Damn what happen with this DAM project?

The other day I was reading an article from Irina Guseva, an independent technology and digital strategy consultant specializing in WCM, DAM, Digital Marketing and Customer Experience Management. Her title of the article was “The Anatomy of a Failed DAM Project”.

Inspired on the title I was interested to read it and see what her observations are. Since I aged over the years into this topic and the industry is inventing more and more terms which reflect nearly the same topic in a new dress I am now after 20 years industry knowledge also ended into digital asset management.

Pitfalls really?

Planning, planning, planning … already during my school time our teacher in physics told us it is all about planning. But is this not the project manager job ? This is correct, so what if your project manager does not bring experience in this category, can she/he educate themselves to be successful? Well Irina brings it to the point – Irina wrote: “One of the most crucial intersections in your DAM journey will be executive support and C-level buy-in”. Absolute correct but is there another dynamic which keeps you pulling down?

Well I am living and working since 6 years in the Middle East, in Dubai. The issue here is that on Executive C-level we have very well educated managers which are not empowered with experience. The don’t know what is ROI or TCO in the long run, they don’t know because they are young graduates which a fresh from an international university, studied there with the empowered money from their family and back home in their country they receive the position as an CEO in a family owned company or relative owned company. What happened with the years of experience in the field, with the experience in failing and success? Sorry not in the Middle East.

Executive support is given as much as you need; financial, resources, change management from the concept but that it fails in the execution. However the stronger party with the relationship to the young star is is going to win if change is needed or also executed.

Irina writes in her article – “Understaffing the DAM project is one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen.” Well coming as I said from my worldwide experience implementing my first solution back in 2001 over 4 continents on the globe it is the question of culture if it will be well staffed. In China management requests their staff to work nearly 20 hours a day, proof the progress and success nearly on a daily base. Working in Eastern Europe the problem is delegation, here we have the opposite effect. Executive level is not well educated but maybe very well experienced working since ages in the industry and sometimes not happy with the digitization of the new age. They need to delegate and cannot judge the right balance between experience, staff, tasks, time and requirements.    
So in essence there is a project culture which needs to be evaluated before you go out there in the market and research possible vendors. Try to define the communication structure, the reporting structure and what your winning argument for your management is. Identify your hero, make him to an Action Hero.

From the skeleton to the full body

Looking on the market left and right and under the hood of most of the vendors it comes down to your priority to select the proper solution for your organization. Think about you want to cook a steak. What you BBQ it or cook it in the oven? Well the question now T-bone, fillet, what will it be?
Digital Asset Management solutions have exactly the same questions. Do you need help in; making digital assets, modifying them, version them, distribute them to which device and to which audience in which format. Once decided we can take the next hurdle to proof our preferred vendor or solution.

• My existing assets need to fit their also, how to get there
• My search for daily life is based on which META information
• My work shall be easy, what education and training is available
• My biggest concern please my users internal and external
• My control shall be enforced but not block people to use and work
• My corporate identity is required for acceptance and integration
• My time is running away, how quick can be the implementation

Technology Train is it too fast?

Planning in phases is modern project management so of course we do here the same. Irina writes in her article – “During this phase, pay attention to not only the technology, but the people involved: from internal stakeholders and users, to outside agencies, to consumers of your digital assets”.
She is so right, a lot of DAM projects I have seen the organization started on one single end because the pain was the biggest there, but stopped in the middle and never thought about other departments, other assets flying around in the organization or even utilizing the communication with external partners.

Working with agencies in the marketing industry I am still thrilled and feel pleased working with other industries when I see this huge amount of waste of time and resources. Sending Artwork around on paper with FedEx, UPS and Co or as large attachments uncontrolled over email. 

So do we make here a technology implementation or not? How do you feel about it, yes or know?
Well leave technology to your IT Manager, which should never lead this project, it needs to be owed by a business owner. He will select the proper technology partner for the back end but let us focus on the front end. Search for a partner who understands your business, who can share experience what other companies did. Try to identify your unique process which differentiates from others, stand out of the crowd. Whatever you do and select one thing stay essential over the last years. The world moved away from the keyboard, try to automate the best any workflows, data capture and how to interact with the DAM. Consider tablets which are very much used in the creative space where stylus, pads and touchscreen replace the keyboard.

Take it down to the finger swipe to swipe the asset over to your favorite Photoshop application to make editing on the digital asset, swipe your finger to get the digital asset delivered into a digital channel like social networks, Facebook and Co and delivery channels like email or broadcasting. What does it bring you: Acceptance, minimizing training needs and happy users. Be modern, think loud, be proud and don’t forget – keep swiping.

Did I swipe ideas for you – did you consider in your projects the culture of the team – did you maybe success in the past, I shared some more pitfalls but share your top 3 success factors.

References 

"Produce and distribute digital assets across content channels with automated workflow and collaboration tools." By Dieter Hovorka April 22, 2014 

“TheAnatomy of a Failed DAM Project” By Irina Guseva  Aug 28, 2014

Meet Swarm: Foursquare's ambitious plan to split its app in two

Foursquare, daily in your pocket

Looking back it is already many years since social networks are contentious partner of our social life. The first one i personal registered was OpenBC. OPEN Business Club AG was founded in August 2003 in Hamburg, Germany and helped to connect business people to keep in contact, like collecting business cards. Business cards can change when people move on to a new position or to a new company. The platform was officially launched on 1 November 2003. It was renamed from OpenBC to XING on 17 November 2006.

Many social networks came over time, and since the early days of social networks I was a fan of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users "check in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application, and the map is based on data from the OpenStreetMap project. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges". The user who checks in the most often to a venue becomes the "mayor," and users regularly vie for "mayorships."

To take on Yelp, Foursquare is moving beyond the check-in

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has spent the last year trying to convince the world that Foursquare isn't what it used to be. The company emerged back in 2009 with a novel app that let people “check in” to a location. That vision, and the local information that followed, propelled it to amass tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions in funding, and billions upon billions of data points from people who used Foursquare to check in around the globe. The problem was, in 2014, that story no longer worked for Foursquare. In fact, it was holding the company back. 

Earning points and badges with check-in

“Listen, the point of the company, this whole thing, was never to build an awesome check-in button,” says Crowley. “That’s not the thing we got out of bed and said, that we wanted to build the most awesome check-in button in the world!” Back in 2009 declaring your location was a necessity, because phones didn’t have the power to reliably pinpoint a user, and Foursquare didn’t have much data on what venues were nearby. By 2014, however, both the technology and the data have finally come of age.

With the check-in front and center, however, Foursquare was still struggling to enter the mainstream and saw its user growth overtaken by younger startups. The company had created a new paradigm around location sharing, but that activity was never going to be as popular as snapping a selfie, sharing a link, or firing off a tweet.

So Crowley decided it was time to do something radical. “What if we don't need people to check in anymore?,” he asked. “What does a version of Foursquare look like that doesn't beg you to check in as soon as you open it up?” Over the last six months, the team has been hard at work on a complete reinvention of the company. In the end they decided that, in order to save Foursquare, they would have to break it half, splitting the iconic service into two separate apps. 

A new baby is born

Now, the company is announcing the first fruit of this labor, a brand new app called Swarm that will exist alongside the current Foursquare app. Swarm will be a social heat map, helping users find friends nearby and check in to share their location. A completely rewritten Foursquare app will launch in a month or so. The new Foursquare will ditch the check-in and focus solely on exploration and discovery, finally positioning itself as a true Yelp-killer in the battle to provide great local search.

Predicted social network change 2014

Early 2014 i reviewed many changes which will happen and dictate people social life in the coming 12 month. Which networks will come up, which will gain momentum and which will disapear.

One of my top 3 predication was the  "The great unbundling", meaning nothing else than social networks will offload services, features and functions into new apps. The reason for this is clear. Mobile apps shall keep slim, more attention to services can be given through an app, measurement of people usage will be easier to be determinate and many more.

The great unbundling

Having the check-in button as the main interface every time users opened the app created a noticeable hurdle for engagement. "Imagine if you opened up YouTube and the first thing it asked you to do was create a video. That would scare off a lot of people," says Bijan Sabet, one of Foursquare’s early investors and a current board member. "Just like you don’t need to tweet to enjoy Twitter, splitting the app in two will help make it clear to a big audience that you don’t need to check in to find value in Foursquare."

During months of testing, the company found that unbundling the two halves of Foursquare made each experience more focused and efficient. Sessions were shorter, but more frequent. And using some simple hooks in iOS and Android, Foursquare can shuttle users back and forth between the two apps with ease, much as Facebook does with its main app and its Messenger app. "By simplifying a lot of the story, and having an app that's dedicated to search and discovery I think it's going to be very clear to people that the search and discovery tools that we built are some of the best in class," says Crowley.

Let's Swarm

Swarm should work very well for seeing who’s around to get one more drink at 1 AM, but Foursquare may have been beaten to the punch by an old rival: Facebook. Two weeks before Foursquare announced its big split, Facebook debuted "Nearby Friends," a feature two years in the making which, for better or worse, looks and acts a whole lot like Foursquare’s Swarm. Facebook first tried check-ins back in 2010. Facebook friend list is far too big for people to be comfortable sharing intimate data like their location, so no hurdle has been discovered here.

Preview of the App Swarm

"Passive location-sharing in a way that people actually want"

A number of similar apps like Highlight, Sonar, and Banjo, which helped you track down friends and interesting strangers, were so broad that they bombed with the mainstream. Both Nearby and Swarm try to ease user’s concerns by providing a sense of which friends are close by without giving away too much detail. Using passive location-sharing in a way that people actually want, is the way of the future predict the makers of the app. People don’t want to be precision-pointed on a map so somebody can go find them in the middle of a park. What they want is for friends to be ambiently aware of where they are, so when they got out of the metro in Dubai, they can say, ‘Who are my 10 friends in Safar park?’"

Most importantly, while you can check in with Swarm, it also passively notes your general location even if you don’t open the app. So if you come out of a subway station and look at your phone, Foursquare will understand that you’re in a new neighborhood and update your status accordingly. This might still seem creepy for some people, but in that sense Foursquare may have one big advantage over Facebook when it comes to ambient location sharing. People who download Swarm are making an explicit decision to provide this kind of data to a specific set of friends.

Cloak: An app to go friends out of the way

This application takes the other road, it loads geo data of friends, so you do not meet these randomly.

The ideology of wanting to share all information with each lasting blows fierce headwinds against: Constant dive on new apps that offer anonymity, delete content after a short time or obfuscate data. First there was Snapchat, which destroyed the images and messages after a few seconds. Then anonymous messaging services such as Whisper or Secret expressly waive real names.

Cloak allows friends and acquaintances to go out of the way. The principle is simple: Cloak uses spatial data that have been publicly shared by friends on Instagram and Foursquare. Then, the app shows exactly where these people have recently found. Later the app will also use data of Facebook and Twitter.

The success of cloak

Many users feel the same, because since the release of the app late March 2014 the application has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. That earned the app a place among the top 50 apps in the App Store, in addition to the service in many U.S. media reports have mentioned. Cloak is currently only available on iOS, a version of Android is not yet known.

Foursquare - Check please

But how can Foursquare personalize its users' results if they are no longer collecting check-ins, the foundation of Foursquare’s recommendation engine? Crowley smiles and says something a bit shocking. He no longer needs check-ins, the meat and potatoes of Foursquare’s entire business and data collection engine for the last five years.

Not only has Foursquare collected 6 billion check-ins, he says, but it has collected 6 billion signals to help it map out over 60 million places around the world. Each place is a shape that looks like a hot zone of check-ins — of times when people have said "I’m here." Foursquare’s "Pilgrim" location-guessing engine factors in everything from your GPS signal, to cell tower triangulation, to the number of bars you have, to the Wi-Fi networks nearby, in order to create these virtual shapes.

Now that it has this data, Foursquare can make a very accurate guess at where you are when you stop moving, even without a check-in, a technology it hopes will allow it to keep its database of places fresh and accurate. Foursquare calls these implicit check-ins "p-check-ins," or Neighborhood Sharing. Take your phone into four or five different Japanese restaurants over the course of six months and without a single check-in Foursquare will learn that you like Japanese food and start making recommendations for you based on that data.

This ability to be contextually aware, to have a general sense of the things that I like based upon where the device has been, and the things that I might like based upon where I’ve been in the past or where my friends have been, that’s a really magical ability of future marketing. Tiny micro-facts are part of what could make Foursquare bigger than a recommendations service, marketers will love it.

For years we promised a service that buzz

"We think of Foursquare as a technology that’s enabling these superpowers… to see around corners and through walls, it’s like I want to find the best stuff that exists within you know, 100 yards, 5 miles, 10 miles of me," says Crowley. "I walked into a restaurant and it told me what to order. I walked into a neighborhood and it told me three places to go to. My plane landed in a city I’ve never been to and it’s telling me that two friends are nearby. That’s stuff that we’re doing now, and I think what people will get is that it’s very clearly the future." 

Happy Birthday 10 Years Facebook

In February 2014 Facebook celebrates its 10-year anniversary

Time to look back and see how Facebook transformed the way people interact with Social Networks.

“On February 8th, 2004 Facebook had a whopping 650 users”

Birthyear of Facebook 2004

The Palo Alto-based company transformed special in the early days a lot to accommodate a total new client base. Original it was only a collaboration tool for universities but opened the doors quickly after moving from Harvard University down to Silicon Valley, Palo Alto. Early rebranding from [thefacebook] to Facebook and the switch to a more image-led news feed on handheld devices, along with the countless other features it has implemented including photo, video, checking in and official pages.

Original Facebook of the launch year 2004

Facebook's limited early design reflects the company's humble beginnings, with the website of course being created in a university dorm room by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg.

Lets take a look at some of the developments which happen over the last decade.

August 2005 - TheFacebook becomes Facebook.com.

September 2005 - Facebook expands to high school students.

October 2005 - The Photos application makes its debut.

December 2005 - Facebook reaches 5.5 million users.

April 2006 - Facebook Mobile debuts.

August 2006 - Facebook Platform launches, Notes application debuts, Facebook partners with Microsoft.

September 2006 - Facebook News Feed launches, users revolt against privacy settings. Facebook opens to all users.

December 2006 - Facebook has 12 million users.

August 2007 - Facebook releases iPhone optimized site.

November 2007 - Facebook Ads launch, users complain about Beacon

March 2008 - Facebook adds privacy controls to Friend List.

April 2008 - Facebook launches Facebook Chat.

May 2008 - Facebook F8 Developer conference launches Facebook Platform and Facebook Apps.

July 2008 - Facebook Connect debuts and Facebook for iPhone hits the App Store.

September 2008 - New Facebook becomes permanent despite user backlash.

October 2008 - Facebook Platform for Mobile, Microsoft invests big in Facebook.

February 2009 - Facebook introduces “Like” feature and TOS changes bring controversy.

June 2009 - Facebook usernames launch.

August 2009 - Facebook acquires FriendFeed.

October 2009 - Facebook changes its privacy policy

December 2009 - Facebook has 350 million users.

Facebook 2009 after 5 years development

April 2010 - Open Graph API launches.

May 2010 - Facebook privacy issues reach overdrive.

July 2010 - Facebook reaches 500 million users.

August 2010 - Facebook Places launches, privacy concerns grow.

October 2010 - The Social Network debuts to rave reviews.

December 2010 - Time magazine names Mark Zuckerberg "Person of the Year."

January 2011 - Facebook valued at $50 billion.

April 2012 – Facebook acquires Instagram

May 2012 - Emoticons added to chat

June 2012 – facebook.com email addresses get introduced

July 2012 - Deeper Instagram integration

Jan 2013 - Graph Search is probably Facebook’s most important feature

Aug 2013 - New Chat Room feature started to circulate

February 2014 – Facebook acquires WhatsUp

So what will come next. Two aspects I want to highlight as an outlook into the future. While Mark Zuckerberg is passionate about the timeline and the news feed to get more and more personalized, benchmarking the important updates from real friend versus not real friends.

In the future Facebook will get a better access to relevant information with making information relevant applications. Facebook will offload content to separated apps and move away from the actual facebook app to keep it slim. A good start was the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the separation of the messenger app and the introduction of the new app paper, and more will follow. 

 
"Today, only one-third of the world's population has access to the internet. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to connect the other two-thirds." - Mark Zuckerberg

User development of Facebook 2004 - 2014