One of the biggest challenges facing brands as social media platforms continue to evolve is that of brand consistency.  In the “old” world, marketers defined messaging and images they felt were most representative of their brand.   On the social internet, the community defines the message and may begin to define the images.  How do Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems fit into this?  They are the central repository for a company’s digital media assets.

As companies intentionally reach out to their communities for input, this input will come in many formats. Brands may invite consumers to create new tag lines.   It may come as pictures of users with the product.  It may come in the form of home video extolling product benefits.  Consumer brands are actively seeking user generated content, partly to attract attention to the brand, partly to gain low/no cost re-usable content and partly to test the waters.

Platforms such as YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo are growing outlets for company created content but also for brand requested user generated content.  This user generated content may not comply with corporate defined brand image.  How do brands address this?  Or by ‘crowd sourcing” content, do brands give up control of brand identity?  The goal for many marketing teams is to create content that can be repurposed across multiple distribution channels and create tighter bonds with their customers.  Regardless of their intent, how do companies manage and repurpose user generated assets?

DAM systems can help companies manage these assets.   Any DAM solution provides the ability to define the ontology and taxonomy of digital assets.  It is possible to create additional categories which identify the assets as user generated, associated with a specific campaign or of certain image quality. DAM systems may also begin to incorporate social concepts such as the tag cloud, which shows the tags associated with specific assets.  They could also incorporate features such as reviews & comments, helping marketing departments identify the most popular or useful content.

A digital asset management system cannot control a company’s brand, but it can help that company manage the digital media assets related to the brand.  The system provides the company with a tool to review, assess, edit and manage assets with the intent to determine the asset’s alignment with brand image.  It then enables companies to extend their brand across multiple channels (i.e., mobile, internet, print, TV, etc.) through re-use and re-purpose of the selected asset(s).  Bottom line, digital asset management systems will have to integrate and manage professionally produced assets as well as those imported from social platforms.

In this world of all things social, there is a lot of focus on making existing platforms social.  As an example, there have been many discussions about social CRM.  While salesforce.com is considered to be social, traditional systems (i.e., Oracle) are not.  A simple definition of social CRM is “having a discussion when, where and how the customer wants it.”  Coming from a world of digital media, should we be talking about Social Digital Asset Management systems? Should users be able to access or provide digital assets when, where and how they want?   Is this an oxymoron or redundant?  Let’s review what functions a DAM system performs.

DAM systems evolved to address the challenges facing organizations who manage a variety of digital assets.  In an enterprise business, these assets would traditionally be managed by the marketing department.  They would include corporate logos & images.  If anyone outside of the marketing department needed these images, for any reason, they needed to go through the marketing department to gain access to these assets.  This could be a slow process with many bottlenecks.

Digital Asset Management systems evolved to provide a central repository for digital assets.  As these assets have evolved beyond static images into rich media assets incorporating audio and video, DAM systems became more elegant in how they addressed issues of tagging, metadata, taxonomy, ontology and overall semantics.  DAM systems, by necessity, must be easily integrated with other systems such as editing, transcoding, storage, digital rights and distribution.

Today, DAM systems are accessible by users across the enterprise, whenever they want.  Marketing may own the responsibility for establishing a corporate wide policy for tagging, metadata, etc., but groups such as sales, engineering, product management have access to the company’s digital media assets.  There is still separation between producers and consumers.  Does providing access make the system social?  Or does it become social when those same groups can become producers and contribute their own content and assets?

Perhaps a DAM system with the ability to annotate, rank and comment on these assets makes it social within the enterprise.  Or, perhaps it’s the option for online, interactive communication that facilitates effective collaboration.  System features now enable uses to rank assets or for managers to understand how many times an asset is viewed partly or in full, DAM systems provide intelligence and elements of social platforms.  DAM systems continue to evolve and incorporate features that feel social.  Perhaps they are as these capabilities are core components of many social sites and platforms.

The ability for a DAM system to accept and manage user generated content (UGC) is increasingly important.  If companies recognize the social web as a relevant content distribution outlet, they may also need to consider it as a source of content input.  The DAM system can become more social by enabling content upload and the assignment of relevant tags, metadata by establishing and automating a standard taxonomy and ontology.  Thus the DAM enables users to access all digital media assets for the company, when, where and how they like.