Rise of the

Social Media

Enterprise

How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets
By Mark Davey of the DAM Foundation

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Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

We read, write and share with millions. Its a fact of our always-on world. The Internet is built around people and relationships, not just content. This has been the case for a while now, but something important has changed lately. For the first time, social interactions and influence are measurable. This is a shift of huge magnitude in business communications. This ability to measure influence is moving the social tools and platforms into the professional communicators toolboxes. New tools are being built to capture knowledge with digital assets (images, video, documents, etc.) and peoples direct and indirect involvement in content. Those same tools are also useful in determining contents effectiveness. Social media is rapidly maturing into sophisticated technologies built on relationships, knowledge and the power of the network effect. We will take a dive into how social media has evolved, who is using the tools and why. Well also look at why digital asset management will remain the bedrock for harnessing all the data and measuring successes and failures.

2011 was the year social media went mainstream.

Weve seen the democratization of information, where everyone is now a publisher ~ THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN New York Times
Whether its blogs, RSS, social media, news aggregation or video publishing, it seems platforms and networks are becoming increasingly mature. These services are also becoming tools of identity, trust and value. 2012 will see the rise of enterprise social media as a mainstream business tool. We are moving away from the first phases of Web 2.0, which has been characterized by the ability to publish directly into the appropriate networks. The original benchmark of network success was about follower count, a metric we now know is neither as useful nor as meaningful as we need.

Social media, networks and graphs: marketing 2.0

Even the proverbial ostrich, with its head buried deep in the sand, could not fail to have noticed the rise of social media as a mainstream force multiplier for any and everyone with something to say, share or sell. Because social media is so user-driven, the segmentation of users based on things like knowledge and shared interests happens organically. This quality has its roots in Web 2.0 tools, which made contributions by users not only easier to facilitate, but also easier to mine for information about those users.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

They grow up so fast!

How quickly did the major social networks grow their user bases?

Time to reach 10 million users

Twitter 780 days Facebook 852 days Google Plus gained 16 days

Time to reach 20 million users

Twitter 780 days Facebook 852 days Google Plus gained 16 days

Google is obviously benefiting from the piggy-back effect. Google+ made it easy for anyone to plug previous network connections directly into the newly launched social platform and with it shattered all records for growth. Whether Google+ can hold that growth pattern remains to be seen. Though most people accept that Facebook and Twitter have staying power, the two are working to catch up to the robust and growing feature set of Google+, which has the advantage of being a part of the same ecosystem as other Google products. The benefits of marketing in social networks stems largely from the very rapid growth and broad reach were talking about. These are spaces with little or no barrier to entry (monetary of otherwise) and massive audiences. Whats more, each platform allows for a very personalized kind of interaction with those audienceswhether youre communicating to everyone at once or addressing questions and comments from a single person.

Multiple Channels and Networks

Although the big four social media sitesFacebook (800 million users), Twitter (300 million users), LinkedIn (135 million users) , and Google+ 90 million users) dominate the numbers game. The challenge for the content marketing teams is to keep up with the changing dynamics of social media and ensure messages are being placed in the most relevant, appropriate spaces possible. Monitoring the content and engagement on more and more socially enabled channels is a skill the marketer needs to develop.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Business on social
In March 2011, LinkedIn reached over 100 million business users. That network is growing by 1 million users a weekmore than one new user per second. LinkedIn is now supported in over 200 countries and has over 1.7 million niche groups. It is a phenomenon that has never existed in the business world before and it affords high value to those who wish to share stories, information and insights. More importantly it offers the most effective real-time database of people and markets. This is a long-tail relationship building tool and business has risen to the challenge of creating skilled long-tail networkers. The way we see and use our business relationships has been changed by LinkedIn. Those connections are easier to refer to and organize than business cards. Theyre more actionable and easier to leverage than a Rolodex. Perhaps most importantly, though, the platform makes it possible to find new, meaningful ways to deepen professional relationships that otherwise would have gone stale and become meaningless.

Who is on social networks and what are they doing there?

The current king of social networks (by sheer numbers) is Facebook. Facebook has drawn users of every demographic. Even if youre not a fan of Facebook, you cant miss the outstanding size and variety of people, brands and thoughts that exists on one platform.

People on Facebook
Average user has friends

Activity on Facebook
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)

130

900 million

More than

800 million
active users

More than

More than 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day

250 million
photos are uploaded per day

On average, more than

Global Reach
70 languages
available on the site Approximately More than

300,000 users
helped translate the site through the translations application

Over

80% of users
are outside the United States

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Platform
people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites

500 million

Every month, more than

On average, people on Facebook install apps more than

20 million
times every day

apps and websites are integrated with Facebook

7 million

More than

Mobile
350 million
More than

active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices

operators globally work to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

47 mobile

More than

Source http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

According to Pingdom.com the estimated average age of a social network user is 37 Years old, using the Google Ad Planner as a data source they find and they make the following observations:

44 Years Old

39 Years Old

38 Years Old

31 Years Old

28 Years Old

LinkedIn

Twitter

Facebook

Bebo

MySpace

Source http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Twitter is on pace to hit the 500-million-user milestone in February 2012. And although it has a vast amount of activity daily, Twitter has nowhere near the engagement levels of Facebook (maybe because it doesnt offer the same kind of personalization for the nature or visibility of engagement). Twitter is, without a doubt, the go-to place for trending information. It has changed the face of viral marketing. Real-time information flows are here to stay, and as better filtering tools appear, the information exchange is rapidly exceeding traditional media outlets, television.

What is a social network? What makes a site, service, app or anything else social?
With over 135 million users and five new sign-ups every ten seconds, LinkedIn is truly a business phenomenon. LinkedIn is now the common action for any business connection and enables the conversations to continue long after first meetings or introductions. LinkedIn probably represents the purest form of business networking on the web. LinkedIn is also becoming a recruitment resource. With the LinkedIn profile all but taking the place of the conventional rsum. The site not only enables job seekers to more efficiently leverage their interpersonal connections, but also enables recruiters to dig deeper into prospective employees histories and obtain up-to-date job histories. LinkedIn however is much more than a 24-hour, 7-day a week, networking hub. People use LinkedIn to share knowledge, experiences and the tools they use in their work. What it lacks in terms of publishing tools (many of which might seem out of place in LinkedIn, anyway) it more than makes up for in ways to connect and build real relationships. Social networks have played a vital role in building out the social graph and factoring the real identities of real people with everything from important international happenings to the relative dullness of what people had for breakfast.

Make no mistake. We are all publishers.

Social marketing maturity

Now that the marketing technologist has the tools and network footprint (i.e. they have a social media presence on the main platforms), we are starting to see a shift from the sales and marketing routes of previous years. One size does not fit all and marketers have learned that spreading a single message the same way on different networks and platforms can hurt campaign performance and effectiveness. Using the same messaging strategies across social and other platforms is unwise for two main reasons. First, many, if not most, of the members of your audience are active in multiple networks. At the very least, there is overlap where different platforms and services have created integrations with one another (so, for instance, YouTube video ads often show up in Facebook News Feeds. Second, users of these services expect different kinds of messaging on each of the platforms and are encourage to engage in different ways. Google+ and Facebook allow for lengthier publishing and easy access to other users comments on a post, but nobody wants to have to open new windows and dig through retweets to digest your message on Twitter. By the same token, the kind of frequent, short updates that are acceptable on Twitter might be downright unacceptable to your audience on Facebook or Google+.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Content marketers and their brands need to be nimble enough to optimize a message for the norms, formats and etiquette of each social channel. For those willing to put in the time, though, this maturity and diversity in social networks is making content marketing and story telling more effective ways of engaging audiences. Lead generation in socially enabled environments has given rise to new, more effective ways to take the soft-sell, long-tail approach to marketing campaigns.

What are soft-sale, long-tail campaigns?

Theres a paradigm shift thats been underway in news media for a long time now. It used to be the case that editors played a gatekeeper role in how we found and consumed information about the world. But with new technologies putting more control in the hands of consumers (that is, a greater ability to bypass the gatekeepers and cherry-pick information based on our own interests, needs and personal persuasions), the editors are being pushed out of that gatekeeper role. The same is true in marketing. We need to understand that the platforms and media through which our audiences find us (or are found by us) are increasingly personalized. For this reason, its necessary to establish relationships that are based on more than placement and message, but on exchange and confidence. That is to say, we need to establish a sense of trust with our audiencenot just to achieve conversions, but even just to convince them to hear out our messages. Trust is a big factor in any social relationship. You know that different gestures, favors, gifts, and attitudes help you to garner trust with certain individuals in your face-to-face interactions. Knowing what buttons to push, what strings to pull, and how to navigate those relationships while letting your audience know that youre genuine about what youre saying is important. In much the same way, you need to be familiar with the ways that different platforms can be leveraged to engage different (and frequently overlapping) audiences. What is generally true, however, is that your social media marketing is more PR than advertising... more marathon than sprint.

Its as much about placement and timing as it is about the message itself.
The long-tail, soft-sale means we are in the stream of our prospective clients; they are able to see who we are and what has meaning to us. When they are ready and would like to communicate we have personally branded ourselves and our companies to the prospect. Soft sell, long tail relationship building is the key to how this new economy is working. Different platforms have their own unique audiences, and this needs to be factored into campaigns, analysed and a feedback loop created of what works, where and how. Socially oriented marketing campaigns and companies will benefit the most as we reach social media maturity. Tools that allow for the immediate monitoring of conversations (positive and negative) can be used to inform your organization of problems, and allow marketers to react in the correct way, build long term relationships and measure campaign feedback. The C suite is still focused on return on investment (ROI). With the rise of analytics and metrics that track human and asset activity social media ROI is a bit easier to quantify. Part of that ROI comes from the fact that social networks offer unprecedented incentive for users to volunteer information about themselves: their likes, dislikes,

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

occupations, political leanings, etc. These are the sorts of things that people used to pay through the nose for. With this information, you can be surer than ever that youre delivering your message to each segment of your audience in the most effective way possiblebecause your audience has largely segmented itself. These form big data points on a massive scale. Perhaps the best-known example of social media metrics is Klout, a service that allows users to track their and and others levels of influence in social media.

The Metrics of Social Influence

Tools such as Empire Avenue, Klout, PeerIndex, and PROskore are helping marketers gauge social performance and influence. Todays tools are just the first wave of social influence metrics (SIM) and there is some debate about their accuracy and value. However, these tools are setting the benchmark by which other algorithms will be measured. For now, though, it doesnt make much sense to neglect to use the available tools and services.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
~ Joe Pulizzi Content Marketing Institute
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88 percent of all brands use content marketing and 25 percent of all marketing budgets include investment in content marketing strategies. Its storytelling on a massive scale and it is affecting the bottom line in companies that there is value in putting great content in the right channels at the right time. Content marketing is nothing new; it has been around since 1895 with the launch of John Deeres customer magazine The Furrow. Whats new is how we spread and construct content. The Coca-Cola Content 2020 program, for instance, is based largely on the use of content marketing to do good in the world. Through the stories they tell, Coca-Cola sparks conversations that earn the brand trust and credibility in popular culture. Thus maintaining brand identity and awareness. Use the QR code above to watch a video explaining this Coca-Cola communications strategy.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Content Curation
Content curation, as it relates to todays real-time news feeds and personal streams, allows us to filter our content appropriately. These services use keywords to segment information and feed into separate streams, thus aggregating the knowledge base of each unique keyword around separate streams. This is a new enabler for filtering the signal from the noise, and is an easier way to find previous content. It is the equivalent of bookmarking in real time, and helps us adjust the information we share and keep to more manageable and bite-sized pieces. Twitter recently acquired a filtering and curation service called Sumify. The acquisition should enable Twitter to offer its members richer experiences and more meaningful relationships based on relevancy and context. Google+ has also been helping people curate streams into bite sized segments, based on the segmentation of people and brands into user-defined circles. This type of service is set to grow as services like Scoop.it, Storify, Tumblr and Pinterest fine tune their platforms and algorithms.

Storytelling
A byproduct of content curation and filtering tools is the ability to quickly share and aggregate your own knowledge streams. Your stories are made up of what you share. In other words, I choose to segment information as it relates to digital asset management, segmenting the component parts: taxonomy, metadata, controlled vocabularies, video, documents, data etc. My stories, the information I share, are bound around the theme of DAM, how it can help people and where it is heading. People tune into different aspects of the story and make their own stories around shared interests within our set niches. Although I use these tools for content and knowledge aggregation, by sharing the collective content of your segmented lists, you build a picture and a narrative about certain technologies, trends and insights into the fields youre especially interested in. People then tend to gather around these themes and share their own insights and knowledge. All this builds an even bigger repository of shared and trusted information. Storify is a prime example of how this works. By using keywords, Storify searches your contacts on Twitter, parsing real-time information based on your keyword search, so you can search Flickr, for example, for images relating to the same keyword. Very quickly, you have a new article mashed up with live feeds, video and images. These rich media mash-up tools offer your marketing department easy access to its own engaging content, wherever it may reside all while enabling the use of other streams of information to create something entirely new. Same message, different formats and ways of engaging. The trick is the ability to harness all this activity into one central repository. The digital asset management industry is rapidly adopting new ways that enable organizations to plan, execute and analyze these evolving channels.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

Where Digital Asset Management comes in?

A digital asset management system should be the starting point for your assets in any campaign. Social media is not an exception. A standard DAM system has the ability to render original files into practically any format; storing the original asset in a safe place with the ability that allows it to be used in the correct formats on multiple social networking sites. Social media pose some specific challenges that your organization should be using DAM software to address. For one thing, your message needs to be adjusted to account for the different tones, and voices that are appropriate and effective in each social space. The message also needs to be adjusted according to the length and format restrictions imposed by each platform. Long-form writing is possible, for instance, in Google+. But that kind of messaging needs to be cut way down for use on Twitter. Youll find that the same kinds of difference exist from platform to platform when it comes to multimedia. Having a DAM system that helps you react to account for the different file format, dimension and metadata specifications of each social platform will go a long way in making your marketing workflows more efficient. Youll also want to ensure that youre doing everything you can to set your social profiles and other pages apart from the pack with effective visual branding. Some social platforms allow more flexibility, but they all require a certain degree of know-how and precision to be taken full advantage of. A good DAM system will help you make sure that a Twitter profile, despite being bound by the Twitter layout, feels like it belongs to your brand and is consistent with your specific campaigns and broader brand identity. Finally, social media poses challenges to marketers by virtue of the simple fact that it demands quick reaction times and authenticity. Youll have to find a way balance your methods of meeting this demand with a means of maintaining brand consistency. Speed cant be sacrificed, but it also should not come at the expense of your messages quality or an adherence to your broader strategy. Social anything should be thought of as an asset, we share objects, things, images, documents, video, audio... the list goes on and on. The benefits of housing these things in one central repository enables the re-use on social media platforms, blogs, campaigns, presentations and virtually all digital information channels, including email and messaging services. This creates powerful tools as DAM expands into knowledge management and the ability to track assets and their usage. A DAM system should enable the tracking of all digital assets, wherever they reside. Some DAM systems carry customer relationship management tools, or at least offer an API (application programme interface) to tie digital assets to people. With a tracking system like an embed code (e.g. embedding a YouTube video on a site), the asset remains in the central repository, but now its external use, the location and the amount of interaction with other assets can be tracked. Not all DAM systems are able to do this. Most respected DAM companies are investing heavily in making social media tools and DAM tie together. The marketing technologist is about to have all the tools for real digital ROI. DAM systems that handle the social data are quickly being brought in front of the CIO. The C suite has access to a 360-degree view of how the business is operating, with analytics and metrics, a CMO is able to report success and failures at a granular level. This is a business game changer and DAM sits at the heart of it.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

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The rise of the social media enterprise: How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1s and retweets Social Media & Digital Asset Management White Paper

The Future of DAM within the social media

Streams of informational data will flow through enterprise DAM systems, dominated by cloud-based technologies and services. As our data and information keep up with exponential growth patterns, digital asset management will play a critical role in creating, defining, refining, publishing, re-use, metrics, analytics and predictive sentiment. DAM vendors and industry analysts will, and should, shortly adopt social methodologies and workflow tools enabling the whole enterprise to participate. sDAM (social Digital Asset Management) will be born, as business social graphs replace the intranets and extranets of old. In effect, we will see social applications that we come to expect on the usual social platforms appearing within our business applications. This will amplify our ability to rapidly share content, ideas and information. sDAM will have the architecture to tie all assets (not just digital ones destined for marketing campaigns) to a central source. It will contain appropriately designed dashboards to access all the data seamlessly and intuitively. But even before social media becomes that central a part of all of our communications, there are simple steps your organization can take to ensure that it is (a) taking full advantage of those social media tools that can get you practical and measurable results and (b) prepared for a time in the not-too-distant future when social sharing and digital word of mouth are at the center of everything you do. One of the most important steps: evaluate your existing DAM software or any software you consider for implementation to evaluate its usefulness in social media marketing. If your DAM system isnt making this part of your operation somehow more effective, you should probably see what else is out there.

Copyright 2012 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

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