Call it what you will, a site audit, an assessment, a snapshot, an overview. Any way you look at it, you need to know the current state of your DAM system before you can get it where it needs to go. And while the path might not always look the same, there are four important stops everyone should plan to make along the way: analytics, users, aesthetics, and governance.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade...or so the saying goes. And that’s exactly what we did for this year’s Widen Summit. While we all would have loved to meet in person, we needed a different game plan during a global pandemic. So we moved the event to a virtual platform, and are thrilled that it allowed us to share the Summit experience with more people than ever. Over 500 registrants to be exact! And here’s everything you need to know about this year’s event. 

This year’s Best DAM Contest brought together admins who overcame big challenges in how they worked and accessed their content. The teams at Autodesk, Life Time, and NVIDIA took different approaches to accomplish the DAM goals they set for themselves and had some fascinating ideas to share with the Widen Summit audience.

Read on to learn more about these inspiring transitions and watch the full Best DAM Contest here. 

Metadata is the lifeblood of your digital asset management (DAM) platform. With hundreds or thousands of visual assets pumping through your DAM system, you need healthy metadata that’s accurate, organized, and relevant to how users search. Otherwise, folks will be hard-pressed to efficiently and effectively find the digital assets they need.

In this post, we’ll discuss how controlled vocabulary lists (CVLs) can improve your metadata. Plus, we’ll walk through a quick exercise to show you how to turn your existing metadata into hard-working CVLs.

Digital asset management (DAM) software has been helping marketing teams organize their content for decades. This technology first emerged in the 1990s to help print and publishing companies manage their photos and videos, and has since evolved to be an essential platform in marketing technology (martech) ecosystems.  

Today’s DAM marketplace is packed with vendors offering similar features and functionality across these 10 core characteristics. But not all systems are equal, as many have unique offerings that support specific workflows or business goals. So let’s take a look at some areas of technical or operational focus that often differentiate one DAM platform from another.

“Everything’s fast now and it’s totally unreasonable,” says comedian John Mulaney. “The world is run by computers. The world is run by robots. And sometimes they ask us if we’re a robot just because we’re trying to log in and look at our own stuff!”

Marketing teams face the opportunities (and temptations) of more channels, more content, and more technology. And thinking about how it all works together to deliver a consistent, effective customer experience can lead to more headaches.

If you’re feeling like your marketing technology is making you work more not less, or you’re struggling to keep up with the speed of business, it’s time to take a step back and think about what your technology is doing for you, your business, and your audiences.

At Widen, we understand the importance of a connected user community. When our customers are able to learn from each other they increase the impact of the Widen Collective^® at their organization, they advance their skills and confidence, and they even find greater satisfaction in their jobs. 

That’s why we nurture our community of Collective customers in many ways — through our annual Widen Summit, Widen User Groups (WUGs), and the Widen Advocate leadership program. And now, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Widen Connect, the place where Collective administrators can connect and grow, online. 

You’ve taken the plunge. You’re on a quest to find the best digital asset management (DAM) software out there. But the sheer volume of options and information can be overwhelming. How do you even know where to start? 

Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve compiled a list of tips and resources to help you whittle down your options and find the DAM system that suits you. 

In this day and age, we seem to have more of everything. As consumers, we have more gadgets, products, and services than we know what to do with. As businesses, we rely on more and more content than ever before to communicate with our audiences. And the data, ohh the data! Keeping digital shopping experiences updated with changing SKUs, product descriptions, and inventory is enough to drive anyone in circles. 

With all this “more” piling up, how do you keep your content and information organized and accessible for the people, teams, and partners that need it most?

These days, you can do some pretty impressive things with content. However, you’re not the only one using content to win the attention and mindshare of audiences. Thanks to the success that content marketing has seen over the years, there’s a lot (and we mean a lot) of competition out there. For example, there are over 4.2 million blogs written each day. Pair that with the nearly 1.8 billion websites out there — and you have a lot of content to contend with.   

To break through the noise, you need to add some horsepower to your content marketing efforts by incorporating visual content. To help you do this effectively, it’s important to know the what, why, and how behind it.