WebDAM Solutions Launch “DAM Success”

One of our featured DAM vendors, WebDAM Solutions have launched DAMSuccess.com:

“DAMSuccess.com is a premium website offering a wide range of educational resources for marketing and creative teams, including free video webinars, best practices and templates, digital asset management trends and an interactive DAM Answers forum. Most notably, DAMSuccess.com provides people with an exciting new way to learn and share ideas.” [Read More]

A number of vendors and consultants have started setting these kind of educational sites up in recent years.  I have to say, the results are a bit mixed.  Dealing with the WebDAM one first, the material is okay, but it’s still too heavily sales oriented and you can’t get far without being prompted for logins or a pitch to buy their product.  Reading it, you can tell the marketing people haven’t quite allowed it to be as education oriented as these things need to be, with the result that the information is a bit on the basic side.  Many software marketing personnel really seem to struggle to understand why the education element of Digital Asset Management is so essential to making sales and just go into auto-pilot and produce sites that are well designed and professionally presented, but don’t tell you very much.  I will say, however, that the language and jargon is kept simple and to the point. You can at least dispense with buzzword bingo card (in contrast to some of the other higher-end vendors).

Widen, who produce DigitalAssetManagement.com do a little better, the site has more ‘how to’ articles, but it’s still pretty clearly an ‘infomercial’ for their SaaS offerings.  Moving up the usefulness scale are Extensis whose DAM Learning Centre.   Much of their material is written by Edward Smith, who also contributes to CMSWire.com and has a consulting background – which shows, as his articles are always very well written and get to the crux of the key issues with DAM delivery.  Also noteworthy is the Daydream site, the articles and blog all demonstrate their expertise and are refreshingly free of excess sales copy (although it is present).  Ralph Windsor has also contributed to DAM News in the past (and we rather hope he might again at some point in the future!).  Joshua Duhl who writes blog entries for the North Plains‘ site always produces some very well informed and accurate pieces also.  Jon Horodyski’s dameducation.com site shows promise but the material needs to be expanded and it hasn’t changed much recently.  Other sites where they evidently understand how to do information oriented marketing are consultants, Real Story Group and also Earley Associates.  Both of these companies are consultants also.

Better than all of these, however, are the David Riecks Controlled Vocabulary site and The DAM Book by the author of the book of the same name, Peter Krogh.  The only criticism of them (the latter especially) is that they’re fairly ‘hands on’ and possibly too in-depth for many, but that in itself might give you some clues as to how many of those who write for these sites actually get involved at the sharp end of DAM implementation (and therefore how reliable their advice is).

This is a fairly high level overview of the DAM information material out there, a number of vendors and consultants who we haven’t mentioned have written some good individual articles also (which we try to feature).  The takeaway point from this discussion, however, is that if you are a DAM vendor and you want your prospective buyers to take notice, then you need to tell them something genuinely useful that they couldn’t have worked out themselves very quickly and nor should you engage in a lot of gratuitous boasting about how great you and your product are.  If you are a DAM buyer you should be working with vendors that are experienced and confident enough to tell you how to achieve results from DAM without the need for either self-aggrandizement or filibustering in the hope of avoiding any tricky questions they would prefer not to answer.

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