Implementing a DAM isn’t a one-step solution. It requires ongoing commitment and effort to ensure that adoption and ROI are high. One of the most essential components of an impactful DAM implementation is building a strong taxonomy – the hierarchical categories you use in your library to ensure assets can be found.

In this post, you’ll learn the basics of taxonomy, its impact on DAM, and 5 steps to building a future-proof taxonomy for your organization.

• What is a Taxonomy?
• 5 Steps to Building a Strong Taxonomy
• The Annual DAM Trends Report

What is a Taxonomy?

Let’s start with the basics: what does a taxonomy mean outside of the context of DAM? Cambridge Dictionary defines taxonomy as “a system for naming and organizing things, especially plants and animals, into groups that share similar qualities”. Simply put, it’s grouping things into multi-level categories, to highlight their similarities.

You’ve likely seen taxonomies used in other business cases, like building a website, but to understand taxonomy, we’re going back even further.

Does this look familiar?

Most people are first introduced to taxonomy in high school biology, where they learned how to name, define and classify living organisms. Using a series of classifications, they’re taught to identify animals, plants, fungi, and more.

For example, here’s the classification of a domestic house cat:

Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Carnivora > Felidae > Felis Domesticus

But now, look at the classification of a mountain lion:

Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Carnivora > Felidae > Felis Concolor

As you can see, a mountain lion and a domestic house cat are identical up until the very last classification. With this, even without any additional information, you could reasonably conclude that a house cat and a mountain lion are closely related. Using this biological taxonomy, you can easily identify the characteristics of living things and understand the relationships between them.

Where Does DAM fit in?

Building a taxonomy for digital asset management works similarly to a biological taxonomy. Using a hierarchical structure, you categorize and classify your assets to ease navigation, identify where any given asset can be used, and identify relationships between assets. It helps your users find assets in a way that makes sense to them.

Why Do We Need a Taxonomy?

Taxonomy is important, as it improves your users’ ability to browse through your DAM library, especially when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. With a strong taxonomy, your users are able to quickly and intuitively find the assets they need by navigating through a category structure that’s been tailored to their use cases.

The mix of metadata and taxonomy makes a DAM stronger than a typical file-storage system. It upgrades a static, visual asset library into a fully functioning content hub for your organization.

5 Steps to Building a Strong Taxonomy

It’s time to start building your own taxonomy! This can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the size of your organization, the complexity of your assets and the business cases you need to address.

But, regardless of your unique use case, there are 6 common steps to follow that will help you build a winning DAM taxonomy.

1. Get to Know the Users of Your DAM

The first step in building a strong taxonomy for your DAM is to understand how it will be used by each group – your various departments, offices, partners – the works! Book in time to talk with leaders of each group, working to understand their use case, specifically:

• The assets they want to store in the DAM
• Their overall business goals are and how a DAM can help achieve them
• How they can use a DAM for initiatives specific to their role

This will help create a scope for your taxonomy and inspire category decisions. You’ll also be able to identify common assets across users and get a clearer understanding of how each team is interconnected.

2. Take an Audit of Your Existing Assets

Just as important as the use of your assets, is the makeup of the assets themselves. Work with your various teams to consolidate all of the organization’s assets from personal drives, desktop folders, existing storage solutions, etc. into a single area.

Analyze these assets to identify:

• Popular formats (video, photos, PDFs, etc.),
• Common uses (social media, print, etc.), and
• Overarching themes.

From here, you can start to interpret how the assets can be grouped and re-arranged in a way that makes sense for each department.

This also lends the opportunity to decide which assets don’t need to be in the DAM at all. If there are assets that no longer provide value to your organization, it’s a great time to declutter.

3. Start to Brainstorm Taxonomy Options

It’s time to start brainstorming categories for your assets.

There are a few different approaches to creating categories for your taxonomy. Depending on the industry or use case, it can be done by the brand, product line, departments, location, or a mix. While taxonomies across organizations may have similarities, they’re ultimately customized to each individual organization.

Map out and group the asset needs of each stakeholder to get a basic idea of the categories and sub-categories you’ll need. From here, you can start to arrange them in a way that makes the most sense. And remember, less is more when it comes to sub-categories – you only want each parent company to expand about 3-5 sub-categories deep.

Keep in mind, that your taxonomy doesn’t have to follow the same approach throughout. A sales team would likely want their assets categorized by customer type, but a digital marketing team likely needs to find their assets by season or campaign.

4. Finalize and Document Your Proposed Taxonomy

Once you’ve landed on a taxonomy that you’re confident with, it’s time to document it!

We recommend using Microsoft Excel, or something similar, to build out your taxonomy before trying to implement it in your DAM. You’ll be able to catch errors and make edits more easily within Excel, ensuring your taxonomy is optimized.

Once you’ve built out your taxonomy into a document, send it over to your customer success manager. They’ll be able to take what you’ve visualized and make it a reality in your DAM!

5. Audit Your Taxonomy Regularly and Make Updates When Necessary

Your taxonomy is rarely static – it requires adaptations as needs develop, teams are added and use cases change. It’s important to audit your taxonomy regularly (often annually) to ensure it’s being used in the way you intended.

Keep It Going…

Your taxonomy is just one component of ensuring your DAM is easy to use and driving business value. To ensure your DAM is optimized, make sure you’re also applying best practices for your keywords and attributes.

The Annual DAM Trends Report

Learn about the benefits that come from implementing the right digital asset management and how to get started.

Download My Copy

Artificial intelligence brought the promise of automating one of the most time-consuming and manual processes in digital asset management – asset tagging. With artificial intelligence, thousands of existing and new assets can be processed in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

But, while AI is able to suggest relevant metadata, human verification is still required to evaluate the levels of accuracy and relevance to the business. As we implement AI into a DAM, we need to be careful to do so in a way that makes asset metadata more meaningful, not less, so that DAM administrators can make assets more easily discoverable.

Here are 6 best practices to help you achieve this and ensure your team successfully implements artificial intelligence in your DAM.

1. AI-Generated Metadata Should Be Kept Separate

When implementing AI in a digital asset management system, it’s important to keep your AI-generated metadata separate from your human-generated metadata.

When kept separate, the organization can toggle the availability of AI-generated metadata on or off and enable users to decide whether or not to use it in any given search. The primary purpose of this is to ensure that metadata derived from the AI service doesn’t corrupt the quality of existing metadata.

This is especially helpful for organizations piloting the use of a machine learning service, like Microsoft Cognitive Services or Amazon Rekognition. DAM administrators are able to see the quality of metadata being generated by the service before allowing users to include them in searches.

2. AI Providers Should be Tracked as a User

One of the primary benefits of a DAM is its ability to track actions taken by specific users, and AI should be no exception. Tracking your AI just like any other user allows actions performed to be more easily tracked and audited. This becomes even more important if you plan on using multiple AI services.

For example, if you’re using Microsoft Cognitive Services for some metadata and Google Vision for others, by creating a user account for each you can better audit the services, as you’re able to isolate the metadata that was added by each service.

3. AI Providers Should be Tracked by Feature

When implementing an AI service, it’s important to separate the services by project or feature to associate training data and test data with a particular attribute.

For example, if you create a test set for your AI service to identify phones, you would define a Cognitive Metadata Attribute called “Phones” to map to that corresponding AI project. You could also create a more general Cognitive Metadata Attribute called “Keywords” to associate with untrained auto-tagging features provided by the AI service.

Separating your services in this way allows you to transfer the data set to another service provider if you’re not satisfied with the results of a feature.

4. AI-Generated Metadata Should be Filterable

When using AI within a DAM, users need to be able to search for an asset based on AI-specific filters, such as AI provider, API/model version and prediction date. Depending on company policy, users should also be able to increase or decrease the acceptable confidence level for any given search.

For example, a user could search using the keyword “Dog” and then filter it to only show results that were tagged using IBM Watson and have a confidence level of 95% or higher.

5. AI-Generated Metadata Should be Convertible

Most digital asset management systems allow embedded metadata to be converted to a regular asset attribute (such as a keyword) and auto-tags should be no different. When implementing AI into your DAM, consider setting rules so that if a tag is generated with a high confidence level, it can automatically be converted into a general keyword (so it will still be available, even if AI services are toggled “off”).

For example, you can set up your AI with a set of rules so that any auto-tag with a confidence level of 99.9% or higher can be converted into a keyword.

6. AI Should Improve Over Time

One of the benefits of AI is its ability to progressively improve its performance on a specific task. As you get more data, you’re able to retrain the model and get better precision.

With this, any deleted/incorrect auto-tags can be treated as negative feedback and any confirmations of auto-tags into a keyword can be treated as positive feedback for the model. You can choose to retrain the model manually or it can be automatically triggered after a certain volume of asset data points has been collected by the DAM.

This capability, however, is only applicable when you’re using Guided or Specialized MLaaS, where you own the model and supply it with the “right information”.

Getting Started with AI and DAM

These are a few best practices when implementing artificial intelligence into your digital asset management system, but there are other important factors to consider. Download a Quick Guide to AI in DAM to learn the levels of customization available, important factors to consider and key steps to implementing AI in a DAM.

Ready to get started with artificial intelligence? Let’s talk about your unique use-case!

A digital asset management project can often get over-complicated. With all the available integrations and add-ons, it’s common to get caught up in the potential scope of your DAM and forget about its primary purpose: to help you better manage your digital assets.

From industry analysts to a multitude of customer use cases, it’s been proven that adopting a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to a DAM project ensures the success of an implementation in the short and long term. This gradual approach provides a critical foundation for organizing existing assets, drives quick wins with the initial implementation and creates a long-term vision for DAM through integrations and expansions.

In this post, we share expert opinions on the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach and explain how we use it to ensure the success of our customers.

The Crawl, Walk, Run Approach: Insights from Industry Experts

Bryan Yeager, Senior Analyst at Gartner

At the Gartner 2018 Digital Marketing Conference, Bryan Yeager emphasized the growing complexity of the digital asset management landscape and the sprawl of features and capabilities expected from DAM platforms. In addition to common capabilities, such as library services, data management and search capabilities, DAM is often marketed as a “catch-all solution” under many different names: marketing asset management, brand asset management, content productivity platform, sales enablement, just to name a few. This has created confusion for buyers and often pushed DAM projects to expand to a large-scale transformation solution, driving multiple purposes and involving an ever-increasing number of stakeholders. That’s also why a lot of DAM projects stall or fail, with the fear of implementation complexity overtaking the promise of tangible results and quick wins.

One of the key take-aways from Bryan’s session is to first focus on the use cases for the team with the largest pain points. From there, you can build a roadmap following the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach, defining short-term goals, a vision for the DAM and a roadmap to get there.

Theresa Regli, DAM Expert and Past Analyst at Real Story Group

Theresa Regli, a DAM strategist and a recognized industry thought-leader shared a similar idea in her webinar on “How to Select a DAM System”.

The way she puts it: “Everyone wants a Millennium Falcon” or, in other words, organizations want the best and the most powerful tools. Most enterprise companies are looking for full-scale, complex solutions before they even have the abilities or tools needed to use them or successfully implement them.

In Theresa’s example, she emphasizes that organizations need to start with “riding a bike” and only then start upgrading to the Millennium Falcon. In DAM terms, this means auditing and organizing assets, implementing a strong taxonomy and spearheading initial adoption, which can take up to 18 months for a large company. Organizations need to implement the core components of a DAM platform first to build a strong foundation, before connecting to workflows or introducing integrations.

Theresa also brings up the issue of a “scope creep” as one of the challenges in a DAM buying process. On one side, there’s confusion between different types of systems, such as MAMs and file storage systems, who claim to have elements of DAM. On another side, there are organizations that want DAM to be an all-in-one solution, with DAM that does too much at the same time. This has diluted the existing use-case for DAM and created an endless list of requirements and customization complexities that prevent a DAM project from ever succeeding or staying on time and on budget.

MediaValet’s Approach to “Crawl Walk Run”

At MediaValet, we know that everybody’s “Crawl, Walk, Run” path is different. It depends on many factors – your company’s size, digital maturity, existing technologies, partner ecosystems, just to name a few. We take all of these elements into consideration to help you define the final vision for your DAM project.

After you’ve defined a vision, we help you develop a roadmap that will get you to that goal, keeping an achievable scope for each phase. Our Customer Success team will help determine the teams that will benefit most from an immediate roll-out of DAM and help facilitate the change management process to ensure early success within these teams. During this stage, the team can also recognize any concerns, issues or gaps that can be improved for the rollout of future groups and identify potential internal advocates.

The Customer Success team will then help define the teams to include in the next wave of implementation, ensuring that the value of the system is maximized. This is one of the reasons we provide unlimited onboarding and training – to allow for a gradual rollout and ensure that any personnel change or new teams do not negatively impact DAM adoption.

Once adoption is high, we’ll focus on your growth and help you make the most of your investment.

Here’s a rough outline of the Crawl Walk Run approach:

1. Outline business requirements and overall implementation scope
2. Create a mission statement for the DAM project
3. Define the roadmap and key milestones to achieve overall mission
4. Define the core team and key technology integrations involved in the initial roll out
5. Define next teams, technology platforms or development requirements involved in the later phases and outline desired timelines
6. Complete initial onboarding, defining taxonomy and best practices
7. Deliver training to teams and roll out adoption strategies
8. Evaluate first phase success and define expansion plan and next steps

Crawl, Walk, Run Use-Case: An Alberta-Based University

One of our customers, a Canadian higher education institution in Alberta, leveraged the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach for their DAM approach. They broke down the DAM implementation into three phases:

• Phase one – enable the marketing team to complete a re-branding project and distribute newly created brand material.
• Phase two – expand the DAM to additional departments, auditing and organizing all assets actively used by the teams.
• Phase three – complete digitization of the school’s historical media and photo archive, auditing and organizing all remaining marketing assets.

The success of their re-branding initiative was accelerated by the DAM platform and paved the way for the following phases and increasing overall DAM adoption. The re-branding project also helped to prove a business case for the DAM and improve organization-wide support.

Ready to get started with the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach? Get inspiration for teams to include in your roll-out plan with these 3 Categories of Users to Consider.

Digital asset management initiatives have a profound impact on creative and marketing operations and positively affect multiple teams and stakeholders. But, DAM projects often have multiple phases and moving parts and, thus, potential opportunities to get derailed.

To drive your DAM initiative to the finish line, you need to be prepared to address challenges that could stall your project or halt it completely. In this post, we’ve highlighted the most common ones, so you can be prepared with counter-attacks.

Here are 5 factors that could be stalling your DAM project and how to stay on track.

1. Budget Reallocation
2. Competing Project Priorities
3. Lack of Buy-In
4. Resistance from IT
5. Internal Change

1. Budget Reallocation

A change in budget is the number one project staller we hear from companies looking into digital asset management. It’s also the one that’s hardest to control as budgets get overspent, unexpected opportunities are presented and competing priorities are introduced during the quarter. Two-thirds of those investing in marketing technology don’t have a clearly defined budget, so when it comes time to sign-off on pricing or approve a proposal unless specifically allocated to DAM, the budget may no longer be available or may be pushed out to the next quarter or year.

Staying on Track: Find Budget for the Future

To avoid budget reallocation, work with your team to find where digital asset management will fit into the budget and try to get approvals specifically for the DAM project, separate from the overall marketing technology budget. (Smartsheet has 12 free marketing budget templates if you need help). Sometimes your accounting team will also allow annual payments for SaaS technology to be budgeted as a monthly expense across the entire year, making the spend easier to justify in proportion to the yearly budget.

You can also do an audit of your existing programs to see if there are any that can be retired, have overlapping functionality or have not been adopted, finding ways to reduce existing spend rather than having to justify technology budget increase in order to add DAM in your marketing stack.

2. Competing Project Priorities

With nearly half of marketers (43%) using between 6 and 10 different martech solutions, we occasionally hear that another project or a different marketing technology is taking priority over DAM. Competing priorities can be the nature of a marketing team, especially within larger organizations where different initiatives have to compete for a limited budget.

Staying on Track: Prove DAM ROI

When you’re competing against another piece of marketing technology, the key is to prove that a digital asset management system is a priority, and part of this is proving ROI. There are plenty of ROI calculators, like this one, that can help you show the value of DAM, including benefits, quantifiable ROI value and growth opportunities. You need to use ROI as an offensive, rather than a defensive tactic. Once the decision has been made to prioritize another project, it can be difficult to pivot.

It can also be helpful to highlight DAM as a foundational technology that speeds up other marketing initiatives, so it’s often beneficial to implement a DAM first. By auditing and organizing content or brand assets first, rebranding, website updates, marketing automation or other projects can be completed faster and at a lower cost.

3. Lack of Buy-In

When trying to get a DAM system approved, it’s important to have buy-in from multiple stakeholders, especially from ones that would benefit from its implementation. Digital asset management isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, so it’s important to consider use cases from different user groups and ensure that their needs are met. Omitting functionality that is key to a specific user group can introduce obstacles into both vendor selection and approval stages, which can cause a DAM project to quickly go to ruins.

Staying on Track: Recruit Advocates

There’s strength in numbers – especially if you’re hoping to get a digital asset management project approved. A DAM initiative is set to gain more traction if you involve stakeholders from key user groups right from the get-go. It allows every party involved to share what they’re hoping to achieve with the system, creating a truer scope for the project and narrowing your vendor options. Start by identifying the groups that will likely be impacted by the DAM and get them involved in the decision-making process (here are three categories of users to consider). Ensuring that your DAM requirements match stakeholder use-cases will ensure that you get support from these groups and strengthen your DAM case, leaving less chance for bumps down the road. Here’s a helpful guide for getting key stakeholders involved.

4. Resistance from IT

IT can be resistant to a digital asset management project if they feel it will significantly increase their workload or endanger corporate security protocols. Their concerns come down to three things:

1. How the technology integrates into their existing technology roadmap?
2. Does this new technology introduce the level of risk that’s acceptable to the organization?
3. Will it help business users?

As the department responsible for planning, operating and supporting the company’s overall technology infrastructure and enabling business users to carry out their roles efficiently and securely, IT is looking to analyze if the DAM is safe to implement and if it will reduce overall costs from the corporate perspective.

Staying on Track: Build a Business Case

What IT needs is cold, hard proof that your DAM initiative will increase user efficiency while decreasing risks, and that often boils down to a business case. You’re looking to prove that you’ve done your research, calculated the potential risks and built a project plan that will work. In our recent interview with Microsoft’s Global Channel Marketing Lead, she suggested running a pilot/trial to prove the use-case for your own organization and give IT a realistic sandbox to test. Workzone built out a great post on making an exceptional business case, that can help you start on your own for digital asset management.

5. Internal Change

The final factor that we frequently see stalling a digital asset management project is an internal change, such as a change in leadership, organizational restructuring or even an acquisition. Each one of these factors introduces an enormous amount of change to the organization, leaving many active projects on the backburner.

Staying on Track: Start Smaller

If you work within an organization that frequently reorganizes departments or product lines (some even do this every fiscal year), or if you’re in an industry that experiences a lot of consolidation or acquisition activity, you need to be strategic about how you approach your DAM initiative. Part of this means simplifying the scope of the project to reduce the project complexity and introducing a phased approach. Integrations and add-ons can often make implementations more complicated, lengthen the project cycle and threaten overall budget allocation.

We often recommend a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to digital asset management, where organizations roll out the “core DAM” before adding on any extras. It not only ensures that the implementation runs smoothly, it also gets the DAM rolled out before internal change can stall the project.

While this isn’t a definitive list, we hope it prepares you for potential stalls that come your way and helps you confidently lead the charge for your digital asset management project.

Heading into a digital asset management demo? Don’t forget to ask these important questions to ask on a DAM demo.

When you begin evaluating digital asset management vendors, you often face a varied landscape of designs, features, and configurations. While it can be difficult to navigate these options, there’s a group that can help provide clarity: those who will be using the system.

There are three categories of users that should usually be consulted when evaluating possible DAM vendors: creative, technical, and business users.

A successful adoption often depends on satisfying these users and their interests, so they should be top of mind when selecting a DAM system.

Creative Users

Your implementation’s fate largely lies with the power users in your creative department or those that create your content. For this crucial stakeholder group, one thing matters above all: speed.

Today’s creatives often face production demands that stretch them to the edge of their ability and this pressure is only increasing with the growing amount of content distribution channels that require tailored content.

Considering this, it’s understandable that creative users have no tolerance for unnecessary disruptions to their processes. No matter how sophisticated or feature-rich a DAM is, their feelings about it boil down to one thing: Does it interrupt their workflow?

Neglecting this concern is a mistake you don’t want to make.

While a DAM is designed to help creatives keep organized, store, and share files, if it slows down or interrupts a creative user’s workflow, they’ll resort back to their own methods of storing and managing content without speed delays. At that point, the DAM isn’t being used and the implementation has failed.

To ensure that this doesn’t happen, your DAM provider has to solve a very sticky problem: physics.

A large file requires time to render when it’s downloaded from the cloud. This latency isn’t long by most standards – only a second or two – but these seconds aggregate over the course of a day and it’s time that your creative users don’t have to lose. If content development is an intrinsic element of your business model, it’s critical to ensure that the vendors you’ve shortlisted can minimize or eliminate any delays your creative team may experience due to the DAM.

Technical Users

Your company likely has a technical strategy related to a cloud provider like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. Aligning your DAM with your overall technical strategy will streamline implementation, integration, and maintenance. Ultimately, it will make your IT team happy.

Your first question may be: How do you know if you have a technical strategy? Look at your suite of applications.

For example, if your organization uses Microsoft Office, you likely have a Microsoft strategy. Microsoft applications are typically backed up on Microsoft cloud infrastructure and provide access to the cloud storage service, Microsoft Azure. Any other separate SaaS applications or systems that you employ, including a DAM, that are also hosted on Azure should easily integrate into your Microsoft applications.

This alignment with a technical strategy also streamlines implementation from a security perspective. Since your IT team will have already audited your current cloud provider for other applications, they know the security of the cloud platform well. This familiarity can fast-track your implementation and speed-to-value.

Business Users

Your business users are the marketers, salespeople, and external partners that need to be able to easily find content for their PowerPoint presentations, product briefs, or promotional material. While they aren’t power users, they remain one of the most important DAM stakeholders. Like creatives, business users value the ability to access any file format, size, or resolution quickly, so that they can concentrate on hitting their deadlines.

However, the greatest value a DAM can provide to these users is the ability to facilitate asset discovery and ideation. These users need to be able to quickly find what they’re looking for through reliable and user-friendly search capabilities. This allows business users, who are sometimes geographically distributed, to be able to independently find the assets they need at any time.

Customer Use Case: The Stevens Institute of Technology

The Stevens Institute of Technology, a private research university in New Jersey, took great care in incorporating and considering users during their digital asset management evaluation process.

Here’s what Jay Boucher, their Graphic Designer, had to say about their experience:

“Something that was very important to us was to do interviews with users to find out how they used our old system and what they expected from the new system. We wanted to understand their workflow and what their pain points were.

This information was then used to create a list of our DAM needs, the features that were absolutely necessary, and expectations for the system. From there, we could narrow down our list of potential vendors and only include those who offered the features we needed, but who was also in our price range.

By performing this exercise, our team was able to come together and make a final decision on a DAM vendor and present our findings to upper management”

For Stevens Institute of Technology, considering their users was extremely valuable to the success of their DAM implementation.

By considering these 3 user groups throughout your DAM selection process, you can start on a good foot to establishing high adoption and having a successful implementation.

Understanding the requirements of your users is one of the three major considerations when selecting a DAM. We’ve discussed the other two – Strategy and Configuration in the ebook: “Choosing the right DAM”. You can get a full copy of the ebook here.

While Blockchain is a hot topic, it can be a challenge to find examples of implementation other than through cryptocurrencies.

Jean Lozano, the CTO of MediaValet has presented his take on Blockchain and how it can transform the DAM industry at the DAM New York conference, and more recently during a webinar with Henry Stewart Events.

During his presentations, he discussed the intricacies of Blockchain 2.0 and how it can transform the Digital Asset Management industry. While there’s still work to be done in order for blockchain to be available in the DAM industry, let’s discuss the benefits of Blockchain in Enterprise DAM when it’s leveraged, and its challenges and considerations.

Benefits of Blockchain in Enterprise DAM

• Governance: Enable companies to create a distributed and decentralized system of record for digital media
• Rights Management: Concrete media asset ownership rights and provenance can be established
• Rights Transfer and Licensing: Content and ownership can be transferred to other parties, and content licensing and publishing can be facilitated by distribution companies
• Content Creation Attribution: Allocate and enforce the stake of content creators to produce content
• Digital Lifecycle Management: Facilitate and keep track of digital media assets, through each stage of their life cycle
• Security: Ensure security with blockchain cryptography

Considerations and Challenges

With benefits, it is still important to consider other factors and potential challenges of implementing blockchain.

1. Blockchain Technology is new and rapidly evolving

With Blockchain 2.0, blockchain technology has matured but is still in a state of change and will require continuous development of the decentralized app (dApp) for Digital Asset Management.

2. Establishing use cases with proven success

Successful blockchain use cases with proven success, outside the cryptocurrency space, still need to be established. These success cases also must tell a massively transformative story to justify the investment and implementation risks of this technology.

3. Need for Talent

Developers with high expertise in blockchain are in high demand and scarce, which can affect the pace of technology development and adoption.

Steps to Leverage Blockchain

While blockchain is still in development, what can you do to prepare for implementation? Here are some steps you can take:

Step 1: Implement Foundation Technologies

It’s important to centralize your existing assets, establish rights management for taxonomy, and invest in audits and data quality initiatives. We recommend also identifying your high-value digital assets and establishing provenance for them and tagging new assets that are ingested. These initiatives will create a strong foundation to implement new technologies and will aid your success.

Step 2: Analyze your Digital Asset Supply Chain (DASC)

The digital asset supply chain can be broken down into activities and will include various participants from inside and outside of your organization. The nature of these activities ranges, therefore will become more complex as the supply chain gets closer to the consumer of the content. It is recommended that you start your analysis from the commissioning of the work.

Step 3: Establish Use Cases

Identify use cases from the activities you identified from your Digital Asset Supply Chain (DASC) that will benefit from the blockchain implementation and evaluate their impact on your business. This includes their ROI and associated risks. During this step, it is also important to consider any legal implications or contract changes you may need to prepare in advance.

Step 4: Develop Talent

Ensure you have an internal team with individuals who have a growing understanding of blockchain and its applications. In addition, training should be provided to other core members of your team. It is also recommended that organizations identify consultants or partners, who have experience with DAM implementations as well as Blockchain expertise.

Step 5: Build a Minimum Viable dApp Product (MVP)

Work with a vendor or with your team to build a minimum viable dApp product for your selected use case. Take the time to implement and revise as needed. Use this as an opportunity to learn from nuances of the implementation, as working with blockchain technology will deem to be an iterative process with incremental improvements.

Step 6: Evaluate and Expand

Once you have implemented a successful MVP, plan for the expansion of the dApp to tackle other use cases within your DASC.

If you’d like to learn more about blockchain, and how it can benefit the DAM industry, download the presentation slides from our “Blockchain and the Future of DAM” webinar.

When implementing a digital asset management system, your users’ ability to quickly and easily find their assets is critical for high adoption and overall satisfaction, and creating a sound metadata strategy and a set of best practices is the first step to ensure that assets are discoverable.

As a part of your metadata, your keywords give you the power to label your assets in a way that’s relevant to your unique business needs. Keywords hold great power, but can also hinder the efficacy of the DAM if used incorrectly. Below, we share some best practices to help you build a successful keywording strategy.

1. Be thorough, but use keywords sparingly: Find the balance between too many and too little keywords – just enough to highlight the who, what, when and where (and why, if it’s relevant).

2. Don’t make your keywords too specific: If you get too specific with your keywords, it could prevent people from finding the assets they need. Instead of keywording STILETTOS, PUMPS and PEEP-TOES, just stick with HIGH HEELS to cover all three.

3. Don’t make your keywords too broad: If you find you’re using the same keyword over and over again, it’s likely too broad. For example, if you work at a jeweller, the keyword JEWELRY would likely make it into a majority of your assets, and should be eliminated entirely.

4. Be consistent with your abbreviations (or avoid them altogether): While it’s best to not use abbreviations at all, if you need to, be sure that you’re using the same style across all keywords. This tends to become a problem with locations, for example, UNITED STATES vs. USA vs. US.

5. Be consistent with how you phrase verbs: Do you prefer to use SURF or SURFING? Both are fine, but pick one and keep with it (although SURFING may be the better choice, as it will likely come up when you search for SURF, as well).

6. Don’t double-up on synonyms to describe the same thing: It’s common to want to keyword different synonyms, such as FELINE, CAT and KITTEN, however it’s better to pick one and use it consistently.

7. Be consistent with plurals: Decide if you want to keyword assets in singular or plural tense – and stick to it! For example, do you want to say CARS or CAR? Keeping it consistent will make it easier to find assets in the future, without having to use advanced search capabilities.

8. Be literal with your keywords: While an image might suggest a LADIES NIGHT, using literal words, such as WOMEN, DANCING and NIGHT CLUB, makes it much easier to find later.

9. Be careful when using trendy words: It’s tempting to use words that are trending at the time you upload the image, but while the word SELFIE might be relevant now, the keyword could be useless down the line.

10. Avoid homonyms and homographs: The keyword BAND could refer to both a music group or a ring. Only use homonyms if it has a clear context with your business (for example, a jeweller would only use BAND in the context of a ring).

12. Choose your language and stick to it: Be sure to use the same language for all of your keywords. Also consider regional spelling, such as American (COLOR) and Canadian (COLOUR), and ensure that it’s consistent.

11. Avoid regional and slang words: Only use keywords that will be understood across different regions and groups. For example, in Canada the word TOQUE is used to describe a HAT worn in WINTER, and a BUNNY HUG is used to describe a style of SWEATER.

13. Keyword for your business: Keywords will be used to make searching easier for the end user, so it’s important to think of context. Consider an image of a couple walking on a beach. For a dating site, they’ll likely use more keywords to describe the couple, while a travel company will be more concerned about the location.

14. Watch your spelling: Most importantly, be careful that there are no typos in your keywords – it will leave the asset almost undiscoverable later.

Your keywording strategy is at the heart of your whole digital asset management initiative. It’s important to take the time to create keywords that are consistent, clear and have the end-user in mind.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.