The past five years have witnessed a seismic shift in the way people use the Internet. Just like our early human ancestors, we have evolved from hunters and gatherers (surfing from site to site in search of nutritious informational nuggets) to a more sedentary existence where we rely on each other to not just survive, but thrive as a society and culture.  Whether it’s broad social networking applications such as FaceBook and Twitter that enable us to interact with one another in a closed environment or vertically integrated social media sites like Flickr or YouTube that allow us to express ourselves through media, these sites have fundamentally altered the way in which we interact with media.

Developers of DAM systems -- and the companies that rely on DAMs -- can learn a lot from some of these sites and in turn, re-think the end-user experience by heeding some of the best practices of what I’ll call the “New Social Media Order.”  As Pablo Picasso once said, ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’. In the spirit of great artists, here are a few ways to rethink your DAM in a social media framework:

• The Real Wisdom of the Crowds — Creating a taxonomy scheme for tens of thousands of digital assets is challenging on any number of fronts. First and foremost, it’s difficult to organize information in a way that makes sense for both left and right-brained thinkers (i.e. people who think ‘spatially’ seek out information differently than hierarchal thinkers). Flickr succeeds in organizing millions of images by letting its community do the organizing for them by crowdsourcing this function across all of its users. One of the most frustrating part for users of DAM systems is when they can’t find what they’re looking for. By giving users the tools to add (or suggest) new metatags, your DAM becomes less of a static archive and more of a living, breathing catalogue.
• Cul de Sacs Don’t Work Online — Cul-de-sacs have become a fixture in suburban America. While they’re great for kids, they’re not so great for online communities. By that I mean that you want your DAM to be as open as possible so users don’t get stuck and can’t find their way to what they’re looking for. Embracing open standards and making it possible to connect your DAM system to other web-based API’s will provide for a more flexible user experience in which your community is empowered to continually improve the site by embracing the latest web-centric technologies.
• Visual Cues for a Visual Experience – Another challenge that many social media sites encounter is managing massive amounts of user generated content. While DAM’s don’t have this problem to the same degree, they should think about using some of the same visualization cues as a way to not only organize digital assets but also enhance the user experience. One good example are Tag Clouds in which topics (or in our case, digital assets) are organized by keyword and the relative importance of a tag is either indicated by font size or color (i.e., the larger the tag the more popular it is). Tag Clouds are widely implemented across the spectrum of social media sites (especially content heavy sites like Digg and de.licio.us) and provide another lens into content that might otherwise be obscured .
• Simplicity Wins – One of the primary reasons that Facebook is about to surpass MySpace as the number one social networking site is the simple fact that it’s breathtakingly simple. MySpace has built its brand by allowing its users to make their pages as unique and different as they are themselves. But this virtue is also one of the reasons why its growth is stalling — because each MySpace page is representative of a given user’s personal preferences basic site navigation suffers (not to mention aesthetics in general). While Facebook has its fair share of detractors, one of the reasons why it’s been so successful is because they have embraced simplicity (stark white background, consistent and fairly intuitive site navigation, etc.). If you think about DAM’s in a social media context, this concept of ‘less is more’ will likely provide users with a more fulfilling experience.