iTunes and Content Management in Consumer Applications

Many people these days gush about how awesome their experience is in the consumer space while they complain about the dreaded experience in the enterprise. And content management is one of those enterprise applications with bad reputation. What many do not realize, though, is that most of what we do in the consumer space is content management. Yes, indeed. We edit and share pictures and videos, we rip music onto our iPods, we publish blogs and microblogs and we collaborate and network with each other. All these activities deal with content – text, audio, video, and social media. We just never call it content management as that would make it sound like work. But the reality is that this is exactly the same thing that content management is trying to do in the enterprise. The main difference is that the content is jointly created and consumed by multiple users.

The consumer space also gives us appreciation for some of the difficulties related to ECM. One of the key challenges of ECM is to get good metadata attached to content. What, you don’t care about metadata? Oh yes, you do! Take your iTunes library, for example. All those names of songs, albums, and artists are metadata which allows you to organize your library and to make it useable. When you first import your songs into iTunes, you are likely to see a lot of mess. The names of songs or artists are missing and you comprehend the value of metadata very quickly. And so you spend hours cleaning it up to make sure that it is organized the way you want it. Without keeping your metadata clean, your iTunes library can quickly become a mess again which would severally limit its usefulness. And the same is true for your pictures, videos, or documents.

It's all about metadata.

The issues are the same in the enterprise, except that now we have to coordinate many people to agree on the metadata consistently. And that’s a big challenge. You know how you sometimes have to decide to organize your pictures by date, by location or by event? Well, not everyone will make the same call and with hundreds or thousands of users, the inconsistencies can become significant. To avoid the mess in the enterprise, you need a taxonomy. But that sounds like a boring kind of enterprise software that is so much less cool than the software at home. And yet, the management of content in consumer applications is very similar to enterprise content management. Well, perhaps ECM does handle a tad more complex problems…

Metadata - The Secret Value of Social Media

A lot has been written about social media and so I am not going to talk about its end-user appeal or benefits. Instead, I’d like to discuss the value of social media for the operator. Advertising is of course the first thing that comes to mind and that’s behind Facebook’s agenda. But there is another benefit that so far has not been making the headlines: metadata.

Metadata is essential for any content. Without good metadata, content is difficult to find and impossible to process. But good metadata is very difficult to get. Traditionally, the users were expected to add it at the time of content creation and throughout the processing. But users are notoriously unmotivated to do so and they won’t. Automatic approaches through content analytics are promising but still nascent (see my article The Problems Waiting to Be Solved). Yet here comes a 3rd way to create metadata – social media.

Just think about what’s happening on Facebook. Millions of users are socially interacting. They are telling each other their opinions about what they like and don’t like, what they do, what they need. This is the online version of an Italian piazza or an American sports bar on a football night. And they do it of their own accord, without corporate policies, and without having to adhere to any taxonomy. Mining these interactions is relatively easy and the result is information about people, processes, and content. And that’s how we define metadata.

Unfortunately, Facebook owns their metadata and they will be selling it to advertisers a bit at a time. And that really worries Google. If you want to read a good book or find a good store, you can either search for it or you can get a recommendation. You can either trust some search algorithm that relies on keyword prominence and frequency of links or you can trust your friends whom you know and share common interests and values with. That’s why the metadata generated from social media is more valuable than any search index and, as a result, ads based on social media are much more relevant than the ads based on search. And that’s why Google fears Facebook.

The same applies for private social media deployments on your intranet or web site. The high quality metadata generated by social media in an enterprise is just as valuable. It can be the driver for use cases such as recommendations, expertise location, knowledge discovery or suggestive records filing. Yes, the value of social media lies not only in the user engagement and interactions; it also represents a great source of metadata. And that’s the secret value of social media.