7 Ways to Tame the Chaos of Digital Content

Having difficulty finding videos and images in multiple folders on different servers? Is it tedious to create, upload and organize the digital assets your team and business requires of you? Are you frustrated with trying to gain control and maintain accuracy of the growing number of digital files coming from internal teams and external partners?

If you answer yes to all the above, then you have a problem that may only get worse. No worries. We’re here to help with a few simple steps to tame the chaos and remove the bottlenecks in your company’s digital content lifecycle.

Many companies struggle with simply “finding” their digital assets. In fact, 84% of businesses reported that finding assets is the biggest challenge when working with digital assets. That problem is compounded every day when a huge amount of digital information and materials are produced and assembled. Before you know it, you’re spending most of your day, well, searching… 

Without a powerful yet easy-to-use system to organize and tag thousands of digital assets in one place, there may be chaos. Fortunately, we have some answers. Below, we’ll guide you on what you can do. 

1. Assess Your Digital Media Ecosystem

One study found that in a week the average employee searches 83 times for media files but fails to find them 35% of the time. It’s a waste of effort and resources. In the long-run it impacts efficiency and productivity.

The above situation begs the question - do you actually know how many photos, videos, audio files and other digital assets you have in your collection? If not, it may be because they are spread out across many local folders, network servers, cloud-based servers, or even someone’s personal hard drive.

Making an inventory of all your digital assets is a good first step. And if you can't go to that level of detail, at least make a list of the hard drives, servers and folders where they can be found. We've seen companies that have discovered some of the most valuable images are on a hard drive in a desk drawer in someone's cubicle! 

2. What’s Missing?

Cleaning up and sorting helps you understand what you have. But knowing what you don’t have is equally important. The time may come when you go searching for something you need and you actually haven’t got them.

In determining what you don't have, consider the following as guides:

• What are the types of end uses for your digital media? For example, if you own a stock photo company, you would need a broad collection of images on various subjects and categories.
• Where are you publishing to? Company website, product catalog, knowledge base, customer portal, social media, marketing campaign tools, etc.
• Who is involved in your digital media process? If in-house photographers or videographers are involved, they are in the best position to evaluate what's missing in your digital library.

No collection of digital assets is ever complete. But that doesn’t mean your company’s collection of media content should not be extensive enough to have everything it needs. 

You may have to undertake a gap analysis tailored to address your particular business requirements. It usually follows a template - identifying a specific problem area, defining your goals, assessing the current state, determining the desired state, and pinpointing the gaps between the two states. The process of a gap analysis involves the comparison of current digital assets with the desired set of digital assets. The gap analysis should include business requirements for both current, and future, goals and objectives.

This is being proactive and staying ahead of the game. So knowing what you don’t have now and analyzing what ideally you should have means you can create and stock up on required digital assets and be ready when the need arises.

To give you an idea how crucial it is to know what you lack, below are real-world examples on selected sectors related to their digital media requirements.

• Car manufacturers - Complete images of all car parts. An average car has 30,000 individual components according to Toyota.
• Apparel makers - Fashion brands, on average, use 8 photos per product on their website. Big brands require more than 3x that number. Product images can run into the thousands for large clothing companies.
• Medical/healthcare – A medical technology company has hundreds of products in its lineup and needs a full collection of media assets for its promotional materials.
• Marketers – 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. An exhaustive library of relevant video content, clips, and footages must be readily available.   

3. Who Is Doing What, Where And Why?

While it is essential to know what and where your digital assets are, it’s also vital that you are aware of who creates and is allowed to use them. Is there a procedure or checklist to guide personnel when it comes to the production and utilization of digital media? Are digital rights managed efficiently?

There must be role-based permissions. This means certain levels of access to the company’s digital assets are granted according to an employee’s job function or responsibilities. That way you can limit the use as well as control access based on employee needs. 

Aside from streamlining approval and workflow processes, you’re also aiming to safeguard company assets and enforce accountability on users. If any vital assets such as proprietary data or copyrighted materials go missing or are tampered with, you can trace who handled them to the last person. 

The point is to have a smooth workflow to bolster communication and collaboration, making tasks easier to do and projects faster to complete. It is imperative especially for time-critical projects that things move steadily forward. This is made possible when you have a system that gives you greater visibility and better control over your digital assets and their users.

4. Standardize First, Then Organize 

After taking an inventory, it’s time to make sense of it all. And that requires a taxonomy to apply metadata to all your digital assets. This is the key to making your life a little less stressful. By applying a standard taxonomy (i.e. vocabulary of metadata) that properly describes the asset and its usage, you add a necessary level of accuracy and consistency that ultimately provides more efficient searches and improved information sharing.

• It's important to have everybody that touches digital media be involved in the process of defining the metadata and its values. A taxonomy provides a standardized way for your company to classify and categorize digital assets and content, in essence a unifying language for searching, use and re-purpose of assets. Here are a few examples of metadata:
• Title
• Author
• Format
• Status
• Description
• Keywords
• Digital Rights
• Category
• Usage
• Target Audience
• Campaign Type
• Views

While it has many purposes, metadata primarily helps users in discovering resources and finding relevant information. It provides digital identification which is useful in organizing, preserving, and storing assets, content and resources. 

5. Back Everything Up and Archive

According to one research study, 96% of all business workstations are not being backed up. This is despite findings that every week in the U.S. roughly 140,000 hard drives crash. Hardware does fail and some other unfortunate events do happen such as data theft, accidental file deletion, system failure, and malware, to name some. 

In other words, it’s not a perfect world. It’s better to be prepared than sorry. Backing up your valuable digital media is one of the best practices your business can do. If you have a physical server location for your files, you can opt to have a separate external hard drive or even cloud storage.

Having a second set, duplicate copy or alternate versions of your digital files and assets is a wise move. It may take time to backup thousands of files and digital assets but the prospect of losing them all in an instant is a compelling reason that you should be backing up starting right now. 

Remember, your digital files are also valuable pieces of content which if lost will cost you time and money to replace. This is why businesses put great value in properly archiving digital assets because these are reusable content that translate to savings.

For instance, you can use particular video footage or a photo again and again for various video marketing projects or product showcases. Reusing items from your digital archives is much more affordable than creating entirely new ones for every new project. 

6. Follow the KISS Principle - Keep it Simple Stu..!

Procedures relating to the creation, use, disposition, handling, storage, preservation, archiving, and access of digital media must be straightforward for users. You’re simplifying things - not making them more complex. Time management and productivity are your goals for staff who handle company assets, so it’s important to have transparent rules everyone understands. 

If there is a checklist to follow for your personnel, keep it clear. If there are guidelines, make them direct and to the point. Define roles and responsibilities relating to your digital assets – who creates, handles, accesses, and uses – and make sure your people follow them. 

Keep in mind that organizing your files and content is a process that will introduce improvements. It will significantly lessen the average 18 minutes for employees to manually locate a document and considerably shorten the amount of time they spend on file search. There will be positive results on work and it is therefore extremely important that rules governing digital asset management are embraced by everyone involved.

7. Consider a DAM Solution

It’s possible to manually manage assets if you’re only dealing with a few dozen. But it gets a little crazy when you have hundreds, thousands or millions of digital files. 

The good news is that everything we've talked about can be handled by a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. A DAM solution may actually be the first and last thing you’ll need to clear the clutter. And if you’re faced with digital content chaos, then you need a robust and easy to use tool to tame that chaos.

Even the process of sorting and deduping current assets can be automated and doesn't have to be as time-consuming as you think. All your items can be centralized in one secure on-premise or cloud-based digital vault complete with safety and access protocols. 

Searching, sharing, and sending files can be streamlined while backing up files can be scheduled and put on auto-pilot. These are just some of the benefits you gain from using DAM software.

You may ask, “Can’t file sharing platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive perform DAM functions?” For simple file sharing and sorting, yes they can. However, they are not designed for enterprise level requirements, particularly with the following:

• Inadequate security and permissions
• No tagging functions which leads to poor searchability 
• No automation to streamline workflows and improve efficiencies

DAM is a different breed altogether. It’s more robust, customizable to your unique needs and capable to handle work beyond mere file sharing and simple organizing by folders.

Solid Steps To Great Results

The steps we’ve outlined are solid enough even for the most substantial collection of assets. However, to get optimal results you need a smart and powerful DAM tool on your side that can automate and simplify processes from end to end. Of course, you don’t have to dig too deep for a solution that will save you time and eliminate frustration.

Take a look at Eyebase, for example. It’s one of the most feature-filled DAMs in the market today. Many successful professionals, large companies, and established organizations have told stories of success with Eyebase. You owe it to yourself to experience the ultimate DAM. With Eyebase, you have over a hundred cutting-edge features designed to address all your enterprise requirements. 

Choosing the right DAM is a big process as there are literally hundreds of features to consider when you look under the hood of a DAM.

To help you in your quest, the Eyebase team created the ultimate DAM Checklist. This DAM Checklist will save you time as you consider requirements and search for the perfect DAM for you. Download it today!

If you want to personally check out the software up close, it’s easy to do – just sign up for free Eyebase demo here.