Hot on the heels of its leaked announcement yesterday, Picturepark is quietly launching a new initiative that many who need to implement, manage or use DAM will applaud: a web site where experts meet novices. Appropriately called “DAM Guru”, the site “is an honest, sincere effort to connect people within the Digital Asset Management community.” It’s also the best idea in content marketing I’ve come across in ages.
The DAM Guru Program was created and is managed by Swiss DAM software vendor Picturepark. DAM Guru Program operations are managed separately from Picturepark’s sales operations. Picturepark isn’t doing this out of charity reasons. Its FAQ tells it all: “Picturepark launched DAM Guru Program because we know that digital asset management education is key to maintaining an effective and long-lasting DAM initiative. People in the DAM community have wished for a program like this for years, but no one has acted. We had the personnel and technical resources to make DAM Guru Program work, so we decided to do it.”
It’s an initiative that could be dangerous for Picturepark’s brand image. If too many scam DAM “experts” try to hijack the site, it will soon backfire. However, Picturepark has built in security measures so this shouldn’t happen. From the FAQ: “When you join, you identify yourself as either a DAM Newbie, a DAM Guru or a DAM Employer. Based on that info, we’ll send you a link to a form you can use to provide more information about your needs or experience. When a Newbie or Employer needs help, we’ll try to find a match in our database of Gurus. If we cannot find a match, we’ll search the world to find one. (We know where DAM Gurus hang out, so we should be able to find them.) We forward Guru information to Newbies, and we forward Employer information to Gurus. In order to discourage abuse of the program, we do not share Newbie details with Gurus, nor do we share Guru details with Employers.”
As Picturepark doesn’t automatically accept anyone who says he knows what DAM is as a Guru, the risk of ending up with bogus advisors is quite small.
It seems like a genuinely brilliant idea to me. It solves the problem of many DAM users/managers, which is to find someone who really knows what he/she’s talking about. It also wants to be vendor-neutral, which is in the best ‘tradition’ of content marketing done right. A true win-win situation, if you ask me.
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About Erik Vlietinck
I love the idea of this but I’m a little concerned that the three categories they’ve assigned – guru, newbie and employer – may end up being too limiting since you can only be one or the other. What happens to someone like myself who is smack dab in the middle of guru and newbie? I want to be able to post questions and get answers from knowledgeable sources but also be able to respond to questions that I may have experience with that may help others. So, true collaboration or information sharing may end up being a bit difficult. I also really love the idea that they are vetting gurus. In the LinkedIn Digital Asset Mgmt group I see a lot of questions from newbies and responses clearly from vendors that are looking to hawk their products and it becomes very difficult to determine evaluate the quality of the advice. So, this provides nice filtering.
Kitty: I’m so sorry I didn’t see and reply to your note sooner than this!
Each DAM Guru Program member is assigned a program manager. Program managers are responsible for matching Gurus and Newbies (or Gurus and Employers), and handling any other concerns the member might have. So, in your case, you could sign up as a Guru and, when you have a question that you’d like to as some other Guru, just relay that to your program manager. Because all matching is done manually (so that the matches make the most sense), it would be no problem to accommodate this.
We actually thought about the situation you mention when designing the program, but in the interest of keeping the registration as simple as possible (particularly for the real Newbies), we decided to segment it like this.
Thanks for the nice things you said in your comment.
David Diamond
Director of Global Marketing
Picturepark DAM