Getting Users To Engage With Your DAM System
One of our featured DAM vendors, Brandworkz, have contributed a special feature article for DAM News: How To Encourage All Your Employees To Use Your Digital Asset Management System. Brandworkz, as their name might suggest, are more oriented towards the Brand Management side of DAM (or Brand Asset Management) so the article leads on those kind of benefits:
- Integrate it with the corporate intranet
- Keep the brand in view
- Establish a brand community forum or blog
- Provide a central brand platform
- Put brand training online
I’ve taken a quote from the fourth point:
“A DAM portal’s key function is to give access to brand assets such as logos, templates, images and videos. So wider accessibility to all departments across the business will ensure that, not only are digital assets available to a broader user base but the brand guidelines that go with them are stressed prominently too. This supports the correct use of assets and promotes brand consistency across the wider organization. If you don’t provide this, then many people will just make it up as they go along, diluting your brand message and personality in the process.” [Read More]
Although the premise of the article is about brand assets, even if your DAM requirements are not necessarily related, it’s possible to extrapolate the core ideas and apply them across to your own use case. The key themes are providing centralised access, integrating subject oriented discussion forums and collaborative areas directly with the assets as well as providing training to back it all up. As should be clear, user requirements are now rapidly progressing beyond some basic media file search facility and into more of a range of different services that can transact upon assets (brand or otherwise).
It’s interesting to compare this article with the one we featured from Southpaw Technology a few weeks ago where they were talking about industrialisation and automation of metadata using events generated during workflow processes. In essence, both vendors operate in the same market, but their focus is on different stages in the asset’s lifecycle. For Southpaw, their market is more production process oriented, especially how multiple assets get combined and composed. For Brandworkz, their clientele seem to be more likely to be interested in finished brand assets and making sure that they are used in a compliant manner. It’s not that either vendor is right and the other wrong, but that the perspective and positioning is quite different, even though they both might refer to themselves using the ‘Digital Asset Management’ description.
It’s been noted by a few commentators in DAM that the industry is dividing (or even fragmenting) into various sub-markets and that different groups of vendors are travelling in diverging directions based on the demands of their specific client base. I think it might not be long before many vendors (not necessarily either of the ones discussed) come to the realisation that they are going to need to partner up with some operators who they might once have regarded as adversaries so they can continue to meet all of their client’s expanding scope of requirements. The DAM industry is fast transforming into a digital supply chain (some might argue that it always was). Just like conventional supply chains in logistics or manufacturing, it’s rare (if not impossible) for a single operator to own and control the entire value chain. Even the larger service providers in that sector accept they have to collaborate with each other to meet the needs of their clients. No doubt there will be plenty of arguing and horse trading going on behind the scenes – but this seems like an inexorable trend that can’t be avoided in the medium to long term.
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