Guest Blog Post from Karin Schei, Widen Marketing Coordinator

With the ever changing advancements in marketing software, the world of digital asset management is constantly evolving.  Today, there is a greater demand for the creation and consumption of digital media than ever before and that means here at Widen, we are constantly developing ways for clients to manage and deliver rich media.  Right now, we are working on a new feature that will allow clients to create a direct link to digital assets stored in the master repository to the online medium where they are used and consumed.  This means no more worrying about whether updates within the DAM system are being received by everyone – with DAM as the master platform – it automatically takes place.  This process also allows marketers, webmasters and designers to refrain from duplicating digital asset repositories in other locations for that particular online medium – web content management, e-commerce websites, email marketing, etc. – which ensures brand consistency.  More details to come on this exciting new step in digital asset management.

Guest Blog Post from Ben Johnsen, Widen Sales Representative

Last weekend while attending a wedding reception, I had the opportunity to have a very memorable conversation with the bride.  She came up to me and asked how work was going?  She said since all the rain and flooding, business must be doing well!  Now, my friend, the groom, has a good idea on what we do here at Widen, and I had thought his wife would to, but apparently when she saw my Facebook status as “Ben is selling DAMs” she literally thought I sold dams - as in dams for water containment and hydroelectric power.  She then went on saying how she was very impressed, and did not realize that people actually went around and sold dams. 

It was my fault she did not have a good idea on what I am selling.  Although quite funny, I realized when talking about Widen with other people, I sometimes forget they might not be familiar with Digital Asset Management.

In an ideal world, everyone would know DAM means Digital Asset Management, but in reality people who do not work directly with marketing, communications or creative groups might not realize that the amount of digital media created and consumed warrants a need for a DAM system.  Each day, creative departments are creating photos, logos, graphics and any other branded promotional materials to help drive revenue and build brand recognition for their organization, and each day they need a place to store and organize these files in addition to a means to easily distribute them. 

That’s what Widen does.  We help you contain the flood of digital media and direct it wherever it is to be used and consumed. 

When’s the last time YOU saw roller derby?  Well for me, it was last weekend in Madison, Wisconsin – home of the Dairyland Dolls AND Widen.  Is there a connection between flat track roller derby and digital asset management software?  Well, here goes. 

The Women’s Flat-Track Derby Association is a relatively new group established to organize the 100+ roller derby leagues in North America – and has over 4000 registered skaters.  Now think about all the stuff this group has … team pictures, logos, graphics for posters, t-shirt designs, video clips … lots and lots of digital media from all across the country.  And I’m guessing not much of a staff to help them organize everything.  Now if the association had Widen’s digital media management platform to organize and distribute their digital assets – I can guarantee that we would make the staff SO happy that they might not want to knock down another woman from another roller derby team! 

If the association had a web-based DAM system, they could allow users from ANYWHERE in the world access to certain things on the site.  The beauty of DAM SaaS means not having to be stuck with some software installed at only one location for an organization.  And when an organization has members spread out across North America – a web-based solution sure seems to be the way to go.  With each league or team being not only part of a national association, but also being their own ‘brand’ – the association and its members would definitely benefit from an asset management system. 

The goal of the Women’s Flat-Track Derby Association is “World Domination,” which is ironic because we want to help organizations with that goal.  Hey Women’s Flat-Track Derby Association – give us a call!

Funny story.  When I began my video position at Widen and introduced it as a marketing tool.  It made quite the impact ... so much so, that it started to take on the feel of Duct Tape ... our marketing department wanted to use it for everything. You know what I'm talking about guys, tell me you don't have more than 5 rolls of duct tape on your work bench, yet, when you are at the hardware store, you buy another roll.  You don't want to run out because you can use it on everything.  Yet, when you need to use one of your rolls of duct tape, you can't find one ... Sound familiar?  I know we created a video for that Marketing project, but now I can't find it.  Enter Video Asset Management, as part of Digital Asset Management from Widen Enterprises.  I single out video here, but it applies to images, logos, brochures, and any other type of digital asset.  Since Marketing departments are usually the keepers of all of these assets, we can put it under the umbrella of Marketing Asset Management.  Video management is baked into our DAM system by allowing on-line previews, transcoding to other video formats, and DVD authoring.  The previews and transcoding allows the system to integrate video into your marketing asset workflow for images and logos.  The DVD authoring allows for a specific delivery format specific to video.  Some people are "old skool" and just want to watch videos on a tv.  Widen's DAM is like duct tape ... you can use it for everything.

Would anyone like to provide clarity to the issue in defining digital asset management and/or position of DAM relative to ECM?

The ABI Research press release from September 3, 2008 gives mention to a lingering confusion about the definition of digital asset management.  ABI Research Analyst, Zippy Aima cautioned “There is still a lack of clarity around defining the system.  DAM Systems are often confused with ECMs. Currently, DAM is considered to be a subset of enterprise content management (ECM).” 

Please join the discussion and submit your comments. 

View the full press release

View the ABI Research Digital Asset Management Study

ABI Research, a market research firm focused on the impact of emerging technologies on global consumer and business markets, has reported that the Digital Asset Management market is to reach $1 Billion in 2013.  (Wow! That’s some incredible growth!)  This was a study Widen participated in this year with ABI Research analyst Zippy Aima.  Business drivers for adopting Digital Asset Management solutions include the need for increased collaboration for growing amounts of digital media across all personnel and departments part of all processes from creation to delivery of the digital content.  Another driver highlighted in the study is a DAM system’s ability to integrate with existing third-party systems including ERP and enterprise content management (ECM) applications.  (I concur.)  As for the bottom line, DAM systems “improve operational efficiency and demonstrate a clear ROI.” (We’ve been preaching this for years.)  Decreasing storage costs and increasing bandwidth are two resource elements affecting cost and asset mobility.  (That’s why we mention “cloud computing” – flexibly scalable and conveniently cost-effective.)  High price is reported to be one of the barriers to DAM adoption – mentioning the average cost to be in the range of $100K - $150K.  (Consider the low monthly subscription of DAM SaaS.)  Another barrier reported is a lack of interest from C-level executives.  (That’s why we prove DAM’s impact on marketing efficiency and effectiveness with a clear ROI.)

Visit ABI Research to purchase the report or learn more

Widen will be sponsoring and exhibiting at the Henry Stewart Business Briefing on Digital Asset Management on Monday, October 27, 2008 at the Avenue Hotel in Chicago.  Henry Stewart Events cover Digital Asset Management, Marketing Resource Management, and Best Practices in Marketing Operations.  The comprehensive one-day briefing will cover the challenges, opportunities, problems and solutions with digital media management.

See below for the full conference program or learn more at www.damusers.com.

Conference Chair:  Michael Moon, President & CEO, GISTICS

What is DAM – introduction, latest developments, how to get started and how to upgrade

• What is it?
• Who needs it?
• DAM for improved efficiency
• DAM for consistency, e.g. specification and billing
• DAM for better marketing
• DAM for generating new products

Michael Moon, President & CEO, GISTICS

Benefit analysis, ROIs, implications for the bottom line and the construction of an internal business case for implementation and improvement

• Evaluating costs and risks of an enterprise wide asset management solution
• Identifying harvestable benefits: short term and long term
• Strategy from the organizational level to the individual perspective
• Using statistical methods for ROI analysis and forecasting the future

Mary Yurkovic, Manager DAM and Distribution, Playboy Enterprises, Inc

Evaluating and Selecting DAM Technologies

• Fundamentals of DAM technology
• How to categorize the DAM/Media Asset Management marketplace
• Rough cost estimates for different types of projects
• Selecting the right offering to meet the identified business objective
• Typical pitfalls in tool selection and implementation, and how to avoid them

Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch

The Management Challenges In Installation and Operation

• Golden rules to ensure an implementation goes right
• The pieces that need to be in place
• Getting your vendors to work with you
• Managing inevitable changes

Linda Burman, CEO, L.A. Burman Associates

Understanding the critical importance of metadata and adopting a metadata approach suitable for your organization and its activities

• Why metadata is so critical to effective Digital Asset Management
• Taxonomies, metadata and search – combining components to improve findability of content
• Making the punishment fit the crime – how much metadata is enough?
• Who does what? – developing a workable governance policy around development, maintenance and application of metadata

Seth Earley, Principal, Earley & Associates

Case studies – who has done what, how and with what results?

Case Study: Extending the Brand Experience through DAM

• The digital asset management software helped Knaack marketing implement and launch the new system enterprise-wide quickly and seamlessly.
• The web-based DAM system was integrated with the Knaack Partner Gateway allowing channel partners to access images, videos and PDF files in a variety of formats from the same single sign-on portal they use to access other Knaack Resources.
• The Big Achievement: Knaack’s digital media is stored in one location, eliminating redundant and outdated libraries. More importantly, Knaack’s assets are repurposed across multiple interactive media channels to extend the brand experience from corporate marketing to channel partners.

Jim Scarlata, Director of Marketing Operation, Knaack LLC, Division of Emerson Electric Company

Case Study from General Motors

• Designed, implemented and managed a process to streamline the digital asset creation, storage and distribution process in the area of Advertising & Marketing for General Motors Corporation.
• Worked with Marketing Teams at GM, their Ad agencies and Production houses to understand their workflows and create a Digital Asset Management process that improves their workfows. Also, identified redundant systems and migrated those to a common global platform
• All GM brands are now using one common global system to store, share and collaborate advertising assets across the world. This has resulted in multi-million dollars in cost savings and also driven significant efficiencies.

Manish Mallick, Program Manager, Asset Manager, General Motors Corporate

Case Study from Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon deployed its Digital Asset Management system to centrally archive artwork created to support consumer product initiatives for Nickelodeon Shows such as Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, Rugrats and SpongeBob SquarePants. A B2B, rights-managed website, Nicksource.com, was developed in tandem as a means of delivering content to licensing partners, lowering printing/shipping costs and expediting delivery to developing markets. Over time the archive has grown to over 200,000 files and the B2B site has become a globally accessed central hub for creative content. In addition to all internal lines of business (On air, On line, off air design teams, marketing, advertising, press, publications and all international offices) 3,000 users access Nicksource to download 2,000 files a day on average. More recently the Nickelodeon DAM system has been used as a central screening point for viewing QuickTime files of on air promos, reviewing and routing digital photography and serving as a repository for audio, mechanical and Aftereffects files.

Our main challenges:

• An ever growing amount of content that is regularly being revised, updated and retired.
• Limiting content by contract rights, region and timing which coincides with broadcast.
• Global delivery of large amounts of content in a simple, visual manner as quickly as possible and routing artwork simultaneously to offices throughout the world
• Distributing exclusive artwork to select partners.
• Dealing with large, difficult and complex file sizes.
• Routing artwork simultaneously to global offices.
• Receiving content.

Opportunities our DAM System Presents:

• Ability to create active user and work groups for particular pods of creative.
• Ability to track download history
• Targeted delivery of cataloged assets.
• Cataloging of an enormous body of character art
• Ability to deal with assets in multiple formats: Quark, InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quicktime, Audio and others

Miles Rohan, Senior Digital Asset Manager, Nickelodeon

I read an interesting the article the other day featured in Chief Marketer called “Give Content a Chance: Why Smart Content is Smart Marketing” by Joe Stanhope.  The article talked about a convergence of analytically-led marketing and the face of marketing to consumer’s – the content – including new content, versioned content, and dynamic content; which with the right strategies and toolkit can be used to create “smart content” or content most relevant to the consumer. 

The article is relevant to Widen marketing software because it talks about digital asset management as the foundation of the marketing resource content repository.  According to Joe Stanhope, “Smart content requires investment in marketing technology.  Initially, marketing needs an asset management system that contains all of its creative efforts, templates and documentation.  This centralization drives consistency, leading to an improved customer experience, and also makes marketing more efficient by enforcing standards and reducing the effort required to pull campaign elements together.”

Other parts of the article mention that the marketing asset management system must be integrated with the campaign management system to drive efficiency in distribution from a single source, avoiding duplicate efforts.  The author mentions that this helps the content become a stronger component of the campaign with equal consideration and balance with the “tactical components of campaign design.”  Stanhope mentions that marketing needs to track content consumption throughout campaigns and goes on to provide a list of new questions that arise. 

This article strikes a chord with Widen on multiple levels.  Widen’s digital asset management integration with Salesforce.com allows marketers to centralize all rich media within campaigns, which allows marketing content to be tracked to the individual campaigns and measured with its cumulative value across all campaigns.  Widen’s new release of embed codes allows marketing to treat DAM as the foundation with all assets centralized in one location and seamlessly repurposed across multiple online mediums.  Widen’s Marketing Template Creation application for Salesforce.com allows marketers to provide sales channels with customizable content.  Integrations with Salesforce.com allow marketers to be smart with their content by bringing the content to the end-consumer via the CRM.  All Widen marketing software comes with reporting tools that allows marketers to track and measure content availability and use. 

Guest Blog Post from Sean Banahan, Widen Sales Executive

We talk a lot about hosted vs. installed software and it’s becoming more obvious why organizations choose DAM SaaS, but here’s a couple more things to look for:

- Support.  Many license digital asset management software providers tie support into an annual fee.  If you fall behind or get out of compliance with the license they hold you hostage until it’s righted.  Other hosted DAM providers have had trouble even getting back to customers.  It’s often because there are no real dedicated support channels at all.  Customers call into a developer who rarely picks up the phone and gets back to them when it suits the developer.  I am not aware of a single DAM company that provides user support through a chat as Widen does.  Most only provide product support to administrative users rather than end user support of any kind. 

- Product Improvement.  With three releases a year, most other DAM providers can’t keep up.  I think customers are used to seeing a very stagnant approach to improving things in their DAM vendors.  Bug fixes are released a few times a year but real enhancements show up once a year and usually contain far less than was promised. 

- Cost.  Why wouldn’t you consider that Widen’s DAM solutions are more cost-effective than almost every other SaaS/on-demand provider in the enterprise space?  With licensed solutions there is no comparison.

- Experience.  Widen is a DAM provider and not an agency/printer that has developed a piece-meal solution for one client last year and then tried to productize it for everyone.  Our shared platform includes 12 years of experience and a feature list that shows it. 

- Ease-of-use.  The solution tends to be easier to use than other DAM solutions people have seen. Period.

- Features.  Embed links, support for storing, displaying and transforming multiple files types, robust access rights that are not exclusively tied to folders.

- Vision.  Again, prospects are used to seeing their DAM supplier develop things after the market begs for it.  With Widen we talk about publishing to Youtube and present marketing materials there, we have three major releases each year, we want people to access the demo site, we are much more forward on cost and what's what.

Guest Blog Post from Amanda Jenny, Widen Client Services Assistant, from Widen’s color management and prepress services side.

Let’s talk about dots.  Did you know that if you fill an area on a white sheet of paper with 50% black dots, letting 50% of the white paper to show, you will have a shade of gray? You can create 99 shades of gray by using dot concentrations of 1% to 99%. Obviously, when you reach 100% you have solid black and 0% would be pure white - assuming the paper is pure white.

In the same way, you can get 99 shades of the specific process blue called cyan. This is also true for magenta, a specific process red, and for a specific process yellow called interestingly enough, “yellow.” By mixing the different percentages of CMY will you will get about 1 million colors (100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000). You may be worried about the K or black color component of CMYK. Well, don’t worry, I didn’t forget.  You don’t need black (or K) to make black. 100% of CMY makes black. It does this by subtracting all the color present in a white paper.

It’s that time of year again – school buses, textbooks, and back to school shopping.  And speaking of school shopping, any idea what many colleges and universities are shopping for?  In the past 4 months, myself and several colleagues have had numerous conversations with people who work in colleges and universities about hosted digital asset management and photography approval.  It seems that regardless of the department (athletics, marketing, communications, alumni, business) – all have problems with managing and routing their digital files. There are pictures of football games, alumni events, and concerts... New student marketing materials... University promotional materials...  Video footage of campus speakers.  All of these things seem to not only get lost in the vastness of the university – but take up precious space on university servers. 

So, what should these departments put on their back to school shopping list?  Widen’s Media Collective – aka – digital asset management application, of course.  With this software as a service application (no IT involvement needed!), a university marketing department has an efficient and affordable solution to manage all their digital files (brands, images, pdfs, videos, etc).  Digital files are not only organized, but controlled and available for easy reuse!

Widen Enterprises' Digital Asset Management, or DAM SaaS, has taken great strides to add Video into it's mix of marketing assets that it manages. I previously wrote a blog about Mezzanine formats as a way to maximize video management. Video files are huge in file size, and Mezzanine formats are a great way to make high quality video accessable to your marketing and sales channels while keeping a lid on the amount of storage they consume.

Let's take youtube for example. The amount of compression it uses on uploaded videos degrades the quality quite a bit. So the question is, how high of quality video do you need to upload to before you see no perceptible difference in quality.

Here is a youtube video that came from a DV file that was about 68 Megabytes.

Here is that same clip, but I uploaded a H.264 version at 10:1 compression. It was only 6.8 Megabytes.

There is basically no perceptible difference in the end result. If the amount or storage is an issue with adding large amount of video to your DAM system, in this case, using H.264 as mezzanine format would allow you to store 10 times as many videos utilizing the same amount of storage if you used hi res DV files.

In preparation of Widen Enterprises attending the PhotoPlus trade show in NYC, we had a photo shoot for our booth graphics yesterday.  We are promoting our photography management application - Backdrop™ at this show and were trying to come up with something that not only catches the attention of attendees, but also provides some visual representation of this application.  As I mentioned in a million other posts, Backdrop is used by creative teams and photographers for reviewing, commenting, and approving images.  Anyway, we shot the images (thanks Brett!  thanks Bryon!) and upon completion, uploaded them to our digital asset management application – Widen Media Collective.

Instead of messing around with burning them to disk or putting them in some file folder –where no one can find them – we uploaded them to a place where they can actually be FOUND and USED!  Unbelievable!  It sounds so simple – and it is – yet thousands of businesses struggle each day with organizing their images, finding images from last years photo shoot, and getting them in the hands (in the correct format) to those who need to use them.  By having a web-based DAM application, I can send these images to our retoucher, our designer … or better yet – I can give them permissions to log into site and select the image(s) they need and order them in the format they need (eps, tiff, jpeg – no problem!).  Anything our designer needs for putting together promotional materials for PhotoPlus is easily accessible!

Based on that title you may think, “oh no, not another blog bashing the stability of cloud computing.”  Not even close.  DAM is the industry acronym for digital asset management and Widen has geared up its’ digital asset management system to leverage the power of cloud computing. 

Widen defines cloud computing as a technology revolution enabling infinite scale to meet a rising demand for processing and storage with a pay-for-what-you-use pricing model to accommodate the peaks and valleys of demand without breaking the bank.  It’s not just a marketing term, it is very real and it will change the way organizations do business.

Cloud computing is the push software-as-a-service needed in the bloody battle with installed software.  Installed software providers scamper to enter the software-as-a-service market because they played their cards wrong when they started.  They see a dead-end; an end-of-life to their products and we are happy to report that the regime that strangled marketers and internal I.T. departments with over-priced and under-performing technology is over. 

Freedom from limitation, freedom from legacy applications, freedom from lackluster service, and freedom from the resource drain that is installed software – that, my fellow marketers and technology enthusiasts, is what digital asset solutions leveraging the power of cloud computing is enabling you to do. 

It enables internal I.T. teams who are challenged trying to keep pace with the exponential growth of digital media, specifically graphics and video files.  These types of digital media are the most desirable for marketers because of the high impact and direct ties to capturing market share and maximizing revenue opportunities

The benefits of cloud computing for customers using Widen for digital media management is the use of digital media throughout the entire internet (corporate sites, brands, distributors, dealers, outlets) and electronic communications (email, blog) using only one file location.  Widen digital asset management serves as a true central location of digital media that is repurposed through embed links using the power of the cloud.   

So you want to place a 25 minute video of your CEO speaking on your intranet so your employees can watch it.  I.T. says they cannot handle it because 5,000 people watching 25 minutes of video at 10:00 a.m. would cripple the infrastructure.  The answer is simpler than you think; upload it to the Widen media asset management system, copy the unique URL and paste it into the intranet site.  When 5,000 people watch it they are viewing it from Widen DAM that is leveraging the power of cloud computing. 

I love that DAM cloud.

It’s not very often that I get to talk about how I use our digital asset management system, but I just had the perfect use case that I wanted to share.  I’m going to the ExactTarget Connections user conference for email marketers again this year –  in September in Indy and they have a pretty sensational program lineup (if I may plug for ExactTarget).  Anyways, I just got a call from one of their marketing people asking us for a hi-res logo for the opening presentation and I quickly fulfilled the request… it was easy.  In fact, this particular marketing person replied “What quick turnaround time!”  How quick?... less than 30 seconds.  How’d I do that?...

Here’s the process I went through using our own asset management software:

Instead of sifting through the shared folder on the network, I have our corporate image library set as a favorite in my web-browser.  My “Remember me” settings on the login page got me in instantly and a quick search for “widen logo” presented me with our three logo options.  I clicked on the cart icon next to our standard ‘grey text with burnt red circle w’ logo which got me started with the checkout wizard.  All I had to do was enter the name and email address for the ExactTarget marketing person and then select which file formats I wanted to provide.  The request was for a hi-res logo, but I wasn’t sure on the specifics so I gave a few options – a 300 dpi RGB JPEG, a 300 dpi CMYK TIFF, 300 dpi CMYK EPS, and even a 72 dpi RGB PNG with no background to save this person the hassle of having to do any conversions.  My favorite part of this whole thing was that I was able to customize the send order with my own subject line and message so my ExactTarget recipient knew exactly what she was getting without me having to take the two extra minutes to craft an additional confirmation email saying “It’s on the way.”

Pretty fast huh… I even have the intelligence to know when my recipient picks up the order and what format is actually used.  Not only fast, but smart!

For those of you familiar with Widen Enterprises, you probably are familiar with our talk about digital asset management, photography workflow applications, and premedia services.  You may have any read our 'standard' blurb, "Widen has honed its more than 60 years of experience in premedia and color management specifically for the creative industry, assisting its clients with marketing execution, creative support, photography workflow management and sales enablement through its intuitive suite of web-based digital asset management applications."  But is that it?  Is there more to Widen? 

YES!!  One of the things that makes me proud to work at Widen relates to Widen’s philosophy and involvement (practice what you preach!) with being Socially Sustainable.  What is this?  I found a great definition of it this morning – “Social sustainability … strives to take future generations into consideration, and to live with the awareness that our actions make an impact on others and the world at large.”  Widen wants to ensure that our community thrives through its contributions to schools and non-profit organizations.  Many companies say they do this, but do they really?

This year Widen became involved with Forward Lymphoma.  Forward Lymphoma was established to raise funds to develop a preeminent lymphoma research program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  It was started by a local entrepreneur who was diagnosed with lymphoma last year and found out that research was lacking for this particular kind of cancer.  Widen became involved with web development, marketing, and establishing a digital asset management site for the organization to house its marketing collateral material.  All of this helps Forward Lymphoma raise money for research at a much faster pace!  For those of us working on this project, we’ve been blessed with being part of something that will impact others and the world at large.  Thank you Widen and thank you Forward Lymphoma.

We often overlook our marketing software for the on-demand leader in customer relationship management (CRM) – Digital Media Organizer (DMO) and Marketing Template Creation (MTC), but it’s important we mention these as we’ve seen a growing international demand for these two applications.  DMO is Widen’s digital asset management system and MTC is the dynamic media building application, both available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.  The idea behind the integration with Campaigns, Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities is to bring the content closer to the consumer.  What better place to do it than the place where the people dealing with the customers manage all their data?  Digital Media Organizer allows marketing people to centralize the assets used for executing multi-channel campaigns.  Also, when salespeople need to send a product brochure to a key customer contact, they can do so with a few quick clicks.  All of the activity history continues to be maintained with the record.  Our more popular application, Marketing Template Creation, allows a marketing team in the U.S. to provide brand-approved templates and content options to a dealer in Australia, who localizes the brochure for a special event in their market.  Now, not only can the marketing content be consumed on-demand, it can be customized by the salesperson needing the content in support of a particular selling situation on-demand.

I read an interesting article in the recent B2B Magazine for Marketing Strategists talking about the new search marketing trend of blended search (also referred to as universal search).  The article “Optimizing for the new SEM” by Carol Krol talks about how marketers can make the most of their digital assets as the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) have come out with versions delivering search results to include images and video.  The article included some statistics and mentioned that this blended search has not taken off yet, but it provides some helpful tips for marketers looking to deploy strategies with this new channel in search marketing.  Experts interviewed for the article mentioned that search marketers should take a look at their current inventory of digital assets and assess how they can be applied to search.  This particular expert mentioned that marketers need to look at both the technical aspects—such as optimizing title tags—and organizational issues.  Most importantly, companies looking to optimize their digital assets for universal search must get all necessary parties to collaborate, including marketing, public relations, SEM and corporate video.  Interestingly, DAO lends itself to Digital Asset Management solutions as a necessary part of universal search because it allows marketers to get organized and take inventory of all existing digital assets, apply metadata (descriptive information) to the assets and fosters collaboration amongst multiple departments.

More to come on Digital Asset Optimization…