Dam Foundation

Metadata Collection Strategies

digitalassetman — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:09:23 +0000

By Maish Nichani This article was co-authored with Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge and Green Chameleon. Metadata is defined as “data about data”. In data systems, the metadata describes the data resources and how they are structured. In other information systems such as content and document management systems, metadata describes the structure, content, and management rules associated with the content or documents. Typical metadata for a document might be ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘subject’, ‘date of publication’ and ‘security classification’. Metadata is important in enterprise settings. If you have a common metadata framework across all your systems, using common controlled vocabularies, and if metadata is consistently and reliably applied to your information and data assets, it can: connect information and data from different different systems help find and retrieve information more efficiently and effectively help better manage the information lifecycle (including the delicate balance between accessibility and security) support coordination and collaboration from a common information base build a sense of shared purpose The challenge is to get complete, accurate and consistent metadata applied to information and data resources. Metadata can be collected in many ways—from the information environment, work activities and from people. The problem arises when metadata that could be effectively collected from the environment is delegated to be collected from people. People who are in the middle of work tasks do not see direct benefits from completing numerous metadata fields. When coerced into doing unnatural things, they usually revolt or find workarounds thereby undermining the entire initiative. In this article we share strategies to collect metadata that lower the reliance on people in supplying metadata. We cannot completely remove people from the equation but we can prevent them from doing additional work, and focus the role of people on the value added metadata that machines and environment cannot automatically supply. Principles In the course of our work with large enterprises we have found the following principles can be used to set the baseline for the conversation on collection strategies. Collect (and expose) only what is required Not all metadata is required all of the time. For example, in an organisation that deals with different industries, metadata for industry coverage may only be relevant to the externally facing departments, not support functions like Human Resources. Similarly, if documents are only meant for personal use or for use within a small team, they will require only basic metadata. Generally speaking, the need for additional metadata grows as the need to expose the document to different audiences grows. Collect incrementally You don’t have to collect all metadata at one time. For example, documents start out private to the individual and when ready it is shared with the team or the entire organization. The private document requires little metadata and all of it can be collected automatically. But when the document becomes sharable it needs additional metadata allowing it to be found and used. It is best to collect metadata required for a sharable document when the status of the document is changed from ‘private’ to ‘sharable’. It would be annoying if all of the metadata is collected when the document is still in the ‘private’ state. Metadata is only added as needed. Strategies Continues @ http://pebbleroad.com Related articles What is the true value of a digital asset? The metadata conservation movement If there’s no such thing as anonymous data, does privacy just mean security? Data Storytelling: The Ultimate Collection of Resources How Bracelets & Intuition Offer 3 Keys To Using Big Data Successfully

The Rising Value Of Brands In The Digital Age

digitalassetman — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:08:04 +0000

Many believe that brands will become less important as digital technology marches onward. They will surely be disappointed. In fact, it is likely that branding will become more important in the digital age. With more media and more brands, consumers have to more to filter out. In order to cut through the clutter, marketers will have to work harder to build brands that inspire loyalty. To understand why, let’s start at the beginning… Creative Kings in a Consumer Age After World War II, most of the globe went through several decades of seemingly boundless economic expansion. Consumers had ever more money to spend and business expanded to meet the demand. It was the dawn of the branding age and marketers strove to make their products popular with consumers hungry to join the consumer culture. It was also an era of mass media. There was a limited amount of TV stations and programming was geared to mass audiences. Popular broadcasts like The Ed Sullivan Show in the US could reach more than 50% of the population. In this environment, creativity was king. Advertising pioneers such as David Ogilvy and Leo Burnettdeveloped powerful brand images that transformed the landscape of commerce. Great creative work combined with mass audiences proved to be a powerful combination. Brands evolved into consumer icons and built enormous profitability for the companies that owned them. The Media Revolution Continues @ http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com Related articles Data Storytelling: The Ultimate Collection of Resources Customer Experience is the Only Competitive Advantage Left Digital Media’s Achilles Heel: Measurement From Touchpoints to Trust Points™ 3 mistakes that prevent retargeting success

The evolution of the chief customer officer — and 3 reasons you don’t need one, yet

digitalassetman — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:27:34 +0000

By Neil Parker is VP of product marketing at Vision Critical. “The Chief Customer Officer is a powerful asset that can help resolve chronic customer issues, create sustainable competitive advantage, help retain profitable customers, and drive profitable customer behavior through the effective customer strategy…Creating the role is a serious undertaking and executives must be firmly committed to supporting the role vocally and visibly to ensure the CCO has the authority and credibility that is necessary for success.” – Chief Customer Officer Council In 2011, Forrester boldly called the era we’re in the age of the customer, a time when focus on the customer matters more than ever before. In this era, Forrester argues that companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline instead of a cliché. The age of the customer has rightfully put the spotlight on the buyer experience—and ultimately the arrival of the chief customer officer. The role of CCO (which also sometimes stands for chief client officer) has been around for some time, and originally grew organically out of frustrations with organizations who realized no one person in the organization owned the end-to-end customer experience. In most organizations, multiple departments share the responsibility for customer experience. Marketing, sales, professional services, account managers, customer support, training, legal, and accounting are just some of the departments that have some touch points with customers. During the Gartner Customer 360 Summit this year, it was revealed that there are more than 2,000 companies who have a chief customer officer now. This number is growing, but it’s a small number in comparison to other C-suite roles. You may wonder – does your company need a CCO? In my opinion, CEOs thinking of adding this role might want to pause and think about the following challenges. 1) The role is still poorly defined Read more at http://venturebeat.com Related articles Customer Experience is the Only Competitive Advantage Left From Touchpoints to Trust Points™ CMOs Set to Spend More on New Tech Than CIOs Predictive Analytics: The Power Behind Next-Gen Marketing 3 mistakes that prevent retargeting success

The New Kingmakers are a rising force in marketing too

digitalassetman — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:14:37 +0000

BY SCOTT BRINKER In a world powered by software, the developers who create that software — especially the really good ones — are increasingly the center of influence and power in business. That’s the core thesis of Stephen O’Grady’s brief-but-brilliant, 48-page book, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World. This is highly relevant to marketers andmarketing technologists. The genesis for Stephen’s book was the striking realization that as part of the democratization of technology in organizations — sometimes called the consumerization of IT — the CIO could be the last know which technologies were actually being used. The most mainstream example, of course, are smartphones and the proliferation of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends — whether officially sanctioned or not. But such “shadow IT” has blossomed much further, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that users adopt because they love them — not because they are mandated by IT. This is certainly the case with many popular marketing technologyapplications. Stephen traces this revolution to the modern emancipation of software developers. Not too long ago, software developers were beholden to the corporate hierarchy to perform their trade. Software was expensive. Hardware was expensive. Marketing and distribution of applications was expensive. So developers had to rely on sponsorship from executives with large purses. The balance of power was heavily weighted in the favor of those executives to decide what was going to be developed, on which platforms, and with which tools. But four forces have converged to turn that model upside down: Continues @ http://chiefmartec.com Related articles CMOs Set to Spend More on New Tech Than CIOs When Did Marketing Become IT? The Three Transformations of IT Customer Experience is the Only Competitive Advantage Left From Touchpoints to Trust Points™

Yes, “Transmedia” is an Empty Buzzword… Until it Isn’t

digitalassetman — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:51:59 +0000

By Jim Stewartson Friends, it’s time to get serious. The ongoing debate between (intelligent, well-meaning) people about what “transmedia” means and even whether defining the word matters at all, is killing our common cause. To this day, after years and years of debate and experimentation, a Producers Guild credit, countless Variety/Wired/Fast Company/etc. articles, and a zillion doctoral theses, it’s still meaningless jargon. Yeah, I said it. It’s time to cross the Rubicon. Either “transmedia” will remain an interesting theoretical footnote, a vessel into which we put our fantasies about what might come someday in The Future; or it will emerge as the dominant entertainment format of the 21st century, in the same way that “motion pictures” defined it for the 20thcentury. Either way is fine. But we must choose. There are two parts to this article. Should we define ‘transmedia’ at all? If yes, what should the definition of ‘transmedia’ be? PART 1: Should we define transmedia? Yes! There are 3 reasons why we need to define “transmedia”: Money Money Do I need to say it? At the moment, the transmedia scene is a vibrant community of smart, creative people who want to create a real industry. However, in order to do so, we must learn to create value on a scalable basis, which is a mission impossible if we continue to rely on touchy-feely, blue-sky concepts to guide our work. To create scale: We must attract investment. A lot of it. But investors will not put their money into ill-defined ideas, no matter how awesome they sound. To put money at risk, they need to see what they’re buying into,understand it, and be able to quantify the return they can expect from it. We must go mainstream. To do that, we have to be able to explain what we’re offering to normal people. Not professors, or industry insiders, or investors. To our in-laws and neighbors and real people who live between the coasts. We have to be able to create tools, platforms, and business models that create a product that is recognizable and repeatable. If someone sees transmedia, they must be able to say confidently, “By George, that’s some fine transmedia right there. Go check it out!” OR Continues @ http://transmediacoalition.com Related articles TYPE:RIDER Video game, documentary and transmedia The Five Rs of Content Curation How Metrics and Transparency Will Make You a Better Digital Marketer Designing Better Experiences Through Data 5 ways big data is going to blow your mind and change your world

Persuade with Visual Metaphors

digitalassetman — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:39:45 +0000

While we think of metaphors as mainly word-based, visual metaphors can be a potent selling tool. They can both engage the brain like text metaphors and stimulate the viewer’s senses in a way that words alone may not. I ran across an ad for Austin-based Elements Laser Spathat includes both a visual metaphor and a play on words. The ad shows a rose with its thorns removed, while its headline text reads, “Nice Stems.” (For international Neuromarketing readers, “stems” is slang for “legs.”) This ad is brilliant in several ways. First, it produces an“aha!” reward to the viewer’s brain since most readers will understand the cryptic ad only when they look at the small print below. (The print version of this ad has a small box below the illustration that offers a discount on laser hair removal. The long-stemmed rose with the little pile of thorns won’t make sense at first, but upon seeing the text in the discount offer just about every viewer will immediately grasp what’s going on. For more on the benefits of triggering an “aha!” moment, see Puzzles Boost Brand Recognition and Marketing to the Infovore. Continues @ http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com Related articles Why You Must Add Visual Content to the Mix Data Storytelling: The Ultimate Collection of Resources How Bracelets & Intuition Offer 3 Keys To Using Big Data Successfully Building a virtuous cycle of design and analytics From Touchpoints to Trust Points™

Connecting Things to the Internet Does Not an Internet of Things Make

digitalassetman — Thu, 09 May 2013 06:39:16 +0000

The Internet of Things has continued to emerge as a trend this year within the consumer electronics sector. Everyone’s trying to get into the game, with connected devices now ranging from dog collars to toasters to sneakers, all getting connected to “the cloud.” This is an exciting trend for consumer electronics in general, but we as an industry need to take a step back and realize that true connectivity extends beyond just the cloud. Just because something is connected to the Internet, doesn’t mean it’s truly part of an Internet of Things (or as we like to call it at Qualcomm, the “Internet of Everything”). What’s unique about the Internet is its openness — the ability for one website to link to any other and leverage information in novel ways. Remember when the word “mashup” was all the rage in Web talk? Why was that? Because you just could. You could have one website leverage data and APIs from another website and mash that up to deliver a completely new, cool Web service, a la LivePlasma.com, Pageflakes.com, HousingMaps.com, etc. So what’s the problem? Aren’t all these hot new connected IoT devices connected up to the cloud? Well, that’s the problem. We are oversimplifying the landscape. Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to one another, meaning they cannot benefit from the data, context or control of nearby IoT devices. That is why we currently need a separate app to control — and interface with — each connected thing we buy. This may be acceptable in the near term, but it cannot scale. Continues @ http://allthingsd.com Related articles What is the true value of a digital asset? The Three Transformations of IT From Touchpoints to Trust Points™ CMOs Set to Spend More on New Tech Than CIOs If there’s no such thing as anonymous data, does privacy just mean security?

Marketing Automation: When and How to Use It Effectively

digitalassetman — Wed, 08 May 2013 06:03:50 +0000

By Eric Webb Use marketing automation right and sales go up. Use it wrong and you risk the chance of alienating potential customers. And that’s not a good thing. When leveraged properly, marketing automation provides the great benefit of empowering sales and marketing to work together to progressively profile leads and deliver relevant content that aligns to a buyer’s buy cycle. This approach can accelerate sales and provide much valued, measurable ROI. All good! Unfortunately, I’ve seen an increase in practices that are not so good. For example, I have had some business developers calling me or emailing me right after I attended a webinar or downloaded a white paper. It was so bad that, one time, I apologized to the business developer on behalf of the marketer. He never should have been inserted at a point in the buy cycle that clearly made no sense. His job was practically mission impossible. Using one of your most expensive marketing assets (a business developer, in this case) to cold-call me because I downloaded a white paper or attended a webinar was a complete waste of my time and theirs. Continues @ http://www.forbes.com Related articles When Did Marketing Become IT? Predictive Analytics: The Power Behind Next-Gen Marketing Consumers Still Pretty Suspicious About Social Media Marketing, Forrester Survey Finds From Touchpoints to Trust Points™ Customer Experience is the Only Competitive Advantage Left

The metadata conservation movement

digitalassetman — Wed, 08 May 2013 05:44:42 +0000

By Tim Cole When we talk about DAM systems, we emphasize the importance and value of assigning and preserving metadata to digital assets. Organizations and individuals can expend a lot of time and effort populating metadata fields in order to increase the value of their assets and their ability to manage them. So, in light of that, what do we think about all that metadata being stripped from our media when its delivered online on popular websites? There’s a thought provoking blog post over at the duckrabbit blog by John Macpherson in which he aggregates a number of other blog posts and articles regarding the stripping of metadata as content is distributed via social media. At a time when there are more images being created than ever before, and millions more being made and uploaded every day, it strikes me that the likes of Facebook could do a lot more to protect metadata. With such a proliferation of imagery I’d argue it becomes more, rather than less, important to ensure provenance of work and accuracy and integrity of metadata. While there may be very good ethical and professional reasons to strip metadata from, for example, legal documents produced in Word, long term implications of stripping metadata from images and other media goes far beyond those surrounding copyright and licensing. When metadata is removed, context, subject matter, date and time, and other facts about an image are lost, thus enabling misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding of the content. Macpherson links to an example of this kind of misrepresentation documented by Tom Devriendt. This misrepresentation of history is the real danger arising from the loss of the accurate story of images, and is something we should all be deeply concerned about. Continues @ http://www.woodwing.com Related articles What is the true value of a digital asset? If there’s no such thing as anonymous data, does privacy just mean security? The Five Rs of Content Curation The Marketer’s Go-To Guide for Creating Data-Based Content The Three Transformations of IT

The Three Transformations of IT

digitalassetman — Tue, 07 May 2013 06:21:52 +0000

by David Hill Information technology is now in its third transformation. The first was the digitization of business. The second is the continuing digitization of human experience. The third stage is the digitization of machines. Each transformation is ongoing, builds upon the others, and may overlap. Thus, some technologies that formed a foundation earlier are still active. For example, the mainframe is still alive and well, even in the time of mobile computing. Even though specific technologies provide a frame of reference, these transformations span a broad perspective and are not dependent upon any one technology. Please also note that there is not a smooth transition to each transformation, but that elements of a later transformation may be present while the key transformation of an earlier era is still more prominent. The Three Digital Transformations Let’s take a closer look at all three from a digital perspective: • Transformation I: Business Workflow and business automation: The beneficiary of this transformation is the business itself. It represents the digitization of traditional business processes most familiarly associated with online transactions processing systems (OLTP); from a software perspective, including operating systems, application-driven software intelligence using third-generation and object-oriented programming languages, database management systems; and from a hardware perspective, mainframes, minicomputers, and servers along with hard disks and magnetic tape; and from a network perspective, leased lines. • Transformation II: Human Experience: This has two stages. (i) Interpersonal communication and productivity — The beneficiaries of this first stage have been employees broadly and directly at all levels; it represents digitization meant to enhance worker productivity and includes office applications, such as e-mail, word processing, presentations and spreadsheets. The key software was office productivity tools, the key computing hardware was the personal computer, and the key networking component was the extension of the local-area network (LAN) within a company’s local environment and the extension of the wide-area network (WAN) to the Internet so that employees of one company could communicate with other people (including customers and business partners). (ii) Virtual digital world (cyberspace) — The chief beneficiary of this stage is the individual (consumer). Yes, business has benefited tremendously, but the overall result has been the immersion of the individual into the digital world. The Internet is key to this transformation, as is the move to mobile devices. • Transformation III: Machines: Continues @ http://www.networkcomputing.com Related articles Designing Better Experiences Through Data Predictive Analytics: The Power Behind Next-Gen Marketing Data Storytelling: The Ultimate Collection of Resources What is the true value of a digital asset? Relationship Intensity and ROI Measurement