After Adobe Summit in London, the whole Social Media industry was enthusiastic with the new solutions launched by Adobe. Even more promising: the integration of Adobe Creative Cloud with Adobe Marketing Cloud in the same workflow. We had a chance to get more insights from Emi Hofmeister, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Adobe Social.
The Vision: Performance is Part of the Creative Process.
Hofmeister confirms our understanding: Adobe solutions are deeply rooted in a content perspective, because of the success of Creative Cloud, which includes products such as Photoshop or Premiere. The idea is then to marry content and data to better shape experiences for customers (or consumers).
Knowing how the content that brands and agencies produce performs becomes key; there’s a need to inject data and metrics within the content production tasks. It’s not just past data that brands must consider, but also real-time information about what customers are saying or doing. The best example of a brand that has used real-time data to inform content so far, according to Hofmeister, is Oreo during Superbowl: in 15 minutes, the team was ready to react to what users were saying in Social Media and benefit from that. Out of this tactical example, brands need to capitalize on conversations that happen during specific days or events.
According to Adobe Social, the main issue is first to help companies in setting up a relevant organizational structure; the tools as well as permission models should be aligned with the internal value chain. As there’s an increasing sophistication of data analysis, there’s a need to make sure that internal teams are ready to understand and transform them into value. This need of streamlined and agile management can lead to exponential value for brands: doing more with more.
About the reactions of creative teams, Hofmeister takes the example of Behance, that has been recently acquired by Adobe: there’s a desire to get more feedbacks from peers or from processes. As a lot of creative talents work in marketing organizations, they should really care about the data, to measure in tune contents, that are aligned with consumers, and so more effective.
As Adobe Social promises to reinvent the way marketers understand their consumers, based on onsite behavior as well as social activity, it’s also a very interesting ground for creative hives: reinventing their approach to an initial brief, based on what real users are actually doing. You have to ask the question, is this a way for data to lead marketers?
Preparing Organizations: Social Activities as Part of Real Marketing Metrics
From a measurement standpoint: there’s a need to better understand the connection between social content and social data. Hofmeister sees a big business opportunity for Adobe. Social used to be the side job in a lot of marketing departments, and it’s still the case in a lot of big brands. As Adobe starts to quantify social activities back to real marketing metrics that matter, this is no longer a curious, “pilot” practice: what’s happening in social properties has an impact on conversion metrics (revenue, sales etc.).Adobe Social sets up a key priority: transforming what you can do with listening data into brand actions.
The pitch of Adobe compared to Salesforce is pretty clear: we are designed to help marketers succeed in social. Adobe Social considers that Salesforce is really focused on customers’ service and sales data, rather than building brands in the social space.
The future of Adobe Social focuses on 3 tasks:
1: A better integration within marketing cloud: really make marketers understand the role of social within the whole marketing effort. There’s for example a deeper integration with Adobe Experience Manager to align onsite social communities with brand activity happening on Facebook and Twitter.
2: Providing marketers with the tools and capabilities they demand. Making sure that we’re able to set up the right social metrics. There’s no competitor to Adobe that has the capability to tie social metrics back to the real metrics that marketers need such as revenue, video views. You also need to provide marketers with the tools and capabilities they are demanding. There’s a growing investment in moderators’ capabilities, publishers’ capabilities, listening capabilities, etc.
3: Innovation: Predictive is certainly going to be at the very centre of their focus.