Wow.  I’m a blogger.  Never thought ‘blogger’ would be on my resume.  Maybe marketer extraordinaire, leader of the free world, dressage queen, or cultural anthropologist… but not blogger.  Yet here I am blogging (by my free will – right Jake?) about the cool stuff happening at Widen.  I’ve been with Widen Marketing since April of 2007.  Prior to moving back to the Midwest and signing up with Widen, my experience in sales and marketing has run quite the gamut.  From director of operations for a furniture importer – managing multiple warehouses and showrooms and dealing with the ‘logistics’ of trade shows to being a marketing consultant for a PBS station raising money using an online auction for the very first time.  Oh, and I’ve sold things from furniture to cocktail dresses to dressage saddles to sweet corn.  Quite an assortment...

What possibly do these things have in common?  Well, it’s all about your client, customers, and vendors.  What can I provide them to make their life (or company) better?  Whether it is by becoming more profitable, removing tedious tasks, improving brand consistency, or being more informed – these universals are across all industries, all departments, and all countries.

As the product marketing manager responsible for the ongoing developments with Backdrop – our photography approval application – and Widen integrations with Salesforce.com CRM, the purpose of my blog is to expose the ways in which customers can apply these technologies to best meet department or workflow specific requirements.

As product manager of Backdrop™ – Widen’s new photography routing and approval application, I’m excited to see the response we are getting from our beta application of Backdrop.  Several clients have done field testing of Backdrop – and the feedback has been great.  Everyone comments on how user friendly the application is along with how great it is to be able to comment directly onto images.  No more telephone tag or trying to describe things over the telephone.

Picture this scenario.  Creative Director in Lincoln, Nebraska working with photographer in New York.  Creative Director makes phone call to photographer after receiving images via email.

Creative Director:  “Do you see that spot on the wall?  I don’t like it."

Photographer:  “What are you talking about?  I don’t see any spot on the wall.”

Creative Director:  “That spot – get rid of that spot on the wall behind the countertop.  Top left, can’t you see it?  It’s showing up on my crappy low res jpeg you emailed me.”

Photographer:  “You’re crazy.  There’s no spot on the wall.  I’m charging you overtime for this photo shoot.”  Click.

If they were using Backdrop – no calls – no trying to describe comments over the phone.  The Creative Director views the high res image online (from her Lincoln office) and is able to zoomify the entire image.  She comments directly on the image and clicks reshoot.  The photographer automatically receives an email and views the image along with the comment.  How simple is that?

Sometimes it’s difficult for people to see how their business or industry could use digital asset management.  Others are ahead of the curve and ‘get’ how something like digital asset management (DAM) can help them get ahead of their competition.  Someone doing this already is Raquel Repka, owner of The Rock Agency – a model/talent agency based in Madison, Wisconsin.  She’s been using Widen’s DAM application for several years to organize and distribute model and talent portfolios.  Not only does the agency use it internally, but clients interested in booking models and/or talent can login, search, and browse through portfolios. 

No more mailing portfolios or image attachments getting caught up in spam filters.  Clients can see all models and multiple images of each model and they can view video clips and listen to audio files of talent prospects.  Plus, with this increased internet presence and exposure, the agency is getting more bookings!  How DAM hot is that?

Last week I had an interesting meeting in which I demoed Widen’s digital asset management application for a large manufacturing company.  Earlier, I had spoken with one of the company’s sales reps who expressed frustration in getting product shots from the marketing department in a timely fashion.  Weeks, even months it would take to get images found, sorted, and sent to potential buyers.  She asked, “How can I be expected to sell their product if I don’t have images to show prospects?”  The company had so many images that it took someone days, weeks, even months to find select product shots.  The sales rep got it.  The marketing department didn’t.

The marketing department thought their internal workflow ‘was just fine’ and didn’t see the need for a hosted digital asset management application.  Soft cost just doesn’t register for many people.  What is soft cost?  These are often silent costs that companies cannot visibly see.  For the person who spent 2 days searching for images – what other more productive activities could she have been doing during that time period?  For the sales rep – how many sales are lost because she could not provide images to her prospects in a timely manner?  These indirect, uncovered costs matter!  Soft costs should not be overlooked as they contribute to inefficient workflows, unproductive employees, and ultimately, the bottom line.

Other people have talked about customization and configuration, but now I want to talk about repackaging digital asset management technologies to serve a slightly different purpose.  The Widen DAM is a very configurable application, however our research team found there were very few web-based applications dedicated to photography workflow so we decided a more drastic change was necessary.

Widen launched a beta version of Backdrop™ with the Winter ‘07 release of the Widen Collective suite of digital asset management technologies to better serve the needs of  photographers and creative teams who can’t be at the same place at the same time during the review process.

Similar in look to Adobe Lightroom, Phase One’s Capture One and Apple Aperture, Backdrop is the web-based extension of these desktop software apps developed to streamline the photography routing and review process by speeding up the front end of the creative cycle.  It means photographers spend more time shooting pictures (and not doing admin tasks) and organizations get their images faster so they can focus on merchandising, marketing and creative.  What is there not to love?

Some of the overlapping parts with DAM and Backdrop include the drag-and-drop uploads, metadata and search functionality.  That’s all well and good, but the cool parts of the app include: an interface designed for professional photography review, automated workflow triggers for approvals, comments and re-shoot notifications, and the ability to integrate the application with other digital asset management systems via web services.  Plus, our favorite part – all the positive feedback we’ve received from photographers and art directors.

Backdrop is available for photography studios and corporate marketing / creative departments.  Learn more at http://www.widenbackdrop.com/.

Check out a demo of Backdrop at: http://www.widen.com/widenbackdrop/backdrop_demo.html