Why is Video Different? 3 Tips to Help Plan for and Manage Video in an Enterprise DAM

The video explosion is upon us. In fact, it actually detonated quite a while ago. I work with many clients, with predominantly larger enterprise DAM implementations, and a frequent topic of discussion among these organizations is, “how do I handle video within my company?” 

Coming from a film studio background, managing video was a given, though we made great efforts to corral what types of video made it into the DAM system in order to control the usage and infrastructure impacts. Most companies will not face the same heavyweight requirements as a movie or a television studio; however, that may not make your job any easier.

Here are some tips to help plan for and manage video in an enterprise DAM environment.

1. Define the Categories of Video That You Will Manage

Understanding the business usage of your assets is important to drive governance, management and service; video assets or stills are no different in this regard. The maturity of video usage in your organization may determine how detailed and well understood these categories will be in your model.

If video creation and distribution is a norm, the categories will more likely be defined and understood. If video is a newcomer to your organization, you may need to define the categories as part of the preparation for managing video within your organization.

I suggest that these categories be organized by usage and include context in your specification or glossary documents. For example, "Product Overview" and "Used by Marketing to Create Online Campaigns." Importantly, the categories should tie back to or drive concepts that are present in your DAM metadata structure. For example, the above might have metadata applied to asset records as Video > Product Overview. This is a simplified example of two metadata fields, but it would allow the assets to be found via a search tool, while also limiting the visibility of the asset in a DAM system, if so desired.

2. Define the Technical Details of Video That You Will Manage

DAM systems are great at storing and delivering digital assets, such as digital photos and video. Similar to a digital photo, a video file may be saved in multiple formats, but video files add complexity. There are video file wrappers (e.g., MOV, Flash, MXF) and video compression formats (e.g., MPEG, h.264, ProRes) and it is common to have a combination, such as MOV wrapped h.264. The intention here is not to detail these formats, but to make the statement that understanding the details will help ensure support for your use cases.

For example, if there is a need to review and approve video within the DAM system but the video will not playback, the business requirements will not be met.

3. Define the Use Cases

This step starts with categorizing and is an additional level of detail that can fit into any methodology for implementation and management. Documenting and cataloging your use cases pays many dividends, especially ensuring that the functionality delivered meets the requirements gathered.

Following along the category from above “Used by Marketing to Create Online Campaigns,” the use case description might be “playback video to determine if appropriate for campaign.” This is a simple case that highlights how using clear classification and definition within use cases can benefit all those using the video file, especially during the upstream process within the marketing department.

Video brings complexities that may have an impact on the success of your DAM and the service provided to users. The steps outlined here can be thought of as a continuum or a loop, because users will iterate as they learn more and take on additional requirements. The steps are not unique to DAM, but the interdependencies of the steps are vital to DAM due to how closely the assets are tied to functionality.

Categorization, storage and delivery of data are the fundamental elements of managing rich media. While your company may not be producing full length features, governance of process and specifications will still yield benefits, no matter the scope of your efforts.

Editor's Note: Interested in reading more DAM tips? Try Should I Auto-tag or Crowdsource my Metadata? by @hgg101
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Smarsh Launches Compliance Archiving for Salesforce Chatter

How can the explosion in social media communications conform to compliance requirements? Compliance solution provider Smarsh has launched Archiving & Compliance for Salesforce Chatter, that might just make it a little easier for companies to meet those standards.

The service, offered on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, allows organizations to capture, preserve or search Chatter files, so that they can be used for compliance, recordkeeping and e-Discovery initiatives.

Uses Salesforce Platform

The Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh offers hosted solutions for archiving electronic communications for compliance and record retention. The archived communications include email, IMs and such social media platforms as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Chatter. Founded in 2001, the company was originally a financial technology solutions and consulting company that turned to email archiving as financial firms had to meet regulatory mandates from federal agencies.

The Archiving & Compliance service for Chatter is built on Salesforce’s cloud-based app platform. All data can be captured in real-time, thus minimizing the risk of lost data from the communication streams, and the service also archives Chatter attachments. Customers are not charged for storage or disk space.

Communication is stored in non-erasable, non-rewriteable media (write once, read many optical storage) in the native format, it’s available worldwide through the Web-based Smarsh Management Console, and it’s redundantly preserved in geographically-dispersed data centers.

Review Hierarchy

Search can be conducted across all objects in the Chatter communities, and results allow searchers to review communication threads. Repeated searches can be saved, and searches can be customized with company-approved lexicons of keywords or phrases — or Smarsh’s default list can be used.

There’s also a permission-based review hierarchy, which can be structured so that it emulates the review structure of a given organization. Message supervision roles can be assigned to specific users and groups with appropriate access and functionalities, and temporary permissions or access can be granted, such as for outside legal counsel. Every administrator session and action is documented.

Messages can be annotated, flagged or escalated, and those actions themselves become searchable. A Reporting Center provides analytics reports on usage, system audit history and message archive data, and message data can be exported in the EDRM XML Interchange Format Schema or other popular e-Discovery vendor “load file” formats.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Analytics: Tap into Data to Build Real Customer Relationships

With the explosion of big data, most businesses are acutely aware that they are sitting on a mountain of untapped data, struggling to get an in depth view of the customer. Along with the rise of social media, multiple disruptive forces like empowered consumers, shrinking budgets, insanely fast innovation cycles and an ever growing number of channels underscore the importance of making marketing informed by data easier.

So a tidal wave of new data is coming at organizations everyday — and it is coming at everyone at an extreme velocity. Rather than drowning in it, smarter organizations are storing, channeling and synthesizing this data to glean better insights and understand customers as individuals.

Data empowered businesses anticipate customer needs across channels; they deliver the right product, the right service and the right price in real time when their customers need it.

Using Data to Anticipate Customer Needs

This is not a pie in the sky idea. Leading social businesses are integrating social media data into their business processes as well as into their entire ecosystem. All the intelligence and insights gained from interactions and the structured and unstructured information that is created from customer transaction to customer tweet is applied to addressing customer segments in a more discrete manner.

For example, a major consumer goods firm created a unified and secure collaboration space for employees and suppliers to increase responsiveness to new demands and improve customer satisfaction. A bank increased customer engagement by creating communities of interests for investment experts.

This social business approach also marks a shift in marketing from descriptive analytics focused on past action to predictive analytics enhanced by social data that forecasts customer behavior based on trends. Reaching customers can be so much sharper than just blindly betting on zip codes and demographics and the transition has already started.

Analytics Drive Results

According to a joint MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM Institute of Business Value study, organizations that excel in analytics outperform those who are just beginning to adopt analytics by a 3x factor. And top performers are more than 5.4 times more likely to use an analytic approach over intuition when making decisions. Being poised to tap into results of your online efforts allows you to repeat success and address underperforming campaigns to improve results.

What can we achieve from knowing what has happened AND what could happen based on social cues? Gaurav Gupta, IBM Worldwide Marketing Manager, Business Analytics and Optimization says “Marketing has ceased to be ‘just an art’ for some time now. Marketing is both art and science and “analytics” is the new science, which is acting as the game changer for companies today.”

There are three marketing areas where organizations are focused on and applying analytics: insight, strategy and engagement.

Companies need deep insight into customer behavior and needs — and the ability to anticipate and predict behavior to take immediate action.

These insights in turn help them develop and continue to refine their customer value strategy — how to enhance, extend and redefine value as viewed by the customer — and the key here is to do it profitably.

Leveraging that strategy to build customer and partner engagement, throughout the value chain and use technology to not just engage with your customers, but to forge personal relationships.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com