What follows is an excerpt from a “Digitas Perspective” client letter written by Beth McCabe, Digitas‘ vice president and director for social marketing and technology. You can read the full letter here.

Brand Pages: As of right now, brand pages have not changed to a Timeline view. While we do know that Facebook is working on them and there will be changes eventually, no dates have been given yet, and it’s unknown what the changes will be.

“Likes” in the Timeline: Timeline is a shift from a chronological posting of your activity on the platform to aggregated content displayed by relevancy via Graph Rank. Consequently, stories posted when users “like” your brand’s page may not be shown as the top story on their profile pages for long. Brand “likes” will be collected together and displayed as a group within the time period the actions were taken. This means that they may drift down the page and be shown with older content. In the same vein, because it is much easier to explore a user’s history on the Timeline, older “likes” will be uncovered as a user drills into past months and years in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Sponsored Stories: Though the number and format of sponsored stories has not changed on the newsfeed, they have been reduced within the profile Timeline environment. In the “old Facebook,” there could be upwards of seven sponsored stories along the right-hand column of a user’s profile. Now, with the addition of the Timeline navigator, the number of sponsored stories has been reduced to approximately two to three. As Timeline invites users to explore friends’ “digital scrapbook,” time spent on Timeline profiles will arguably increase because there is more to do and more to see. This adds to the value of the ticker’s real estate for brands and the stories their apps post there.

Graph Rank: For a long time, Edge Rank has been Facebook’s algorithm for determining relevancy and filtering the content shown on users’ newsfeeds. Graph Rank takes Edge Rank and adds Open Graph apps to the equation, including factors like how often you or your friends interact with content posted by an app. This rewards apps that are popular by pulling them to the top of the feed and highlighting their use. “How often will this app be used?” is a question we should strongly consider when designing these apps for our clients. Apps that only publish stories once (for example, when you first use them) will be less valuable to brands because they are less likely to earn high Graph Rank and will tend to drift to the bottom of the pile.

1. Define the “qualified” lead. Marketing and sales must discuss what constitutes a qualified lead and define its characteristics together. This becomes the foundation for a lead scoring system through which marketing can winnow more qualified, sales-ready leads from all those captured. Once lead characteristics are established, lead scoring also allows marketing to determine the key triggers that identify the ready buyer, so those prospects can be delivered to the right salespeople in real time, decreasing the time to conversion through rapid response.

2. Formulate an integrated marketing plan. It’s easier said than done. Keeping track of email campaigns, drip campaigns, traditional media outreach and coverage, content to bloggers, tradeshows, SEO marketing, social media campaigns and more calls for a lot of juggling – not to mention funneling, segmenting and filtering the leads you’ll generate through all these activities. A good automated marketing platform is the best way to manage and track an interrelated set of campaigns and programs and the resulting leads. The usual process is to begin with email and lead scoring, and then to scale to additional capabilities as your programs become more sophisticated. As you scale, make sure that the leads and data you get from each program are not silo’d. Ideally, every interaction with a prospect should be tracked in a single location, usually a profile in a sales or marketing database. On the content side, aim for consistency in messaging and offers. Create, manage and coordinate your messages across all channels for a consistent customer experience, and update all channels when messaging changes.

3. Segment your lists. By segmenting your lists, you can deliver more focused campaigns by targeting promotions to specific audiences, providing the right content and making the right offer at the right time. The concept of message matching is based on the idea that people pay attention only to what matches their own needs, which in turn helps build more targeted lists and boosts overall response rates. List segmentation comes in infinite forms – by demographic factors, title, industry, offer, behavior, interactivity, preferences, company size, to name just a few. Start simply, and let testing and sales results guide you to more sophisticated list parsing.

4. Create compelling landing pages. When your prospect clicks on a search result or an online ad, the resulting landing page should be exactly what the prospect was looking for and should provide a compelling offer (webinar, trial, whitepaper, demo, etc.). The value of the offer increases with an accurate, concise description of what the prospect will receive. A relevant landing page delivering content that addresses the visitor’s problem induces the reader to not only consider the offer, but often to pursue it. And a strong call to action that clearly shows how they can “act now” provides the incentive for lead capture, in turn allowing your company to continue the dialogue and nurture that new lead toward conversion.

5. Refine your surveys and registration forms. Develop and implement productive online surveys that capture relevant prospect data and furnish quality leads. Review each of your lead generation forms, and make sure they work together to gain more information as the prospect continues to engage. Keep the initial form short and sweet; aim for capturing simple, basic information. You can ask for more information as the dialogue progresses.

6. Measure, measure, measure. “Metrics” has to do with measurements, such as tracking numbers of web visitors. “Analytics” has to do with teasing those numbers apart so you can distinguish categories (e.g., how many visitors visited your pricing page). To gather precise information about campaign effectiveness, you need to tap into the full spectrum of metrics available from all your programs. Analysis will guide you in determining which leads are ready to go to sales, which leads need more nurturing, and which offers are or are not working. All such information helps you focus on where you are most likely going to generate qualified leads that are likely to convert.

7. Test, test, test. Testing tells you what works and what doesn’t, so you can focus your budget and efforts on what does. Remember, less is more. What you choose to test depends on your industry, your target audience and your campaigns. You can test lists, ads, landing pages, keywords, email campaign content, sending strategy and more. Commonly tested list elements include titles, actions and industries. Commonly tested content and campaign elements include headlines, body copy, calls to action, offers, contact forms, days of the week, time of the day, page design, graphics, and so on. Begin with a simple plan and let your results and changing conditions guide you to continuing, expanding or redirecting your testing efforts. Continued testing will allow you to understand how to optimize and improve your communication with your target audience, which leads to better leads, more conversions and closed sales.

8. Automate, automate, automate. Automate as much of the process as you can. You will save time and labor — you’ll also increase consistency, efficiency, awareness, actionable intelligence and measurability. A good marketing automation platform reduces complexity, makes workflow more efficient, and enables and enhances well-timed communications as contacts, leads, prospects and sales professionals interact. It also gives you real-time visibility into every aspect of the sales cycle, from lead generation to close, documenting the data and circumstances that make success repeatable. And finally, automation delivers the sales and marketing reports that provide data for analysis and planning, proves marketing’s contribution to sales, and illustrates return on investment.

In the Beginning

When Hastings founded the company in 1997, the idea of renting DVDs online and delivering them through the mail was novel, to say the least. Netflix ended up toppling Blockbuster and other giants of the rental industry. Blockbuster went bankrupt, while Netflix grew to 24 million customers. After becoming the dominant rental service, Netflix, led by Hastings, tackled another industry-changing innovation – streaming media. For less than half of what people were paying for premium television services, subscribers now had access to hundreds of thousands of DVDs through the mail and thousands of hours of movies through computers, home TVs and other personal media.

For many years, it looked like Netflix was unbeatable. Its overwhelming popularity continued to grow and led to an all-time stock high of $304.79 per share on July 13th. But within just a few short weeks, all that changed due to some poor choices and re-branding missteps.

Change Without Communication

In mid-July, an announcement on the official Netflix blog spelled out the company’s new DVD-and streaming-only plans. Rather than pay one price for both services, subscribers would be billed twice. The price change represented a 60 percent increase for many users who were getting the DVD-plus-streaming plan. Before the changes, these users would be paying $9.99 for both services. After the increase, their price would be $17.99 per month. Subscribers were not happy, to say the least. The announcement post itself received thousands of angry responses.

Sure, the price increase made sense from a Wall Street point of view. After experiencing years of market dominance, Netflix was poised for some deflation. Analysts theorized that the stock price was overvalued, that it was based mainly on Hastings’ reputation as an innovator and visionary. In addition, early content deals that provided streaming media for their industry changing service were going to expire. Content costs were going to increase from $3.5 billion from $2.4 billion in the next few years — and customers were already grumbling about the limited choices on their streaming service.

The price increase would also help support Netflix’s continuing expansion plans. During 2010 and early 2011, the company expanded to 43 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it had planned an expansion into the United Kingdom and Ireland.
But from the consumer’s point of view, the changes were unwarranted and unnecessary. In the radically transparent marketplace, Hastings and Netflix had committed the ultimate sin – not listening to or considering their customers.

Too Little, Too Late

To make matters worse, before the dust settled on the rate increase news, Hastings issued a “half-apology” that explained the reasons behind the price split and increase: a new “analog” DVD service that would be separate from Netflix. Instead of logging into one platform and having access to streaming and DVDs, customers would need to visit two websites and have two separate charges.

The new DVD-only service, Qwikster, was met with about as much enthusiasm as the rate increases themselves. Within just 90 days, Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers and $12 billion in market value. The company’s stock plunged 70 percent by October, and at that time, Hastings announced, not surprisingly, that they’d be abandoning the Qwikster concept.

The Fallout

Now, Netflix is faced with trying to maintain its current subscriber base while also going through with the expansion to international markets. As a result, the company is eliminating jobs in the fourth quarter. They also stopped share buybacks, on which they had spent nearly $1 billion since 2007.

Analysts question whether or not Netflix should continue expanding internationally. Online video viewing hasn’t caught fire, and they theorize that revenue could be better spent on maintaining the company’s smaller U.S. market share. But as CEO, president and chairman of the board, Hastings’ vision is being carried through. He told the New York Times that while the Qwikster concept became a sign of the company’s failings, expanding abroad will cause streaming video demand to take off internationally.

As a result of Netflix’s fumbles, the company now has about a quarter of its previous $4.2 billion market capitalization. With the competition closing in and taking advantage of this exec’s gaffes, Netflix will need to fight hard in order to gain back just a fraction of what it had before.

What follows is a client letter issued this week by Donna Tocci, vice president/group director of social marketing with Digitas. Click here to read the whole report.

Following in the footsteps of Facebook and Google+, Twitter launched its version of brand pages this week. The launch was limited to brands that have been identified as strategic partners based on their pre-launch monetary commitments to Twitter for 2012. These 21 partners will be the only brands to have brand pages until February. At that time, for a lesser monetary commitment, additional companies can have brand pages. They have also partnered with a few charities and individuals for brand pages as well. There is no timetable for free brand pages.

How Twitter Brand Pages Work

Companies will now be able to even further customize their brand’s presence on Twitter. A brand page can be used as a landing page or destination for further information during a campaign or launch. The brand page has an 830-by-90-pixel banner across the top, which can include bio information, graphics and links. The page also includes a “promoted tweet” at the top of the timeline that can drive further engagement with the brand.

Note: Twitter has started to call the “stream” of tweets a “timeline,” which is consistent with Facebook’s new, individual profile page name.

Brand Page Layout and Features

Leaderboard: The leaderboard is the name Twitter has given to the top portion of the brand page. This space allows brands to promote themselves through the use of graphics, written information and links.

Promoted Tweet Area: At the top of the timeline, each page has a stationary spot for tweets. This can be used as a welcome message to the page, include an overview of the brand, offer a deal or introduce a particular campaign. The brand can rotate this message as often as it likes, but the option is to have this pinned to the top of the timeline.

The promoted tweet area does not need to be just text; it has the capability to have a pre-expanded video or picture to capture the attention of the viewer and drive engagement. In the past, videos and photos could only be seen by clicking on a link to a third-party location. This allows people to stay on the platform while viewing the content the brand has shared.

Timeline (formerly “stream”): Regular Twitter account streams include a combination of original tweets and @replies as part of conversations in which the brand is participating. A brand’s timeline will now not include the @replies. The @replies will be filtered out by default to clean up the page and highlight what the brand thinks is most important. However, for brands who are focused on customer service or who want to show their participation with the community, this function can be turned back on.

Mobile Brand Pages: While Twitter did not unveil mobile brand pages yet, Digitas has been told that they will be consistent with the web version at launch.

Marketer Implications

There are several implications that marketers need to be aware of with these brand pages, even though most companies will not have access to them until at least the first quarter of 2012.

1) Increased engagement rates: If people are driven to brand pages through links in tweets, the attrition rate for Twitter, as a whole, will go down and engagement rates should spike, at least in the short term.

2) Non-text elements: For the first time, Twitter is allowing brands to showcase more than just a text-based conversation. Brands are able to use photos and videos right within Twitter, negating the reason to leave the platform.

3) Enhanced branded experience: Brands now have the ability to drive traffic from their tweets to a full branded experience without leaving the Twitter platform. Brands will now want to keep the non-text element within the promoted tweet area fresh and link people back to these on a regular basis.

4) Removal of @replies: For those new to Twitter or inexperienced on the platform, Twitter may have seemed like a club where you needed a secret handshake. If you didn’t feel comfortable with the #, RT and @reply language, you felt left out. Now, brands and users alike may find Twitter more accessible.

This brand page launch is the first step to making the platform more consumer and brand friendly. We expect that there will be updates to these pages and this experience over the next year as brands partner with Twitter to give their feedback on the initial experience. We can also be sure that Twitter users will give their unfiltered feedback to Twitter as well.

This originally appeared as a client letter issued this week by Donna Tocci, vice president/group director of social marketing with Digitas. Click here to read the whole report.

This is the case with search marketing. Advertisers have become so sophisticated in their use of SEO and PPC tactics that they can anticipate a certain level of clicks and conversions and, most importantly, ROI. These brands have been optimizing their conversion funnels, landing pages, etc., for years. They know what works, and they continue to funnel their dollars to search engine marketing. They tend to gravitate toward search as a lead generation strategy and avoid anything that smacks of branding, such as display or social media, even though they may be missing a huge opportunity.

What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Why not continue to use a proven channel instead of risking a shrinking budget on something that might not work? There are many reasons to diversify your marketing channels. Integrating contextual advertising (a/k/a display) with your search marketing efforts is one great way to do it. Here’s why:

1. Decreasing search volume. As CPC rates continue to rise year over year, the volume of searchers has started to level off. Gone are the days in which every quarter saw a huge leap in the rate of search engine use. Pretty much everyone who’s going to use Google is already doing so. It will become harder to reach and engage new consumers via search in the future. Biddable display media — display ads bought through automated auctions — can be less expensive and more effective than keyword listings and can offer a cost-per-sale hedge for rising keyword costs.

2. New pricing models. Display has come a long way since 2003, moving beyond the CPM pricing model to gain accountability. It has become easier to quantify and predict display ROI. As networks like DoubleClick and Quantcast delve more deeply into audience measurement, advertisers can gain greater insight and anticipate results. And many ad networks are starting to offer display on a PPC or even a CPA performance basis.

3. Mobile and social users. As more consumers leave their desktops behind and go mobile, they’re also looking for new ways to interact with brands beyond search. Smart marketers will begin to shift search budgets to mobile and social networks as users rely more on non-PC devices and non-traditional search engines like YouTube or Facebook. A recent study found that 1.7 percent of all paid search impressions already come from tablets. Over the next five years, Forrester Research predicts search will lose budget share from 55 percent to 44 percent of all interactive spend, as marketers refocus their search marketing strategies on “getting found” by users through any medium — not just search engines.

4. Real-time bidding. Some demand side platforms (DSPs) offer real-time bidding that allows a system to dictate what an impression is worth based on user behavior data, rather than a preset bid. These systems work to analyze conversion potential based on behaviors, demographic profiles, and conversion timestamp data to determine the potential value of each impression. For example, in the past, an advertiser could place its ads based on targets (e.g., females in Los Angeles between the ages of 18 and 35) and pay a CPM based on that targeting. With real-time bidding, a system can dictate one CPM to a user who is a 20-year-old female in L.A. and is viewing the ad at 11 a.m., and a different bid to a 22-year-old female in L.A. who is viewing the ad at 11 p.m. Real-time bidding is a more controllable means of costing for display that is comparable to search pricing.

5. Better online ad management tools. New tools mean that advertisers can now confidently shift offline brand dollars into display as emerging data management platforms (DMPs) improve audience targeting, eliminate overlap across multiple publishers, and measure the contribution of a given impression toward business goals. Forrester Research reports that Dairy Queen’s in-store Blizzard sales rose by 10 percent year-over-year, following a targeted rich media campaign managed through the MediaMath trading platform.

6. Retargeting. Retargeting helps close the loop between search and display, re-engaging users who have been to your site but did not convert with ads that send them back to your domain. Retargeting is a way to capture the lowest-hanging fruit — people who have already demonstrated an interest in your product or brand – and convert them via cost-effective display ads. According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), 51 percent of those who have tried retargeting said it had an impact.

If you haven’t tried display marketing in the past six to twelve months, it’s a great time to add it to your online marketing mix. The landscape now includes a wider range of formats than ever before, from contextual listings, to static image ads and rich media ads,to pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll online video. A recent study from comScore showed that Americans are 49 percent more likely to visit an advertiser’s site if they have previously been exposed to display ads.

“Many clients have been using SEM, SEO and PPC for years. It will reach a point of diminishing returns. Display can provide a wider reach than search can and allow advertisers to get eyeballs that they wouldn’t get through search,” said Liz Serafin, vice president of interactive media for my company, LSF Interactive.

Don’t get stuck in a silo – diversity your marketing investment to integrate search and display. Use what you have learned about your target market’s behavior from your search results and apply these lessons to display as you test the waters of this evolving medium. Tablets, smart phones, Facebook and Twitter mean your customers are more places thanever before. Shouldn’t your brand be, too?

“At Arkovi, we are always on the road meeting with potential customers and investors discussing the benefits our service can provide companies. It is crucial that we stay top of mind when companies make a decision,” explained Blane Warrene, CEO of Arkovi.

Here’s how Arkovi uses SlideRocket to create and share effective presentations that make a lasting impression and ultimately grow the business.

SlideRocket Brings the ‘Wow’

Since transferring static, drab slides into the engaging, interactive SlideRocket presentation platform, Warrene has noticed an immediate positive response from his audience.

“People are blown away. SlideRocket brings an immediate ‘wow’ factor to our presentations that wasn’t there before,” said Warrene. “Now we’re able to deliver a presentation and share it with the audience with the click of a mouse. We’re in the midst of rebranding – just seeing our materials in SlideRocket makes them more dynamic. I recommend SlideRocket to executives and companies all the time. It’s given Arkovi a competitive advantage that we couldn’t find with other services.”

Easy Distribution

Arkovi relies on presentations to tell their story, bolster their customer base and garner funding from key investors. The company needed an easy way to create and distribute presentations internally and externally without having to send large files.

“With SlideRocket, we’re able to give a presentation and immediately send it to whomever we’re speaking to without having to wait until we get back to the office or worrying about whether the large file will clog their inbox. We simply send them a link and we’re done, simple as that.”

With the majority of Arkovi executives working from iPads, they’re able to open, present and share a presentation from one device. Best of all, they’re able to track the analytics to see what messages resonated well with the audience.

Effortless Version Control

With employees around the country, it is also important to maintain consistency with sales presentations that contain the most current content. Working from SlideRocket’s centralized library of presentations, slides and media, the company is able to streamline communications by allowing employees to access the latest sales deck, company logo slide, or product video without having to monitor multiple versions. This ensures that all internal and external communications are consistent and accurate.

“With SlideRocket, we have peace of mind that employees at a tradeshow in Florida are referencing the same statistics and messaging as executives delivering a funding presentation in California,” noted Warrene.

SlideRocket provides an elegant, engaging and efficient way for the entire Arkovi team to create a great first impression, delight their audience, close deals, and win business – whether in the boardroom or at a tradeshow.

“After seeing what SlideRocket has done to maximize the growth of our business, it’s confirmed – SlideRocket is the only presentation solution out there that offers engaging presentation features, efficiency and control.”

This data suggests you need a library of brochures, specification sheets, Webinars, e-newsletters, white papers, application notes and more to help make your case. But the content shouldn’t be sales-oriented; it should be educational, helping prospective buyers do their jobs better. Offering good content to your prospects helps you gain an advantage over competitors.

To provide useful content, you need a strategy for developing and publishing content that your potential customers will consume with great enthusiasm — to their benefit in terms of making informed purchase decisions, and to your benefit in terms of earning new sales.

Make sure someone is in charge of developing and managing content in your company, then follow these five steps to develop a strong content strategy.

1. Analyze Your Audience

There are generally three types of decision makers involved in the buying process, and you should have content to meet each of their needs:

• The economic buyer is concerned about return on investment of the products and services their company purchases
• The analytical buyer wants to know if the product under consideration can solve the problem at hand
• The technical buyer is interested in how well the product works or fits within his or her technical environment

2. Conduct an Audit of Existing Content

The good news is that you already have content. Compile and organize information such as Web pages, brochures, presentations, data sheets and videos in one place. Map your content to the types of buyers you have: economic, analytical, technical. Conduct a gap analysis to determine what’s missing from your existing library. Add in new products/initiatives coming to market in the next year. You’ll likely end up with a long list of content needs. Don’t despair.

3. Prioritize Needs and Develop New Content

You know the needs of your audience, and you know what materials you have — and what you don’t. Now decide what your most pressing content needs are and put together a development schedule. This is important to prioritize since you won’t be able to do everything at once.

Maybe you’re short on information aimed at economic buyers. If so, create an ROI calculator. Maybe analytical buyers don’t understand your novel approach to problem solving. That might call for a white paper. You need more visibility and authority in the market: start a blog.

Also, consider re-purposing existing content or creating something new for use in multiple media: a white paper that becomes a Webinar that becomes a video, for example. Or a technical article repurposed for a conference presentation that also morphs into a series of blog entries.

You’re likely to need additional resources, either company contributors or outside writers. Line them up and plug them into your content schedule.

4. Publish new information
The vast majority of industrial buyers are looking for online knowledge, and that’s where you should focus your publishing efforts. Get everything up on your Web site. Publish articles and videos on targeted sites such as GlobalSpec. Promote your Webinars and white papers through advertisements in industry-focused e-newsletters. Give presentations at online events.

Publishing content on sites your audience visits is reason enough to focus on online channels; but there is another advantage: you can measure and track your success. Page views, click-throughs, downloads, time spent online, and video viewings all can be measured. You can see what content is most popular (i.e. relevant and useful to your audience)—and what content is a dud.

5. Update and Archive

Your audience has an almost insatiable appetite for useful information. That means you must continually develop fresh content and updating older information. This puts you back in the audit phase, where you catalog and keep track online materials.

Archive items that are no longer topical or relevant — don’t purge anything; you never know when you’ll need an old white paper or article. The important point here is to have a system to track the lifecycle of your content. Keep publishing fresh material while taking what’s old down from the shelves.

A combination floor wax and dessert topping may not be very appealing to those who need more shine on their floors or a little something extra on their pie. But digital asset management (DAM) is becoming an acquired taste for organizations both large and small. It provides a way to centralize the organization’s digital assets, ensuring not only that the correct and most current version is being used, but also that it isn’t being duplicated unnecessarily.

The idea of maximizing the value of images and videos has become appealing to cash-strapped marketers being told to “do more with less.” Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides the ability to both re-use and re-purpose digital assets effectively while providing better management and control over the process.

Digital assets are generally developed for one of three reasons:

1. To make money in businesses where the assets are the actual products being sold – for example, digital music or movie downloads.
2. To market and/or sell products or services where the digital assets represent the product(s) being sold — for example, product images in a catalog or website.
3. To reinforce a brand image or build brand equity — for example, a brand logo or logo for a special occasion such as “60 years of service.”

Maximizing the value of those digital assets is accomplished by getting as much use or work and result or return from that asset.

There are two basic ways to do that. You can either re-use a digital asset, which means employing it for the purpose it was created more than once, such as an image created for a specific PowerPoint presentation that is then used in other presentations. Or you can re-purpose the asset — that is, use the image created for one medium in a different one.

An example of re-purposing would be to take the image created for the PowerPoint presentation and use it in a brochure, on a web page, on a Facebook fan page, or in an email marketing piece. Each method creates a different type of value for the asset.
Increasing a Digital Asset’s Intrinsic Value

When you re-use a digital asset, you increase its intrinsic value. DAM makes it easier to improve the intrinsic value of a digital asset by allowing images and videos to be easily and cost-effectively cataloged in the proper format for the intended use. The easier an image is to find and access, the more likely it is to be re-used, thus improving its intrinsic value.

The more people who use an asset, the more valuable it becomes. It’s the story of the long tail — 1,000 people using an asset three times is just as valuable, if not more so, than 30 people using an asset 100 times. Think of it in terms of social media. Having 1,000 people watch a YouTube video 30 times gives you a lot more reach and impact — and ultimately value — than 100 people watching it 300 times.

The ability of DAM to empower users to find, use and repurpose a digital asset also plays a big part in calculating its lingering, enduring residual value. As marketers, we have grown so accustomed to repurposing digital assets in as many channels as possible that residual value is expected instead of being viewed as a bonus.

These days it’s rare that a digital asset is developed for one single purpose. Given the challenges in overcoming “noise” to reach target markets, the repurposing of digital assets –- and creating multiple touch points — in as many available channels is imperative to grab, and keep, an audience’s attention.

DAM systems encourage repurposing because they allow you to store one master high-resolution image file or high-definition video file in a single location which users can access in the format they need, on demand. The transformation engine within a DAM system cuts out the manual processes required to a get high-resolution TIFF file for a print brochure and a low-resolution JPEG file for a web site, for example.

Again, the more an asset can be repurposed, the more value it accumulates. Concurrently, the more an asset can be applied to new projects without being recreated or reproduced, the more valuable it becomes.

Controlling Digital Asset Usage

There are cases where marketers must control where and when assets are used — or even if they’re used at all. For example, when a digital asset is used in social media or deployed for social consumption, that asset can be re-used and re-purposed exponentially — to the point where marketers lose control of the asset and it instead becomes managed by the consumers or “socializers.”

Protecting against the possibility of an asset being hijacked by socializers is a “soft” benefit of DAM. For example, suppose an image was developed specifically for use on product packaging for future release, but that image was prematurely or unintentionally repurposed — used for something else.

This premature release could dilute the value of the asset and spoil the impact when used for its intended purpose –- not to mention that a “leak” of this type could be detrimental to the product launch and the authority of the brand.

It makes sense for marketers to have a tool that governs digital assets to avoid leaks into blogs or social channels. Even when leaks are intentionally used as a way of “pre-market” measurement or promotion, those assets would need to be protected at some point.

That old SNL skit demonstrated how everyone feels good when they get more than one use out of something they buy. “Wow — I can put it on my pumpkin pie and see myself in my kitchen floor? I must’ve done well when I bought it!”

This same mindset is pervading the world of digital assets, particularly in a cost-conscious economy. Organizations must maximize the value of all their digital assets, both to reduce their upfront costs and to increase the ROI on every expenditure.

“That’s a marketing nightmare,” Dietrich says, shaking his head.

What marketers need is a centralized source for presentations and the materials within, a platform where any alterations are updated across every presentation being used. Thus no out-of-date information, no old logos — homogeneity across the board. But that’s only the beginning of SlideRocket’s presentation innovation, which revolutionizes one of the most commonly used and most important business and marketing applications.

“Imagine if PowerPoint wasn’t built 20 years ago, but it was built today in a connected environment,” Dietrich says. “The whole notion behind our product is that content should be living, breathing, as opposed to static digital brochures…. There are thousands of things you can do to make presentations more compelling communications, advertising, marketing and sales tools.”

During nine years at SalesForce.com, Dietrich examined all the company’s competitors — hundreds of firms were offering online salesforce automation, yet innovation regarding one of the most commonly used business applications was nonexistent.

“I sat through presentations every day at Salesforce, hundreds of them a week, and it was all the same antiquated technology,” he says. Presentations are everywhere and often used to sell — they’re particularly advantageous in marketing, advertising and media presentations. So why is everybody using PowerPoint?

SlideRocket’s browser-based presentation creation platform facilitates building dynamic, interactive and connected content on slides. A straightforward interface offers contextual menus with all possible options and functions, including animation, video and music (or just sound effects — you know you want your company logo to go “boing!” when it appears). There’s even a recorder for creating audio tracks.

In getting started, companies can simply import their PowerPoint presentations, which the software translates into its proprietary format. Reps and marketing professionals can then easily publish presentations to various websites and ad campaigns.

A company can also upload all its common graphics to SlideRocket’s database for easy access during creation of slides. Brands can create custom themes and add Flash while integrating tools such as Twitter feeds and live stock tickers in presentations. In addition, charts that incorporate data from Google spreadsheets are synced to morph in real-time with changing data.

On Wednesday SlideRocket introduced a slew of new features, including the ability to easily embed YouTube videos, easy access for all mobile devices, and the addition of interactive polls that record data from live and online participants and feature real-time results during the presentation.

The platform also offers extensive analytics, allowing users to drill down to the amount of time spent on each slide and into the specifics of visitors. When sending SlideRocket presentations via email, users can turn on alerts to determine who is opening the package. For example, SlideRocket used its own software for its launch press releases and was able to know which journalists took an interest. Can you say lead gen?

The company has seen wide adoption, and even served as launch partner for Google’s Android Marketplace. The South by Southwest Digital Conference named SlideRocket its official presenting platform and encouraged showcasing companies to build their presentations in SlideRocket — the company gave out 90-day trials.

Dietrich opens up SXSW’s official presentation for me — just another presentation, he intones — which includes eye-catching animation and music. I instantly nod my head when he suggests it looks like it was built by a web designer.

“You start to feel like a designer” when you’re building presentations, he says. Some organizations actually use SlideRocket presentations as their websites.

The platform also offers meeting functionalities that allow a moderator to guide a tuned-in audience. By simulcasting from a server on the Amazon database to those in attendance, SlideRocket eschews the latency inherent in other web meeting software.

SlideRocket’s freemium model comes with many of the same design features, but lacks analytics, sharing and other services. Dietrich notes that 25% of subscribers trade up from the free version.

Coincidentally, Dietrich notes that the top way companies learn about SlideRocket is through watching presentations created on the platform.

“It’s a very viral product by nature,” he says.

A hybrid of a content aggregator and web publisher, HiveFire is publicly introducing Curata. The cloud-based platform is B2B marketing tool for aggregating content on specific topics relevant to potential customers.

Currently around 40 customers are using the Curata to produce educational content for facilitating lead gen and generally promoting thought leadership in the space. These B2B companies stretch across a wide spectrum of industries: from software to telecom to medical devices.

Curata users merely specify the type of content they’re interested in monitoring and insert keywords, and the content engine continuously serves up pertinent URLs, automatically tagged and classified through HiveFire’s natural language processor. In addition, Curata can determine the most-referenced companies, countries and topics in a niche

Through a simplified curation process, a manager ultimately decides what is published and annotates editorial features such as headline, abstract and tags to add context to highlight relevance. The semantic engine will actually adapt to client preferences revolving around preferred content and edited tags.

The content can then be disseminated to a microsite as well as email and social marketing channels. Layout and design tools allow for featured content. Rather than republish the entire article, Curata prints out the first line and links to the content source.

Deshpande notes that an average customer spends about 19 minutes a day on Curata, yet is able to engage thousands of prospects. Many customers are involved in newer industries with a fair deal of buzz but no established thought leader or publication in the industry.

In effect, Curata sets up the client to fill in that gap and become an authority in a niche area — no extra staff necessary, just pay a subscription fee.

For example, Verne Global, proprietor of a data center in Iceland that runs on geothermal power, runs its microsite on energy-efficient data centers with Curata.

“If you’re a CIO or CTO interested in green data centers, you could go to TreeHugger.com, but maybe once a month they talk about that,” Deshpande However, he notes, Verne Global’s site is the only place you need to go for as a research portal into such a niche market — effectively straddling the tightrope between branded microsite and industry publication.