Brad Rencher, Adobe’s SVP for Marketing Cloud, made the argument to more than 7,000 people attending this year’s conference that customer experience is now the key part of your brand.

Brad Rencher

This makes Digital Marketing the epicenter of your digital transformation efforts. Of course, Adobe is at the epicenter for many brands and wants to be the epicenter of more customers.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, talked about Changing the World Through Digital Experiences. Marketing is on a reinvention journey but fundamentals of marketing are not changing. The art of marketing creative is still a key pat of the equation. Science in the form of data analysis, behavior analytics, etc have contributed to elevating marketing to a new level. Real-time has impacted the enterprise is completely new and different ways.  

This has led to the era of “Your Product is Marketing”, according to Shantanu.  So now, you have to ask broader questions about your products and look at new ways to enhance the customer experience. This has impacted Adobe too and they are looking at how to enhance their own products into a unified experience through the Marketing Cloud. 

Brad came back onstage to talk about consumer expectations around being consistency and continuous. The customer experience is the brand and marketing has to move beyond just marketing. Marketing has to take on the many customer experiences your brand has and make them consistent and continuous.

Coca Cola talked about their mission is to create happiness experiences for their customers. Their marketing efforts are not just about the logo, the colors, or even the product. By creating these happiness experiences they keep consumers connected to the brand.  As an example, they created a “hug machine” for finals week at a college campus.  When a student hugged the machine, they received a Coke in return. It was a fun and creative way to help students relieve stress and connect to the Coca Cola brand.

One way Adobe is developing a unified experience is through the Marketing Cloud. Adobe follows these these principles when looking at the Marketing Cloud:

• Comprehensive
• Integrated across channels both online and offline
• Actionable for both data and content

Brad fired off a bunch of announcements that will detailed out throughout the week at Adobe Summit. Briefly, here are some of those announcements that I could capture as Brad talked:

• Adobe Analytics announced Customer Intelligence (integrate customer data) and Predictive Analytics.
• Experience Manager is the backbone of content in the Marketing Cloud.  AEM Assets provides asset management in a Saas environment. Adobe is also delivering a pre-built AEM to get smaller companies and departments running quickly.
• Campaign has been integrated across all the Marketing Cloud solutions.  They also greatly enhanced the email marketing components of Campaign
• Target will deliver personalization beyond just web and mobile and into IoT.
• Social is mobile enabled so you can publish on the go.
• Media Optimizer has been rebuilt to be more programmatic.

Brad announced two new solutions:

• Adobe Prime Time – this puts the TV experience on any screen.  Marketers can track usage.  There is also continuous delivery from mobile to desktop to TV.
• Adobe Audience Manager connects audiences to programmatic features of the cloud and integrates across the Adobe Core Services.

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In this session Craig Stoe and Andrew Bolander spoke about this topic. You can use Adobe Social to gain customer insight. These insights should lead to developing stronger relationships with customers and delivering more consistent experiences.

What is social data?
– engagement data is what is going on with the customer
– listening data are brand relevant keywords, sentiment, influencers
– attribution data is what we can learn about the customer personal attributes

Start with discovery. This is where you mine data about customers. Next is explore. Here you start to look for more engagement data. At the buy stage, customers express buying signals and you need to pick up on these to make offers. All this data can lead to better engagement.

A social profile helps you collect all this data so you have a better view of the customer. Adobe has developed a scoring algorithm that can be assigned. This consists of measuring User Class, Supporter index, Buzz and User Distribution. These measures lead to a composite score that can be used to target customers.

Andrew presented 5 steps to implement and use the social profile.
1. Listen
2. Prioritize
3. Engage properly
4. Gather insights
5. Share insights

He presented a live demo of Adobe Social and how to build and use the social profile through tweets from the audience.

For listening, you create listening rules that help you filter across the social platforms, hashtags, and attributes.

In prioritization, you can set up automation rules to route content around the organization. You can also apply segments and tags to results of the rules.

When it comes time to engage, you use Unified Moderation, which places multiple platforms under one screen so you can moderate multiple systems at the same time. Moderators can claim content, retweet, respond, and close out the item as handled. By claiming content, you prevent others from working on ending up with duplicate responses.

The social profile is connected to the moderation screen and you can review a users profile attributes. The system can also pull together different accounts into one profile. So one profile could link you twitter data with your Facebook data.

The social profile provides the customer insights, including emotion scores, sentiment scores, tracking of previous interactions and more.

As a final piece, Andrew showed how Adobe Social integrates and shares with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. For example, if a user logs into your AEM site using a Facebook login, their actions on the site can contribute to their social profile.

550 million tweets were sent in one day. Yet, there is almost no organization to those tweets. You can’t easily go find tweets about your brand, posted by your employees etc. Add in Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and others you can see that mining social data is not easy. But you must mine this data if you want to understand what people are saying about you.

To make sense of all this data, you want to “cast the right size net for your social campaign”. In other words you want to filter all the data using various techniques. The most basic technique is to use boolean And, Or, and Negation. Gnip uses this kind of filtering as the starting point to filter the huge amount of data coming from the social platforms. Adobe Social then takes that filtered data to further refine the data.

In addition to Boolean, you can also filter on geo-tagging. However only 1-2% of users actually make it easy by supplying or using geo-encoding when tweeting. So Gnip uses other techniques to grab geo-information.

Using public APIs you can also filter on language, hashtags and many other attributes of social data.

Next, you have to figure out what to do with the filtered data. Look at the goals of what you are trying to accomplish. This will affect the workflows you set up for monitoring and responding.

In the session the presenters talked about monitoring the Olympics Twitter feed. So they’ve already performed one level of filtering. Then they looked at specific hashtags, event names, event types and more.

A Social Buzz report showed distinct spikes during the Olympics – one at the opening and one at the closing. When looking at post by platform, Twitter represented 100 times the volume of any other platform. We then drilled down into specific tweets to see the actual contents.

In Adobe Social, you can go back into the history of Tweets. As an example, nobody expected Bob Costas to get pink eye, so no rules were available to monitor that when it happened. Using the historical data, they were able to set up a monitor for that and bring in the historical tweets.

Greg talked about the importance of Disqus. Disqus is a commenting engine that is easy to integrate into web sites. They have 9 billion comments and millions of commenter profiles. Often the comments made through Disqus are more meaningful than what you would see in Twitter. Of course, Adobe Social includes the ability to track Disqus as easily as Twitter and other data.

Tumblr is another platform that is important. They have 165m blogs and 72b posts. Tumblr content is repurposed and reused which accounts for 95% of all posts. These re-blogs can be important to monitor as they can show when something explodes in popularity. Tumblr has become the second most volume that Adobe sees.

Other platforms mentioned included Foursquare and VK. VK is the largest social platform in Eastern Europe.

I think the main point of this session is that Adobe Social gives you access to all the most important social content. Setting up a social program involves monitoring the right content at the right time. When you look to set up your own program, don’t just look at Twitter and Facebook. Many of the other social platforms are also tremendously important both for monitorIng and in which to participate.