McKee Smith: digital media

What is digital media? Basically, it is any media in digital form. Pictures are the most common form and they can be lots of different file types include JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs, Targa’s, Photoshop files, Illustrator files, and many other types. It can also be sounds that include music, spoken words, sound effects or any combination those. They can be MP3s, WAVE files, AIFF files or other types. Digital media can also include moving pictures like animations or full movies.

But more broadly, digital media also includes text and layouts on websites. When you post on Facebook®, you are using digital media. Every email you send is digital media. Even you Excel spreadsheets technically are digital media.

All of these different kinds of digital medias have multiple uses for organizations. The most obvious ones are marketing. That is driving customers to buy your products or services. But digital media can also help you communicate with your employees and other stakeholder faster and more accurately. Effective communication can improve moral, reduce turnover, teach and increase both internal and external interest in your organization. This can reduce costs and thus improve your bottom line and the effectiveness of your organization.

Digital media is a tool that can help your improve the performance of you business. If you use traditional accounting, it can both increase revenues and lower costs. If you use Throughput account – part of the Theory Of Constraints – it can increase total throughput and lower investments and operating expenses. Digital media is thus a very powerful tool.

Like any tool, it must be used properly or it can hurt rather than help your organization. And like any tool, few people are born knowing it’s most productive uses. The purpose of this blog is to help identify the best uses of digital media and show relatively easy, inexpensive and practical ways of implementing digital media to help your organization achieve it’s goals.