Each year Summit attendees look forward to presentations that feature Widen customers. After all, learning by example is effective...and fun! So this year, we expanded the number of customer-led sessions to showcase a broad range of real-life examples from Widen Collective^® sites, as well as best practices. Below is a summary and video of each presentation, breakout session, and panel.

Videos, infographics, brochures, blogs, white papers, and on and on —  there’s no shortage of content floating around the digital stratosphere. And this makes sense. Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers create content for an average of four different audiences each. Apply that at large, and we’re talking about a heck of a lot of content.

Now depending on the maturity of your brand and your content efforts, you may already be feeling the weight of this within your own organization. Content takes time, money, and resources, which are all lost if you don’t have a plan for creating, maintaining, improving, and storing your valuable content. 

How you interact with your content should be dictated by where it falls in its lifecycle. For instance, you will treat a new case study differently than one that’s been around for years. In some cases, as content reaches the end of its lifecycle, it may be time to retire it altogether. Having a solid understanding of your content lifecycle will help you keep track of your content during each stage of its life and get the most out of your investment.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of search tools in our digital world. With endless content across e-commerce marketplaces, digital databases, and software platforms, search functionality helps us find the information we need. When it comes to digital asset management (DAM) solutions, search allows users to quickly and easily locate the exact file they want among thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of assets. 

But here’s the thing: searching in a DAM system only works if content is tagged with metadata. And developing quality metadata is a time-intensive undertaking that’s both an art and a science. If you’re feeling overwhelmed about metadata creation and management, this article is here to help. We’ll discuss what you need to know about collecting, organizing, and editing metadata to power your search tools and set your DAM site up for success.

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.