'Net Features : metadata

5 Ways to Win the Digital Asset Management Super Bowl

Administrator — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:15:00 GMT

Ask any football team – getting to the Super Bowl takes focused teamwork. It isn’t simply the result of winning the conference championship, but watching endless hours of film, nurturing talent, managing egos, developing an innovative playbook and lots and lots of practice. It’s the grunt work that starts the minute the previous season ends (e.g. Senior Bowl, NFL Scouting Combine, the draft, organized team activities, training camp, preseason), that gets you on that hallowed field.

Same goes with running your e-commerce site. Consider the prep work that goes into developing a great e-commerce site. A huge component of your site is its digital assets, and the quality of digital content pushed out to consumers is crucial. You can’t expect to win with your practice squad O-line on the field to protect your QB – you’re in the game, but you won’t likely be victorious.

Without a strong internal process, or playbook, the content will never reach your website. Here are five tips to optimize how your business manages its digital assets.

1. Map out your plays with a project-centric approach

Digital assets have little intrinsic value except in the context of how they serve as components of a marketing campaign, product launch, catalog or other project. And no project is a single-player effort. Tom Brady can throw the ball down field as well as any quarterback ever has, but he needs Wes Welker to shake off the defender and make the catch. How does Wes know exactly where he needs to be to make the catch? He knows where he fits in the play. Your organization has a creative process, but it requires discipline and teamwork to put up the big numbers.

So how can an organization make sure the key elements of each project are easily located, reducing wasted time chasing content? Look for a project management software tuned to the creative workflow. Creatives need management, but often resent processes with perceived bureaucratic burden. By making the project management component as transparent as possible and focusing on the creative tools that drive it, the team can become more efficient without feeling smothered. The project is the central metaphor of the creative process, and it remains missing in action from most creative production and asset management tools.

Look at that – you’ve already converted a first down.

2. Make metadata work by making time to manage it

Metadata is the key to successful asset management, yet it’s the bane of asset managers and the whole creative team. Similar to conditioning and stretching for football players – no one likes the back-end processes, but they are necessary so you’re ready for the big play.

Get organized enough so you actually have more time available for strategic imperatives – like metadata management – that are most susceptible to landing on the back burner. Condition your team and practice the hand-off so many times that it becomes automatic. This, in turn, enables the team to develop more creative plays that keep the other team back on their heels. So you complete the drill the right way and, in the end, have more time available for strategic imperatives.

Another first down.

3. Differentiate strategic assets from tactical assets

Not all assets are created equal in terms of long-term value to the organization. You’ll have your starters and your second and third string assets. A “one-size-fits-all” approach to managing your team is like marking all your players as starters. How do you sift through your lengthy roster and determine who really should be on the field at first whistle?

Again, we see the critical importance of a true workflow process within the creative team to stop what increasingly has become organizational madness.

Now you’re across mid-field and into field-goal range.

4. Keep creatives focused on creativity

Turning your most creative resources into file managers and ‘process cops,’ tasked with policing how the rest of the organization uses assets, is not only poor resource allocation, but it also reduces the quality of creative initiatives by interrupting creative focus. That’s like having the special teams coach also be the physical trainer on the sidelines. How can he do both jobs? Alternately, that’s like developing a game plan where Colin Kaepernick is not allowed to ever leave the pocket. Set him free to do his thing!

This down-field pass strategy gives you another first down and into the red zone.

5. Data-driven insight via usage tracking

A favorite image asset can easily become overused by the organization, resulting in reduced impact and a stale market perception. Anyone remember the Chad Ochocinco craze?

No one wants to see the same picture of your product in the Sunday newspaper ad every week. Although, we will keep watching Ray Lewis’ intro dance because that will never get old.

Look at that! You’ve scored a touchdown.

It takes discipline, planning and practice to win in football. Applying the same principles to your digital asset management strategy will get you the same winning results.

About Eric Fulmer

Eric Fulmer has been a pioneer in digital asset workflow since the early 1990s when he joined the U.S. distributor of Fujifilm's DS-100, one of the first professional digital camera systems on the market. He then joined Fuji's fledgling Electronic & Applied Imaging Division where he worked with clients including Smithsonian Institution, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and major corporations as they began to implement digital imaging. Later Eric worked at both Leaf and Phase One, leaders in high-resolution digital capture systems and image processing workflow. He also piloted DAM integrations at major government institutions including the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy Visual News Service and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Currently Eric is with RealTime Process LLC, a new player in creative workflow software offering an integrated modular suite of tools that takes a holistic approach to accelerating the entire creative process. Eric can be reached at eric.fulmer@realtimeprocess.net.

Would You Benefit from a Tag Management System?

Michael Garrity — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:15:00 GMT

Ask any online professional about analytics, and you may spend hours hearing about their vital importance in the pursuit of Web success.

One secret to garnering especially meaningful analytical insights is by breaking down data into different divisions to see more accurate reports of specific content categories. This process is achieved by using tags.

Tags are metadata keywords assigned to a piece of information or content on the Web that describe the item and make it more easily found when users go browsing and searching for it.

Tags are most common on blog-based or other content-heavy websites as a way to group, manage and track similar information. The problem, especially for less savvy content publishers, is that after a while, sites and pages will end up cluttered with unorganized tags, which sort of defeats the purpose. Because of this, analytics researchers are met with a mess of disorganized data thanks to duplicate, outdated or non-functioning tags that can give marketers and site owners inaccurate information, and that’s no help to anyone.

Enter tag management systems. These services come in and clean up the clutter created by disorganized, user-generated tags. Using a management system allows content publishers to collect all of their campaign’s tags into one container tag and then manage and maintain them in a single application.

According to TagMan, the benefits of such a system include greater accuracy in analytics results, more efficient tag management with a user-friendly interface, more control over all of a site’s tags, improved performance in page load times and serving tags to visitors, and greater flexibility in adding and testing new tags.

Unfortunately, it seems that many website owners tend to undervalue the worth of tag management; but for prolific content publishers (anyone from enterprise-level ecommerce companies to very busy bloggers), tag management systems are the easiest and perhaps most effective way to keep track of the performance of various content categories.

Many major companies have come to terms with the usefulness of tag management systems, however; currently, TagMan works with brands like Travelocity, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru and Kellogg’s, among many others.

Department store group Debenhams turned to TagMan while in the process of switching analytics providers. The site’s infrastructure was supplied and hosted by IBM, making any code changes a “delayed process.” To resolve this concern, Debenhams implemented the TagMan tag management system into its website so that it would be able to apply new online marketing technology without having to wait on code changes from the back-end infrastructure.

The single container tag used by services like TagMan replaces all on-site tags used to manage and track online marketing technologies; instead, these tags are stored in a tag management system that allows site owners to make immediate changes in a single, user-friendly, browser-based interface, never altering the code on the website. Ultimately, this allows content publishers to more effectively manage and track existing technologies and instantly install new ones. This improved efficiency saves site owners time, while giving them more accurate and insightful data from analysis and greater control over the way content is categorized on their websites.

In addition to TagMan, there are a number of tag management systems available, including UberTags, Tealium and Ensighten.

Oracle & Open Calais: Discovering Meaning (Semantics) in Data

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Oracle and Thomson Reuters announced that the new Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Semantic Technologies will officially support the OpenCalais service (a semantic metadata extraction service). The integration enables Oracle users to directly tap the power of OpenCalais to incorporate "rich" semantic metadata into their production workflow environments.

Semantic metadata generated by OpenCalais (a natural language processing (NLP) technology) can now be loaded, indexed and queried natively within Oracle Database. This enables application developers to extracting the 'who, what, when, where and how' from text and break content down into its most basic elements to improve search and navigation, and make integration and interoperability of content possible across diverse platforms.

"Connecting the OpenCalais service -- which has helped popularize semantic technologies in the developer community -- with Oracle Database is a compelling value proposition for our customers," said Xavier Lopez, Director, Spatial & Semantic Technologies, Oracle Server Technologies. "This interoperability lets users quickly process documents in different formats such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF to extract semantic metadata that can be used for more semantically complete searches in Oracle Database 11g."

If you're asking yourself what in the world this possible has to do with you, consider this. You, just like Oracle, can leverage this semantic metadata extraction service if you're running WordPress (Tagaroo) or Drupal, and even "ride the semantic wave" with Yahoo using Calais QuickMeta.

BlinkX Adds Enhanced Metadata for Video

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:10:00 GMT

Video search engine BlinkX announced the availability of an Enhanced Metadata Enrichment solution for publishers.

Blinkx has introduced Enhanced Metadata Enrichment as part of its Advanced Media Platform which automates the capturing, encoding and indexing of rich media content. But this isn't your mother's metadata. blinkx is seperating itself from the crowd by attempting to "understand" rich media, performing speech recognition, visual and conceptual analysis processes with pinpoint accuracy. This is more than just how a video is titled or tagged, blinkx is actually looking at the content and concepts within the video itself to ultimately create more complete and accurate metadata, in greater quantities, than other solutions available today.

"An Enhanced Metadata Enrichment solution does more than just help publishers and content owners better 'tag' their videos," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx. "The information derived from the video using our Enhanced Metadata Enrichment can help them with a host of challenges, including improved video SEO, enhanced relevance for site search, and providing distribution partners with consistent information on the videos. Ultimately, the greater the search- and discover-ability of videos, the greater the opportunity for monetization."

How It Works
blinkx's Enhanced Metadata Enrichment automatically creates a comprehensive range of metadata in real-time, including a full transcription of the audio stream. The process begins by automatically creating a time-stamped transcript of each video. blinkx's conceptual analysis is then applied to the transcript to automatically produce other key data packets from the video, a synopsis (or summary), and conceptual keywords. All of these elements can be added as components for the metadata and saved to each digital asset. In addition, blinkx Enhanced Metadata Enrichment allows editorial input and control of the metadata after it has been automatically generated. As a result, the solution offers the scalability and cost effectiveness of an automated system, while maintaining the ability for editorial input and providing the ability to create the most relevant metadata and user experience.