15 minutes good content flows through the channels like water.

IfMoores law holds true for chip development then content creation is Moore’s law onsteroids, with jet packs, turbo engines and a secret formula only found in deep space,probablydoubling every 18 days if you factor inUGC.The pundits are predicting this content creation is set to double every 72 hours in the next couple of years.Frightening!

This is the problem clearly identifiedin the bookHere Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound. One of the culture’s wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are is discussed.

Yep, here comes everybody, with opinions, complaints, ideas and their own networks, all consuming and re-purposing content. How do you tune into this as an opportunity? How can your organisation demonstrate thecapabilityto interact with this tsunami of User-Generated-Content and personal networks? And how do you measure thesuccessor failure of your content and how the massesimbibeit?

The short answer is Digital Asset Management. (assets are nowdefinedas anything digital, including text,documents, images, video, audio and so on…)

DAM is the foundation, from the creation of an original asset to the consumption and re-purposing all the way down the long-tail of consume-ability. The raw assets need to sit somewhere; they need to be tagged correctly, they should be part of ataxonomy and anontology, the assets, needs to have the correctmetadata within acontrolled vocabulary. After all theWeb3.0 semantic beast is coming upon us, the machine clearly needs to understand the agents of contextual reasoning.

Next is the metrics that surround the assets. From here you have the analytics which form the business intelligence, aid budgets and increase channel deliverables, for repeat campaigns. And much more importantly in today’s knowledge wealtheconomy, thesignal over the noise.

Those assets are then ready to go out into the interwebs. They should beembeddable, shareable and mash-up-able and most of all they need to be able to carry the weight of becoming viral known asusage spikes.

Until now DAMhas been the poor relation to content management. Web1.5 was a way for companies not to have to pay web developers vast sums of money just to update a web page. Content management is a great tool for pushing the content out into the web, but it fails completely when you look at the value of each asset independentlyfrom the bigger picture of “waving, not drowning” in the information super highway of knowledge creation and consumption.

For the last ten years I have been selling, promoting and explaining digital asset management services to companies that quite frankly did not get it. They now understood, at least, the cost and time implications of content and it’s effects on labour hours. The bigger picture bacame all too apparent when bandwidth actually reached the western masses and was the game changer. Companies all over the world are struggling with this. Video content – real-time information flows – is now the medium of choice for WE the people.

We launched this blog, to break down the acroynms, segment the data, build our own taxonomy and create the channels to push the DAMmeme. When we started no otherblog was in this space,linkedin and other groups were starting to form and only the big media companies were utilising the real benefits and true power of DAM. Now it needs to reach everybody. From the vantage point of viewing these industries as an news aggregator, it is now blatantly obvious that digital asset mangement has been it’s own worst self promoter, but the times as they say are a- -changing.

Books such asThe Lonely Crowd (1950) andBowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this trend. Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this situation because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously, and for both short and long term goals.

And, well, quite frankly, DAM has it’s rightful place in the history of digital assets and yet, to date, no one organisation is handling or bringing standards and best practice to the digital asset management market. So we thought we would create a movement to bring this about and invite all relevant participants into the mix – to see if we can emulate Shirky’s vision.

We have created a new group on linkedin, called the DAM Foundation with the aim of bringing standards and best practice to digital asset management. A badge of DAM honour. We invite interested parties to help develop the foundation for the betterment of people drowning in the digital noise.

This blog is now built on WordPress MU. In the next few weeks we will be sending out beta invites and offer a challenge to the DAM community. We will call on the leading lights, the vendors, the analysts, the geeks, the librarians and the thought leaders. Our aim is to build a platform for the knowledge wealth of DAM and how it relates to the best practices for content creation, consumption, metrics and analysis.

So, happy birthday to us and happy asset management to you: Becauseit really is time for the DAM community to set thestandards. We look forward to seeing you there.

Mark Davey aka DigitalAssetMan – Human Aggregator of theDAM Blog

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