People generate massive amounts of content daily. Think about how much you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or blog on a daily basis. As an example of how much content is out there, Facebook has 2.5 billion pieces of content and 300 million photos.

Are companies capitalizing on user generated content (UGC)? For some, the answer is a resounding yes. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 78% of B2C companies plan to leverage UGC in their marketing strategies this year.

Adobe recently acquired Livefyre, a solution that curates UGC, because the technology supports the Adobe Marketing Cloud and provides marketers quick access to authentic, user-generated content.

In an interview with CMS Wire, Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing for Adobe, reveals more about the strategy behind the acquisition. Giving marketers full access to Livefyre, it allows them to tap into billions of pieces of UGC to use on their websites, ads, emails, apps, and more.

Brands typically use this content for brand advocacy. According to Adobe, UGC is revered as more trustworthy by consumers.

“Our content research found 81% of respondents considered a product that was endorsed by a family member or someone they were related to or a friend,” said Stark.

With more authentic user-generated content, brands have the opportunity to create more compelling and engaging experiences.

“That’s why we wanted to work with Livefyre,” Stark remarked. “It’s to bring the joint story of professional and user-generated content and deliver it in creative ways through the marketing cloud.”

This thought should give us pause as marketers. Rather than creating and pushing more of our content out there, shouldn’t we be creating opportunities and experiences for our customers that inspire their content creation?

Let us hear from you. How do you plan on taking advantage of user-generated content to enhance your marketing efforts?

Remember the time when it was enough to just put your content out there and gain customer attention? These times are long gone, and today’s customers expect personalized and relevant content across all touchpoints. To amaze customers and gain their loyalty, marketers need multiple content optimization point products that work seamlessly together out of the box. Along with cross-channel content analytics, every modern digital strategy needs real-time customer segmentation as well as actionable content insights and the ability to deliver dynamic creative content at scale. This session provides tips on how to pair Adobe Experience Manager best-in-class experience delivery with industry-leading content personalization and optimization tools.

They started out with the idea that not all interaction are the same. Those interaction that build trust and fulfill your needs are the ones that will make an impact.

Key Goal: Become an organization your customers trust

Key Takeaways

1. Shorten the cycle for iterations
2. Close the feedback loop
3. Empower people with great technology

Personalization

It’s now a necessity.  you don’t want to serve the Seahawks jersey to the Patriots fan.

Many today look like this:

• Slow time to market for personalization
• Disparate teams owning content authoring, delivery and personalization

What you need

1. Deliver relevant content
2. Streamline cooperation between content authoring and delivery
3. Leverages personalization capabilities when authoring content

Demo:

• Start with the Adobe Marketing Cloud screen. Yes, it’s not AEM but highlights the ever increasing integration of the entire Marketing Cloud
  • Includes an add button for additional services like analytics and Test / Target
• Showed the admin interface (similar interface styles for all Marketing Cloud)
• Found a site to edit and go to a specific page to edit.
• Note: All functionality lies within AEM
• Changed from edit to targeting mode
  • Changed the options in the top bar of the page
  • Created an activity (way to create several experiences across pages)
  • select a component to test by clicking on that section of the page.
  • Chose a few experiences.  (e.g. A/B)
    • an offer is an html fragment you will put in the personalized area
  • New feature in AEM 6.1 – the offer library. Makes it easier to store all your offers.
  • Approve the content and voila, experience B is ready
• He repeated by creating an experience C using the same set of tasks.
• Hit step two in the activity: Diagram the activity
  • This is the step where you map all your segments to the experiences
  • This could be segments from profiles and audiences or from Adobe Target
• Step three is the settings like start date, duration, etc.
  • This is the final step
• Overview of the offer library (again, new in 6.1)
  • Accessible from the personalization menu

Adobe thinks of AEM as the hub of all personalization and content delivery. This includes facebook, video streams, crm, twitter, etc. Can include some competitors to the Marketing Cloud.

Demo of integration to Bright Edge – SaaS marketing platform

• Edit the page as before
• Switch to Target mode
• Integration with BrightEdge works like this
  • Think, wouldn’t it be good to see what your competition is doing
  • Click on the Bright Edge Icon
  • Pop up the BE interface
  • it shows the top 10 competing pages for that specific page
  • Will let you quickly browse those pages
  • Can switch between desktop and mobile versions of these pages
• Test Now feature of BE integration
  • This to the presenter is the coolest feature
  • You choose the # of experiences and BrightEdge will create that first part.
  • Then BE creates experience A, B, and C in AEM. (tight integration)
    • it actually created the text of the message
    • You review the message and can make the changes you want.

Content Optimization

People may have great content but not all content is consumed equally by your audience.

Now

• Slow time to market to identify best content

What it should be

• Server the most relevant content first
• proactively author content based on trend
• Leverage analytics to author content

Demo

This is an analytics and AEM Demo.

• Note: the integration now is much closer and much more out of the box
• Adobe Analytics: the best tool in the analytics space.  (True, viewed as the Cadillac by the industry)
• In site admin, you can see analytics APIs now when you have added Adobe Analytics
  • Better than going to the tool to find the high level KPI’s
  • You can configure this to define which KPI’s you want to see.
  • Search is integrated.
    • e.g. give me those pages that meet these analytics criteria

Third parties can also be integrated here as well.

• This is integration with a company called Skyward
  • They help you crowd source content integration
  • From within AEM, the presenter presented a blank page
  • Clicked the Skyword content button
    • filled out the assignment summary, gave a deadline, and submitted
  • Received proposals for the assignment and choose
  • Choose the one you like best
  • Automatically integrate that content straight to your CMS

 Wrap-up

All the features previewed come in May.