Over the past few years, how much has social media marketing influenced enterprise marketing departments? Historically, enterprise marketing focused on print, TV, radio and events. Then, websites and search engines took the world by storm. And today, just about every company is putting their best foot forward to master social media channels. In fact, in a recent study by eMarketer Digital Intelligence, over 79% of US marketing professionals are increasing spending in social media marketing in 2012.

To share expertise on the relationship between Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Social Media ROI, our very own co-founder, Jody Vandergriff was asked to write an article for SandHill — an industry-recognized organization dedicated to thought leadership in software, cloud, and mobile technology. Read the SandHill article to learn more about how companies are harnessing digital asset management to improve social media ROI.

DAM in Social Media Strategy

In summary, Vandergriff taps into her 15 years of tech industry expertise to analyze how Digital Asset Management can grow beyond an organizational tool and become a key component in the best social media marketing strategy. With the exponential growth of social media channels and campaigns, enterprises are struggling to develop a sound online marketing strategy and optimization plan for improving social media ROI. It has become a tough moving target. To showcase the growth of assets in social media, Topsy reported that Twitter’s photo sharing grew by 421 percent in 2011. In last December alone, Twitter users shared over 58.4 million photos.

In her article, Vandergriff notes that social media marketing can be difficult to pin-down with the industry’s rapid evolution. While technologies continue to be adopted and updated in an effort to better propagate enterprise social media strategy, she zeroes in on the tangible parts of online media: digital assets. “When assets are centralized, they become trackable; and in marketing, we love trackable,” writes Vandergriff. “Using a digital asset management system to directly serve up content such as videos and images, useful analytics such as impressions and sources can be tracked.”

In the SandHill article, Vandergriff outlines the three key benefits of digital asset management:

1)      Access via permissions and availability

2)      Automation to streamline workflows

3)      Analytics to gather and process data

As she puts it, “With the never-ending growth of content and explosion of rich media assets driving social media strategy, a marketer’s tool belt has become more important than ever… digital asset management solutions have taken the market by storm—taking the burden of managing the flood of rich media and turning it into an opportunity for marketers to be even more creative, innovative, and valuable.”

Ultimately, our co-founder focuses on the practical nature of using a centralized system with tracking capabilities, noting that “even the smallest teams can accomplish (successful) social media campaigns, driving user engagement and reaching new levels of social media ROI.” Because social media marketing encapsulates so many different channels–channels that are quickly evolving–Vandergriff’s notion of focusing on trackable elements makes sense. Rather than spending time and money chasing moving targets, digital asset management may be among the best social media marketing tools simply because it provides hard data and centralization of digital assets. In an industry where today’s new social media buzz becomes obsolete within months, a DAM may be the most valuable commodity in a social media marketer’s tool belt.

Click here to read the full article: Digital Asset Management in Social Media Strategy by Jody Vandergriff